The Night Watch ✓

19 / bottoms up

Bree hardly slept a wink that night, her mind churning over and over everything she had done in the last seven years, and every time she thought about having to tell Kit everything she had held back from him, she wanted to throw up. Nausea had lingered at the bottom of her stomach ever since she had realised who he lived with, and the moment she opened her eyes at seven o'clock after hardly two hours sleep, she had suffocated under the weight of her past pressing down on her.

There was a soft knock on her door. She looked over at it, unable to bring herself to get out of bed, and after a couple of seconds, it opened. Gaia poked her head round the door, and her face fell when she saw the state Bree was in.

"Hey," she said, her voice low. "You left your phone in the kitchen. Your work just rang, apparently there was some kind of major power outage or something. They said don't come in today." She stepped further into the room, Bree's phone clutched in her hand, and she made her way over to the bed.

"Thanks," Bree said, with no heart behind the word. Ordinarily, a day off work without having to give an excuse would be means for a celebration, but she wasn't really in the mood. All she could think about was how she had let herself fall for Kit, tangling him up in the web that had a chokehold on her, and it wasn't fair on him.

Gaia sat down on the edge of the bed, looking down at Bree, and she tucked a leg under herself. Her hand went to her friend's shoulder, a sign of her compassion, and she smiled.

"It'll be ok," she said. "At least now you have the whole day to think about things. Maybe you could talk to Kit. If he's as good as you made him out to be, he won't care about what you used to do." She squeezed Bree's arm, more motherly than Bree's own mother had ever been. "It's in the past, Bree."

"It's still me," she said. "I can't just pretend that six years of my life didn't happen."

Gaia shushed her, slowly stroking her arm the way she did whenever either of her sisters got themselves worked up. She had a lot of experience in playing the mother, a role she was built for. She had always thought that by thirty, she would be married with her first child, but her lack of a boyfriend had put a dent in that plan.

"It's not about pretending it never happened," she said. "It's about moving on from it. It happened and there's nothing you can do about it, but you can't just close yourself off every time you get close to someone. I bet that when you tell him, he won't even think it's that big a deal." Then she smiled. "Really, he's getting a pretty good deal. His flatmate paid three hundred quid an hour for something he gets for free."

Ordinarily, Bree might have laughed, but Gaia's joke only served to remind her that she had turned her life into a commodity. She couldn't see any way that she could be honest with Kit without making him question every moment they had spent together. She questioned herself enough already.

"I'm sorry," Gaia said. "That wasn't funny." She let out a long sigh and lay down beside Bree, crossing her hands over her stomach. "You can tell me to go if you want to be alone."

"Stay," Bree said. She didn't know what she wanted, but she didn't want to be left alone.

"Ok."

"I told Evan," she said, and Gaia turned her head to look at her.

"Told him what?"

"Everything," she said. "I mean, everything I didn't tell him last time. I told him about being an escort, and about my real job."

Gaia's cheeks went pink as she smiled. "How was it?"

Bree let out a shaky sigh. "It was good. He seemed pretty upset, but he wasn't angry or anything. I think he was mostly just shocked. I mean, I'd be pretty upset if I found out everything I knew about him was wrong." The thought alone formed a lump in her throat and she hated herself for what she had done to her family, orchestrating so many lies that telling the truth was like setting of a firework in their face.