New Years Eve, one of those nights that has the potential to contain either the most uplifting moments of your year or the most demoralising. Which is it going to be? Lilly asked herself, standing on the balcony of her family's Hampstead townhouse, downing wine and watching fireworks of all different colours explode in the near distance. Her dad and his fiancee, Jasmine, hadn't wanted to leave her on her own but for the happy new couple, it was incumbent that they made their appearances, collected their coos and congratulations, she supposed. In the years that had past, she, along with Gemma, Clara and Alice, had been dragged along to whichever party it was that Cleo wished for them to attend. The usual routine went something like as follows: Cleo forces vodka onto everyone, brings them along to the party, stays with them for all of a minute and a half, recedes into a legion of people who are suddenly not strangers but her new best friends, and then, doesn't speak with them again for the rest of the night. She gets her group photo before and her celebrity style entrance and she's happy. In that aspect, Cleo King was easily pleased. But despite Lilly never seeing Cleo, Cleo had always seen Lilly, issuing her a comprehensive report on her behaviour at the end of the night. Her fake laugh, her idle chatter, the way she held herself; it all needed improvement, apparently. It was so easy for Lilly to get snared by those times gone by, the dopey fish swimming right into the net. She spent far too long thinking about all the things she wished she'd said in response, the epigrammatic rejoinders she could've bounced back with had she been that little bit more quick-witted and that little bit less fearful of whether she could withstand the consequences of whatever it was that she would say. She'd avoided any kind of weight for so, so long, that now, forget the world, it felt like she was balancing every planet in the solar system on her shoulders. That was mostly how she'd passed the time in the days since she lost her baby: pondering over how best she could regain even a morsel of strength, poring over her options like mathematicians go over new formulas. Your efforts, for once, haven't been hopeless, she thought to herself, running her hands through her new bobbed hair cut with a serene smile and a sip of her wine, even if said solution has been there for quite some time. Though she knew that peace was probably temporary, at least she had found it, and she had planned to luxuriate in it for the rest of the evening. Had being the operative word there, for it was only mid-afternoon when the silence, excluding the rhythmic banging and squealing of wasted fireworks, was interrupted by the front doorbell. Lilly frowned, padding back into her bedroom and placing the wine down on her bedside table. It couldn't be her dad and Jasmine, they'd only left the house an hour before and whilst Carl Philipps was hardly a party animal, he'd always told Lilly that he considered it a kind of courtesy to at least stay for an hour or two, regardless of how much fun he was having; as a childhood aficionado of The Sims, even Lilly knew, there weren't many things more disheartening than throwing a bad party. So if it's not dad, she thought, tiptoeing down the stairs and hovering in the middle of the hallway, who is it? She swore, through the blurred window of her front door, that it was Cleo. The long, tousled dark blonde hair, the way that the woman was standing, the style of the clothes she was wearing. Though, once Lilly did open the door, the person that she actually found there made only marginally more sense.
"Tess?" She blurted out, pulling her jumper sleeves down over her hands and hugging herself.
"Yeah...can I, uh...can I come in?" Tess replied, taking a step forward, Lilly holding the door to a close to prevent her from entering. Last time they'd spoken, Tess had just been shoved to the floor by Gemma and was sneering at Lilly in front of a crowd of at least 25 people. Last time they'd spoken, that's what Lilly had assumed it to be. The last time. She had since mentally gone through the embittered wife's motions: convincing herself that the cutesy friendship moments were cloying, not worth reminiscing on, scribbling Tess' name from the top of the internal list of people to whom she told herself she could go when she needed a "friend", reducing the saturation on every joke and anecdote Tess had ever told her so that they were nothing more than a bunch of monotone syllables. All that had been quite simple, unexacting, when the bitch wasn't stood on her front doorstep. But now?
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Trust No Bitch: Part 3
Mystery / ThrillerYou think you know the story: 4 women, a dead friend, and an anonymous texter. But think again. It's about to get a whole lot messier, as 4 British university students are about to find out. Full of sex, drugs, and deceit, you've come to the wrong...
