Trust No Bitch: Part 3

The Supplier

"I was going to get rid of you, you know, Gem. I was wondering when to do it."

Game fucking over.

Gemma knew, and in doing so, had made herself the new sole opposition.

"But then, that night outside the bar, after your friend Alice's 21st, you left your phone in my car. You had been texting shit to Clara Wright. And then, a couple of days later, I see that Will Barkley kid giving the mask I wear back to Clara. Tess Rowe told me shit too, a couple of days before she, uh...well, you know. She told me that Lilly had been acting weird, told me Lilly had left some anonymous app open and there was texts on there to you. And then, the other week, Sasha Evans tells me that Alice Jenkins asked her to fuck with Lilly, asks to borrow my mask. It's so bloody brilliant! I mean, you all did my work for me. You fucked each other over, completely."

Taking in Gemma's horrified features, her eyes brimming up with tears so quickly it was as if she was storing a small waterfall beneath her eyelids, Josh laughed cooly and one-handedly grabbed her wrist. Then, he wrested his phone out of her grasp before rolling down the window and tossing it out.

"The lot of you spend more time trying your best to screw over each other than you did me. Those times, trying to catch me outside the church, trying to go to Jensen?" He shook his head dismissively. "Pathetic. Almost as much as the four of you pretending to be me so that you could ruin each other's lives. And it was so much more interesting, you know. Decent entertainment. Could've cancelled my Sky Sports package, what, with all the fun I got out of watching you pick each other off. Like lobsters in a fucking tank." He made the word tank loud, staccato, abrupt, and then watched amusedly as Gemma recoiled in fright. "Cleo would be like a proud mother if she could see you all now."

"Why did..." Gemma tried to say, but had to start again, her sniffs obscuring her words. "Why did you kill Cleo?"

"Why do you have to say it like that, babe? Like it's so impersonal. I admired that woman. That's why I went to the funeral, watched from the trees. You came running after me, didn't you?" Josh asked sardonically, Gemma nodding, that single movement more mutinous than any other utterance or gesture she'd produced in the five minutes before that. "But Cleo...fuck her, you know." Josh continued, regardless of whether of not Gemma was really listening. "If she taught me one thing, it's that your love for another person says nothing of their love for you. And then, she showed me what she meant. I mean, she caused me problems, babe! And I can't be dealing with that shit! You know me." He said, running a gently mocking finger along her chin. "I've got to eliminate my competition, no matter how good their arse looks in a pair of running shorts."

"How did you even meet?" Gemma snarled, but her acidic tone still could not hide how close to tears she was. "You were her supplier, right? But I never even knew you two spoke."

"We met through running. Just like me and you. And we fucked about a bit. But she was always in it for the drugs. She knew I supplied and she also knew that the way to a discount was through my dick." Josh muttered amusedly under his breath. "And she wasn't wrong, babe." He added. Despite his eyes being firmly on the road, he still caught Gemma attempting to reach for her own phone in his peripheral vision, and waited until she looked as if she thought she had gotten away with it to snatch it right out of her hand, chucking that out of the window too. Her flinching as he did so just made it all the more comical, him drawing a hand down his face with a rakish grin before continuing. "She always knew everything, didn't she? Cleo. And I don't mean trivia. I mean about people. She somehow knew straight away that I was the one who, uh, got rid of Mia and Dec."

"How did you kill..." Gemma started before shaking her head and shoving into her hands, as if embarrassed that she could not get the words out.

"How did I kill Mia and Dec? Well, Mia was pretty easy." Josh murmured, reminiscing on the night he had done it, Mia sat on the edge of her bath tub, shooting up the heroin he'd just supplied her with. Turgid classical music playing on the high-tech blue tooth speakers she'd recently brought, in spite of her incessant claims that she "abhorred" all modern technology and had been "born in the wrong era", she finished off and then tossed the used needle onto the floor. Pushing herself up off the bath, she twirled round on the spot and held her arms out either side of her.