The Sleeping Arrangement

Chapter 7

"Hey! What's happening, Sophie?"

I felt Ben's hand on my shoulder before I registered that he was talking to me. I turned around to look at him, standing in the same place Thomas had been just seconds before, and sighed.

"It doesn't matter, Ben." I shrugged his hand away and pushed past him, heading towards our bedroom. I didn't want to talk about the whole thing, especially not with him. In the past five minutes my mind had changed dramatically: suddenly I realised that kissing Ben hadn't been such a great idea, after all. I'd been crazy to believe that it would be so easy to form a relationship with him—I hardly knew him, for goodness' sake!

I heard him following, and he closed the bedroom door quietly once we were both inside. I stepped across to the bed and jumped in, wrapping the duvet around myself, covering my head so that I was completely shut off from him. It worked...for a moment. Pretty soon, though, I heard creaking as Ben lowered himself down onto the other side of the bed, and the whole frame moved as he crawled across to reach me.

"Sophie?" His voice was soft. I felt pressure on my hip, where he'd placed his hand on the duvet. My skin crawled. "Please tell me what's wrong. He didn't upset you, did he? It sucks that he saw." There was a pause, and I stayed silent. "I could kiss you better."

I wanted to vomit. Scrunching my face up in disgust, I pulled the duvet tighter around me. "Go away, Ben," I said.

He was silent for a moment, but I could feel him moving beside me. Sure enough, just seconds later his fingers appeared right above my head, curling themselves around the edge of the duvet. Oh, my God. Did he think I was doing this to be playful? Oh no... I wasn't kidding about that vomit...

"Come on, Sophie..." He prised the duvet away and I curled into myself, shutting my eyes and covering my face with my hands. When he wrapped his arm around my waist and lay down beside me, I let out a small squeal. "What's wrong, baby? I thought you liked me. Did something change your mind?"

So, there were several things wrong with everything he'd just said. For a start, he'd called me baby. Baby. Of all the cringe-worthy, badly-overused terms he could have chosen... Gross. Second, he was honestly asking me what was wrong? Was he blind, or just under the influence of something?! It was quite obvious what had happened between me and Thomas after I'd run out there after him when he'd caught me kissing a half-naked Ben on our bed! And, worse than anything, he'd believed that I actually liked him enough for my mind to be changed back! No. The decision to kiss him had been a split-second, spur-of-the-moment, "Thomas doesn't want me so I'll settle for second best," sort of thing. I was not attracted to Ben at all.

Certainly not right now. That was for sure.

"Don't call me baby!" I hit his hand away and jumped off the bed, leaving him lying there without me. "I'm not your baby, Ben. I'm not your girlfriend, either. In fact, let's just pretend that kiss never happened, because it meant nothing. I don't like you in that way. You know why." I stared hard at him, my arms wrapped around my body tightly.

Ben nudged himself up in the bed and stared back at me. He was nibbling on his bottom lip and his eyes were bloodshot, and, for a second, I felt a twang of something that was almost guilt. But it quickly disappeared when he spoke.

"Well, it's obvious Thomas doesn't want you, Sophie," he said, his eyes glittering maliciously as he spoke. "And if there was ever any part of him that did before, it's going to be all gone now. He watched you kissing me. I'm pretty sure that was enough to tell him that you're not interested, either."

I could feel the rage bubbling so hard inside of my head that it threatened to spill out of my eyes. The red droplets were practically forming right there, inside of my eyelids. And then all of a sudden they actually did start pouring out of my eyes. Except, I realised, they weren't red droplets of rage but—to my annoyance and embarrassment—they were tears.