Making Love

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

I called my sister as soon as I got home, just to check that she and our mother were okay. Mum had calmed down, apparently, and was now looking forward to meeting Tom.

Wonderful.

My phone had lit up with text messages the moment I turned it on but only a few were from numbers I recognised. I called my friends Rayne and Marie back and both women seemed to understand why I hadn’t told them the truth about Tom but were either thrilled that I had ‘landed such a hunk’ or that I had found ‘someone so nice’.

See? Now why couldn’t my mother react like that?

I was pretty jet lagged so as soon as I was mostly unpacked, I called Tom, just to say goodnight, then crashed for 12 hours.

The next morning was something of a revelation.

First I checked the other text messages and my voicemail. They were almost all from the press, asking for confirmation of our relationship.

My email was similar but contained more detailed request, some even included questions they wanted me to answer. Yeah, because I have nothing better to do with my time that tell perfect strangers about my love life, to help them get hits on their gossip website. Some emails were clearly from fans, who must have got my email from my website.

Once such junk was deleted, I was left with only a dozen or so work messages. Most of my existing clients knew I’d be away, so had just sent updates or notes that hadn’t required an immediate response but out of the rest, many were… suspicious, worded slightly differently to most genuine requests.

I wrote back to most of them anyway, keeping everything 100% professional, just in case they were genuine.

Next I checked social media and found that my twitter and my facebook pages had a load of new followers. One new follower on twitter though, was Tom, which made me smile. He told me he couldn’t follow me before as anyone he did came under scrutiny.

Suddenly I realised that there would be some plusses to being public, namely, not having to hide.

Most of the messages I’d been sent were not work related. There was a lot of questions, like how long had we been dating, which I ignored. There were some nice messages, which was kind but weird, some nasty messages (those users immediately got blocked) and some strange messages. Someone wanted to know what Tom smelled like, while one chap was trying to warn me that Tom was only using me.

He could be genuinely worried for me and just passive aggressive, or just a troll but either way, he was blocked. I do not need dating advice from strangers, thanks.

By the time I turned my attention back to my unfinished projects, it was gone noon and I doubted I’d get a lot done today. I reviewed them all however, so I was up to speed with my progress and ready to start drawing again tomorrow.

My phone rang about once an hour but it was all from the press. I simply answered ‘no comment’ as soon as they introduced themselves, and entered the numbers into my phone with the name ‘no’, then I assigned them all a tweeting birds ringtone that was subtle and easy to ignore.

Tom called at about 3pm, so I took a break and made some tea while we chatted.

“Luke wants us to go public,” he told me, after we’d made the requisite amount of small talk.

“What do you think?”

“I think we should. All the time we deny it, we’re just going to have people after us, trying to prove we’re lying.”