Every time you make a move

The Great Pretender-Pt 1

"But you're always telling me that the boy's like his Da," Paula contested, "you always say that he's a little star, that they have the same stubborn streak..."

She sighed, and reluctantly explained, "Earlier in the year Freddie said a few things about how Johnny was doing in their old school, and Johnny overheard. They never really made up properly."

Similarly there was the way that Freddie spoke to her and his own fans at the Thai restaurant a couple weeks before as well, but Monica didn't want to divulge into that embarrassing and hurtful day. She knew that her friend wouldn't take it too lightly.

Paula held her tongue as she studied her friend, who was biting her knuckles anxiously and hugging her knees to her chest. She then looked at the space that Monica was staring into, the dark gray screen of the cable television on the dresser across from their shared king-size bed.

"Whichever one of them who paid for this room has done well" she thought, for the Hilton hotel was a far cry from her trusty Fiat Pandora camper van, let alone the Montana hotel in London where they both were staying almost ten years before when they were still innocent vivacious girls.

"And to think that Mo was convinced that Freddie was the man of her dreams, willing to throw away the other dreams that she had to be with him... and for what? To be this miserable?" she thought, studying Monica more closely.

She couldn't help but think that the ordeal had aged her friend at least five years. The dark circles that were under Monica's blue eyes yesterday were faded, but they were still there. The copious amounts of alcohol that she drank on the night flight from London to Dublin obviously didn't help either. And her brown shoulder-length waves were greasy the night before they'd been shampooed this morning, and Paula could tell that Monica's disheveled clothes stuffed in her suitcase were picked up off the bedroom floor at Garden Lodge in a haste.

"If only she'd listened to me" she thought with annoyance.

But it wasn't like Paula could turn her back on her best friend at her worst. After all, Monica supported her when she came out to her last Easter.

"That was the same day she glugged down all that gin in front of me at her parent's house too," Paula reminisced, "It's almost as if we revealed a new thing about ourselves to one another that day"

And with Monica's self-destructive bad habit Ms McIntyre also hated to think what Christmas next week was going to be like, what with the amount of wine and spirits available in the festive season.

"And those two poor children... what are they going to see when they come home?"

"God Paula, it feels just like giving birth to them in Switzerland again" Monica broke her friend's train of thought, and the silence between them.

She raised an eyebrow, "Why do you say that?"

"Freddie passed out on the maternity hospital floor when he saw Roshni come out of me," she elaborated, "Then he was revived right as I was pushing Johnny out ten minutes later. And the moment we both heard those cries for the first time, something did change in him the moment we became parents, but I don't know if that lasted."

"Men can be vulnerable too, you know," Paula tried to reason, "I see it in my line of work all the time"

"I know, the point is that I almost had to do it all on my own and I felt too exhausted to carry on... just like he left me on my own to parent them today"

"Hey, I'm here. I said I'd go do Fred's job for him, didn't I?" Paula reached across to hold her friend's hand, then shook her head and muttered, "Besides, if I'm honest I don't know why you still put up with him at this point. Even after what you said about him and Johnny."