A Rhapsody Of Sorts

1- The Tactless Tart

August 4, 2012.

His skin was warm against mine, his arm heavy on the small of my back, and his breathing as loud as a philharmonic orchestra in my ear. I knew that his name was Ben, that he had calluses on his hands, and that he closed his eyes when he came.

I had always admired people who could sleep through anything. Matthew had been like that. He slept through thunderstorms and police sirens, and I even caught him sound asleep under the catering table after one of my shows last summer. I envied him for being able to ignore every bump in the night, especially since even the smallest and most harmless of noises could tear me from my sleep.

Waking to a ringing phone was one of the worst ways, second only to the sound of a heavy fist pounding on my front door, for me to jolt back into reality. As my phone went off now, my heart thudded rapidly in my chest and my breaths came out in quick gasps. Ben, with his early morning stubble tickling my shoulder blade, didn't know this feeling. His light, unfamiliar snores that had kept me blinking in and out of rest all through the night carried on even as my mobile's ringer pierced the silence of my bedroom.

I was wide awake now, but I didn't know how my phone had ended up on my bedside table, especially with its ringer switched on. Its usual home was the kitchen bench, where it almost always stayed — silent, off, or dead. As I rubbed my sleep-filled eyes, I vaguely recalled the way Ben's greedy hands had grabbed it last night, my chapped lips scraping across his throat, and him laughing as he added his number to my phonebook. As drunk on his touch as I was on vodka, I hadn't noticed when he carried it down the hall into my room.

I ignored the voice in the back of my head that told me to burrow under the duvet, and reached over to answer the call.

"Oliver Rose, what do you think you're doing?" my mother screeched down the line.

I rolled out of bed, the sheets detangling from my limbs and Ben's arm slipping from my waist. When I tried to pull one of Matthew's old jumpers on over my head, the phone, and my mum's unintelligible grumblings, went crashing to the floor.

I stepped into a clean pair of leggings before I bothered to scoop up my mobile again. My mother's voice continued to rant, too fast and too loud for me to keep up.

"Mum," I whispered harshly.

She stopped jabbering but her breaths continued to come out in hysterical spurts.

"Be quiet for just a mo', please," I begged, glancing at the slumbering boy before I stumbled out of my bedroom.

A shiver ran through my body when my feet touched the hardwood floor in the kitchen. The air conditioning was on full blast — though I reckoned I didn't need it at all when the weather outside was already so comfortable — and my flat felt like an icebox.

I started the coffeemaker, and took a moment to picture my mum seated in front of her laptop with a gossip website open on the screen, her robe haphazardly thrown over her nightshirt, thick reading glasses perched on her nose, and a look of cross-eyed wrath on her usually pleasant face.

"Okay," I spoke slowly, rubbing at the dull ache that was growing between my eyes. "What did I do now?" Last time — meaning when she'd shown up at my flat at eight o'clock in the morning back in February with an article printed off her dodgy color-printer and a scowl on her face — she overreacted.

"Someone got a photo of you snogging a boy at Gateshead last night," she said with a level of calmness that both frightened and impressed me.

I groaned. "So?" We'd already talked about this. There were always going to be pictures of me. The captions written under them, if not the comments at the bottom of the page, were guaranteed to be worth a thousand nasty words conveniently compacted into a passive-aggressive ten-word or less phrase.