‘But what if I want to bring someone home?’ I asked.
He snorted and Emma suppressed a laugh. The cow.
‘Ellie, I love you,’ said Will, ‘but after hanging out with you a fair bit this summer, I think I can safely say you’re not the kind of girl to bring a guy home.’
‘That’s so unfair!’ I cried. ‘Just because I didn’t sleep with any strangers over the summer doesn’t mean I never will.’
He raised the perfectly arched eyebrows at me. ‘Ellie, have you ever even had a one-night stand?’
I flushed and felt my face heating up. This was a very sore topic. I couldn’t lie because I’d sworn to stop covering up the truth about my—limited, very limited—sexual history, and besides, Emma knew everything anyway. If I lied, she’d just think I was pathetic.
‘Fine,’ I growled. ‘I have never had a one-night stand, but if you give me this shitty little room, I never will.’
‘You could go back to theirs?’ suggested Ollie.
‘What?’ I asked in exasperation. ‘How is this even a conversation? I am twenty-two years old. I am clearly capable of casual sex, and if I want to do it, I will. I’m not taking this room on the basis of being single because that is …’
Shit, what was it?
‘That is outright discrimination,’ I declared. ‘We live in a democracy and we’re … we’re going to pick names out of a hat.’
‘Ellie, stop acting so childish. We can reach an agreement like adults,’ said Will.
‘I dunno, it seems fair to me,’ said Ollie. I flashed him a look of utter gratitude. ‘Shall we just do rock, paper, scissors?’
‘Meh, fuck it,’ said Emma, shrugging her shoulders and sticking her right hand out into the air above the bed.
On the other corner of the bed, Will rolled his eyes and stuck his fist out. Ollie did the same and, from the one remaining corner, I placed my trembling arm out so our hands met in a charged square.
I had to win this. If I wanted to live the life of a young professional graduate in London, I needed the right setting. I couldn’t go on dates if I didn’t have anywhere to bring them back to.
‘OK, on the count of three,’ said Ollie. ‘One …’
Please, Julius Caesar, help me out here, I prayed to my own personal hero. God had never really done it for me—which broke my Greek Orthodox mother’s heart—but the Roman conqueror had helped me out once before, and he could do it again.
‘Two …’
Oh shit, I had to pick one. Um … rock. The strongest one. Caesar would pick the strongest.
‘Three.’
There were two rocks and two pieces of paper in front of us.
Will scowled at me. ‘OK, Ellie, it’s between you and me now,’ he said, as Emma whooped with joy and Ollie high-fived her. It was fine. I hadn’t actually lost. Caesar had helped me out. The rock was clearly a keeper. I would play it again.
‘I’ll count,’ offered Ollie.
Will and I faced each other across the bed and I stood with my legs wide open. This was it. Roman luck was on my side; I could squash this Gallic peasant.
‘One … two … three.’
My pale rock lay in the shadow of a triumphant palm paper. Will grinned smugly at me. Bollocks. Just like my hero I’d forgotten the cunning of Brutus’s betrayal. Et tu, Brutus.
‘I knew you would go for a rock again, Ellie,’ said Will. ‘You’re so predictable.’
My face dropped and Emma reached out across the bed to squeeze my limp fist. My Ides of March had begun.
I looked around my room. I’d covered the bed in a floral bedspread and hung scarves from the ceiling to give it an Aladdin’s cave vibe. There were fairy lights around the window, and photos of me, Emma and Lara taped onto the walls. If I stood on the bed, I could touch all four walls and reach pretty much any item in the room.
The bed, for lack of other options, was pushed up against the non-double-glazed window. It meant condensation was slowly dripping onto my Primark cushions. I sighed. Throughout my three years of university I’d lived in halls of residence and constantly dreamt about living in a proper flatshare with friends. This was not what I’d expected. A room of my own it may be, but I bet even Virginia Woolf would be seriously unimpressed with it.
‘Nooo, get off me!’ squealed a high-pitched voice.
I thumped the wall behind me with my fist.
‘Nope, not me,’ called Ollie from behind the wall.
I rolled my eyes and stood on my bed to hit the ceiling.
I could hear suppressed giggles before Cheng yelled, ‘Sorry. We’ll keep it down.’
Will’s low voice murmured something and then the squealing came back. I sighed and collapsed back onto my bed. We’d been living here for only forty-eight hours but I—quite literally—knew the ins and outs of Will and Cheng’s relationship. Thanks to the shitty plaster walls I also knew every loving word Ollie said to Yomi whenever she was visiting. The only person whose relationship I couldn’t overhear was Emma’s because her room was down the hall, but she told me every detail about her sex life with Sergio every time we hung out anyway.
As fun as it was living in the youngest—and cheapest—part of London, I had never felt more single. I opened my laptop and logged onto Facebook to see how great everyone else’s lives were now we had graduated.
Kara was back in a relationship with Tom and working for a publishing company. Belgian Marie seemed to have five boyfriends who all looked like varying versions of Burberry models, and my arch-nemesis, Hannah Fielding, was working as a writer for Tatler. Ugh, she was even tagged in a picture with Kate Moss. That was just so bloody typical.
I looked around my tiny room, where the mould was growing over the landlord’s cheap paint, and I felt an urge to start crying. Instead, I decided to tech-harm.
I reached out slowly for my iPhone, knowing I would regret what I was about to do. I tapped open the screen and, feeling pre-emptively sick, opened up Instagram. The sepia-filtered world burst into life and I scrolled down the feed to see photos of my uni friends dating beautiful people, working for high-powered companies and sunbathing on the rooftop of Shoreditch House in white bikinis with retro sunglasses. I could feel self-pitying tears pricking my eyelids when the door burst open.
‘Ellie, we’re having a major crisis,’ gasped Will. He was standing in my doorway wearing red boxers patterned with tiny yellow cars. Were those mini Noddys sitting in the yellow cars? I craned my head forward. ‘Stop staring at my penis and help me,’ he snapped.
‘Oh, right, sorry. What’s up?’
‘No one in the house has any lube,’ he declared.
I snorted. ‘Oh, right, and you think me, the single flatmate with the single bedroom, is going to be the one to help you out with that?’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘Please, I’m not that deluded. But I just wondered if you have any more of that Aussie miracle conditioner you use.’
I stared at him. ‘Um, no? I need to go to the supermarket. Why do you want to wash your hair now anyway?’
‘It’s not going on my hair, babe. At least, not for the hair you can see.’ He smirked.
‘I literally have no clue what you’re talking—OH MY GOD. You want to use my £4.49 conditioner for lube?!’
‘Well, that’s what I’ve been using