Page 82 of Jessica Beam is a Hot Mess
My head is killing me. The coffee smell is too strong.
I think I have to …
‘Puke,’ I whisper.
Knocking the mic stand over, I jump off the stage and race right past a startled-looking Leo Frost and into the ladies’ room. I reach the loo just in time to hurl like I’ve never before hurled in my life. I hurl like a champion.
I hear Leo’s deep voice from outside the cubicle.
‘Lucille?’
Shit!
I grab some loo roll and lightly dab at my mouth, trying not to smudge the pink lipstick Grandma so carefully applied earlier. I feel absolutely rotten. I’m never drinking that much flavoured vodka or eating a dodgy kebab again.
‘I’m OK,’ I say as brightly as I can manage, which isn’t very. ‘Just something I ate!’ My voice is all shaky. I wonder if Leo Frost heard me puking?
I reach up, unlock the door with shaking hands and peek round it. He’s grimacing. Yup. Definitely witness to the vomming.
Fuck.Fuck.
Well now I’ve completely ruined it. I’m pretty fucking certain that a Good Woman must never chuck up in the near vicinity of her intended chap.
It’s over. The project is over. There’s absolutely no way to come back from this.
I yank off Grandma’s ridiculous hat with a sigh and rub my hand over my face.
‘Look … Leo, you might as well, you know, leave. I don’t mind,’ I sigh heavily, dropping all pretence of Lucille. What’s the point? I mean, he’s hardly going to want to see me again after I made a right tit of myself on the stage and then extravagantly chundered in front of him.
Man, I feel rough.
Leo Frost steps towards me, his rangy frame filling up the tiny ladies’ room. He crouches down and undoes the tight Liberty print scarf from around my neck, takes it off, folds it neatly and tucks it into his shirt pocket.
‘Might get in the way,’ he says reasonably.
Before I can respond, my stomach lurches horribly. I turn back to the basin and throw up again. God, this is the worst fake date in the history of the universe ever.
But then the weirdest thing happens. Leo leans over, gathers up my hair and gently sweeps it back from my face so that it’s away from the toilet. He patiently holds it there until I’m finished.
When the contents of my stomach are flushed away, I flop back against the wall and take long, steady breaths. Without a word, Leo hurries off to get me a glass of cold water. When he returns, he hitches up his fancy suit trousers slightly and sits on the floor beside me. Thankfully, it’s a clean floor.
I rub my stomach and puff the air out through my cheeks, taking the glass of water from him with a mumbled thanks.
‘You can’tpossiblyhave any more left.’ He raises an eyebrow.
Grandma would be horrified if she saw that my grand first date with Leo had ended up on a flipping toilet floor. She would cry, for sure.
‘We ought to get you home,’ Leo says in a low voice. ‘You’re certainly not going to get better in time for our next date by hanging around in a coffee-shop bathroom. Though, as bathrooms go, it’s not a terrible one. A rather good selection of reading material, in fact.’
He points up at the scrawled graffiti on the cubicle wall.
Wait … did he just saynext date?
Whaaat? He’s still interested after everything that’s just happened?
I don’t understand . . .
Unless … God, it must have been all my enthusiasm about the poetry. Grandma must have been right. By pretending to be super interested in whathe’sinterested in, I’ve totally hooked him in. I’ve hooked him in so well that he’s overlooked the puking. Woah. Matilda Beam might be magic.
