Free This is Not a Love Story by Suki Fleet Page B

that took our tarpaulin away, and it’s there hidden under his desk, keeping his feet dry. The look on his face tells me he doesn’t really want to help me.
    I hand over my prepared speech. I wrote it yesterday while I wasn’t feeling so strange. He skims the words and stares at me.
    “Is this some sort of joke?”
    A joke? I reel backward, floored.
    A joke?
    It’s my fucking life.
    I give up. Fuck it , I think, I tried .
    But at that exact moment, a pretty young woman with long dark hair and sparkling eyes like Julian’s breezes through the double-lock doors into the waiting area where I’m standing. She has on a long coat, and there is a heavy black leather bag in her hand, and she looks like she’s leaving, but for some reason she stops, and she looks at me, really looks. And her eyes are so like his eyes I can’t look away. Somehow it’s too intimate looking at someone else so deeply like this.
    “Is everything alright?” she asks, frowning kindly, still scrutinizing me.
    “I’ve got it, Annie, you get off,” the deep-voiced fucker calls to her.
    But she shakes her head, ignoring him.
    “You look like you could do with a hot drink,” she says quietly, almost to herself, still looking at me closely. “Come and sit down through here.”
    And she leads me through to a small square room just about filled with a metal desk and two chairs.
    “I’ll be back in just a tick,” she says, resting her large bag on the desk and leaving me alone in the room with it.
    I look around, feeling I’m undergoing some sort of test. Does she want to see if I’m going to open the bag? Are there cameras filming me? What’s in the bag? I blink up at the corners where the walls meet the ceiling. I feel very strange.
    Bizarrely, I’m working my way around the sides of the room looking for secret compartments when the woman comes back with a steaming mug and a plate of food, my prepared speech tucked under her arm.
    She doesn’t bat an eye at my weird behavior or even look to see if her bag has moved. I don’t know whether she is just trusting or stupid.
    “Here,” she says, placing the food and the mug on the table. “I thought you looked hungry, and this was going spare upstairs.”
    Cautiously, I walk back over to the table.
    “Romeo, right?” She waves my speech by way of explanation. “I’m Annie. I’m a forensic medical examiner, police doctor.”
    I stare at the food. I don’t think I can eat anything. But my hand picks up the fork, and before I know it, I’m eating. Ravenously.
    “This is what you handed in to Sergeant Moore out there, isn’t it?” she asks, showing me my writing again.
    I nod.
    “Do you mind if I call in a colleague of mine? She’s a detective, and I think she’d be really interested in what you’ve written here.”
    Feeling slightly more grounded after choking down a few mouthfuls of food, I pull out my pad. I’ve done some drawings of Vidal and Malik, and there is one of Julian too.
    She nods, smiling as I show her.
    “Okay,” she says, before taking out a mobile phone and pressing a few buttons and holding it to her ear. “Are you homeless, Romeo?”
    I nod.
    “How old are you?”
    I shake my head. I can’t tell her. They’ll put me in a home.
    “Romeo, I have a duty of care to call social services if I suspect a person under sixteen is at risk. If you’re homeless, you’re at risk.”
    I feel the well of panic starting to build, and I wobble to my feet.
    “Hey, hey, listen, it’s okay.” She holds my gaze, and her voice is calm and commanding like Peter’s was. “Just wait a few more minutes with me, okay? Speak to my colleague. If you like, I won’t make that call until after she’s spoken with you, okay?”
    If you put me in a home, I’ll run, I write.
    “Okay, but you’re too young to be looking after yourself. Social services are there to help and protect you. Did you run away from home?” she asks as she puts down the phone.
    I shake my head. I don’t