Free You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Sarra Manning

her body just to make sure it hadn’t swelled in size since Charlotte had started shouting at her.
    ‘Sorry,’ Neve offered again and she stood there, hands hanging limply by her sides, head bowed until with one last muttered curse, Charlotte went back into her flat and slammed the door shut behind her.
    Neve crept up the stairs, tensing as she reached the first-floor landing in case Charlotte decided that she was ready for an encore performance because she did that sometimes. Just to keep Neve on her toes.
    Once she was inside her own flat, Neve made herself an omelette very quietly, making sure to carefully place plates and utensils down on the rubber mats she’d bought. She’d even fixed rubber stops to her cupboard doors so it was impossible to slam them shut, though she hadn’t had much luck with her cutlery drawer. She ate her dinner at the kitchen table and then it was seven thirty and Charlotte would be settling down to EastEnders and not liable to start banging on the ceiling because the sound of Neve’s fingers on her computer keyboard or turning the pages of a book could be classed as noise pollution if you were the most heinous, evil, black-hearted witch that had ever walked the earth.
    As she washed up, Neve thought about Max. But then she’d been thinking about Max all afternoon. She longed to be the kind of girl who could metaphorically shrug her shoulders, find some perspective on the situation and then turn it into a funny anecdote to tell her friends. As it was, Neve knew she’d take the sordid secret to her grave and never tell a soul, and she could only hope that Max felt the same way. Maybe he was already holding court over cocktails in some private members’ club in Soho and making his glamorous, jaded friends roar with laughter as he gave them a blow-by-blow account of how he’d spent the previous night.
    Neve clutched her head in her hands and felt a wave of shame and revulsion shudder through her. She was still sitting on her kitchen chair and rocking gently when the phone rang ten minutes later.
    ‘Hello?’ she said warily into the receiver, because her mother always called about this time and she wasn’t sure that she could handle Mrs Slater loudly lamenting about how cold it was in Yorkshire and how many inches of snowfall they’d had in the last twenty-four hours.
    ‘Neve? It’s William. How are you?’ Just like that, just with six words from William, Neve went from despair to delight.
    ‘I’m fine,’ she gasped, face pinking up from pleasure. ‘What a lovely surprise. How are you?’
    ‘All the better for hearing your voice. How do you do that?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Neve said, resisting the urge to giggle girlishly and preen at William’s compliment. ‘I thought we were going to speak on Sunday. Is something wrong?’
    ‘Not exactly.’ But William sounded so forlorn that Neve felt her heart ache in sympathy. ‘Neevy, I’ve got myself in a terrible bind with the footnotes on that paper I’m writing about Rossetti. Honestly, I’m thinking of giving up academia and getting a job in a bookshop.’
    ‘Oh dear,’ Neve cooed, her tone getting so saccharine that she actually wanted to gag. ‘I don’t think you’d be a model bookshop employee; you’d be too busy reading under the counter to do inventory and you’d refuse outright to sell books to customers if you thought they were badly written or without any literary merit.’
    ‘And you wouldn’t?’ William enquired, and he didn’t say it snidely but with such rich amusement that Neve couldn’t take offence.
    ‘Oh, I totally would,’ she assured him. ‘So is there any way I can help? I mean, the Romantic Poets aren’t my strongest area, but would you like me to read your latest draft?’
    ‘Would you?’ William’s relief was palpable. ‘Also, are you going to the British Library in the next week, because I need to check a couple of references but the inter-library loans take for ever and I’m not