Free Boyfriend in a Dress by Louise Kean Page A

side of the room, barely visible through the smoke and the neon.
    I heard my jaw click, as I reached to massage the tension in my neck, and looked down at the floor, not wanting to meet any of their gazes. I wasn’t surprised, just mortified. I knew damn well that nothing was past Charlie now, but I had never shared it with my friends. I didn’t want them feeling sorry for me. I didn’t feel sorry for me, why should they? But I wanted to see for myself, some morbid curiosity wanted to at least see his face, see who he was with. He had told me he was seeing his brother tonight, and I wanted to see if it was true. Earlier in the day, when he had told me that, I wondered why he had felt the need to pass the information on – I had started to lose track of Charlie’s movements, and didn’t care to be told. I had heard whispers from various people, that they didn’t think he was ‘happy’, asking me if we were, as a couple, ‘ok?’ Asking indirect questions to which they didn’t want an answer, fulfilling an obligation to somehow alert me to what was going on, without having to get actually involved in what was at the end of the day a ‘domestic’ issue, somebody else’s relationship. Amy looked shocked. I felt slapped in the face – I don’t care how ironic it was that we were in this sleazy hole, which now looked rotten to the core, old and haggard and flabby and bruised. He shouldn’t be here, in front of my friends, making me look like an idiot.
    Nim, Jules and Jake had picked up their coats and bags, as well as mine, and were trying to usher me to the door. Amy was staring at me, trying to work out what she could reasonably say about my boyfriend, who she at first really quite liked, but had recently come to almost despise. I could tell from her eyes that she was framing sentences in her headthat wouldn’t upset me, but which would get her point across as well – I could also tell it wasn’t easy.
    ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said, and marched towards where Charlie was supposed to be, hearing Jules whispering to the others behind me, ‘he really has changed, hasn’t he. Poor Nix.’ I shuddered at the pity of it all.
    As I got closer to the group of guys, I could hear a laugh coming from within their circle. His laugh had always been too loud. I was five feet away when I saw one of the guys he worked with clock me coming towards them, and shove the guy sitting in front of him, obscured by one of the others. I could see notes flying towards a girl on the stage, who was kneeling close to the guys, massaging her plastic tits, and licking her lips, and pulling at her G-string as if she might take it off. She looked … hairless. Suddenly, an arm sprang into view, waving a fifty pound note at the stripper, and then the crowd seemed to clear, and I could see the note was attached to a hand, to a suited arm, to a man with spiky hair and sideburns, with the top button of his shirt undone, and his tie, knotted around his head like an idiot. The man was leering at the kneeling woman, and it was a smile I didn’t recognize – it was seedy and sordid and desperate and arrogant and awful. It was still Charlie, though.
    All the other boys were staring at me now, not the stripper, and one of them was nudging Charlie hard on the arm, but his attention couldn’t be dragged from the bare breasts in front of him, pushed together to receive his fifty pound note. I stood and watched his mates desperately try and get his attention, with my hands on my hips, just waiting. Finally one of them said ‘Charlie’ loudly, and he turned quickly.
    ‘I’m fucking busy, what?’ and then he looked past his comrade, and saw me, his girlfriend, standing a few feet away.
    I didn’t say anything, I just looked at him, his hand still outstretched, holding the note. The stripper moved awayquickly to another group of guys, glancing back over her shoulder at me once, in sympathy. Charlie seemed to click into life suddenly, and stood up,