Free Star Struck by Jane Lovering

before Catastrophe came calling at Wotsit -ville.
    It took far, far longer than it should have, to bring up two packets of cheesy puffs. Between noisy heaves I could hear Jack on the phone, calling downstairs, and in a few minutes Felix arrived in the bathroom, overheated and with a lipstick mark on the side of his neck.
    â€˜Whoa!’ He looked down on me for a moment as I drooled bile into the toilet bowl. ‘You look crappy, darling.’
    I rolled a bloodshot eye up at him and heaved a few more intestines closer to the waterline. To his credit, Jack brought me a glass of water, although I couldn’t steady my hand enough to take it and he ended up feeding me sips, crouched next to the nasty-smelling toilet with me.
    â€˜And you missed such a fantastic outing.’ Felix patted my back ineffectually as another burst of retching caught up with me. ‘Gethryn is down there, chatting. You could have had your moment with him, if you hadn’t been –’ he cast an eye over Jack – ‘making friends up here.’ And then, impatiently, ‘Surely there can’t be anything else to bring up.’
    A commotion in the bedroom, and both men turned. My already rock-bottom self-esteem managed a feat of geology to become even lower as Lissa’s penetratingly nasal voice asked, ‘What are you all doing in there?’
    Jack straightened up beside me. ‘We’re looking after Skye.’
    â€˜Well, fuck you .’
    I managed to sit away from the toilet bowl for long enough to clock Lissa’s expression of revulsion peering into the bathroom.
    â€˜Jeez, Jack, you do pick them. Surely it doesn’t take two of you. Felix, you could come back downstairs with me.’
    â€˜Lissa and I met earlier,’ Felix explained, and the way his eyes traced the contours of those very tight pink jeans spoke an absolute library. ‘So. You and Jack been together long?’ He spoke to her without meeting her eye, which said even more.
    â€˜Way, way too long. How about you, you two …?’
    â€˜Oh, no, we’re – look, it’s a long story.’
    All this was going on over my shoulder as the final crisps exited my system in the most undignified and, possibly, loudest, way imaginable. My eyes streamed from the effort, my nose trailed vomit and my head hurt. I just wanted to lie, very still, on the cool floor of the bathroom. Instead I had an audience.
    â€˜Does she have a very low tolerance for alcohol?’ Jack asked. ‘I only gave her a couple of glasses. What? Don’t look at me like that, Lissa.’
    â€˜Here we go again …’
    â€˜No! No, this isn’t like that, Liss.’
    I could feel the blonde’s eyes on me. They didn’t seem particularly angry, as I would have expected from a girl finding her boyfriend, however ‘ex’ the nature of the relationship, embroiled with another woman. She looked more sad. ‘If you say so. But if you’d rather chat to some whacked-out, beat-up English chick than me , man, you have your priorities way wrong.’
    â€˜Lissa, you didn’t want to talk, you wanted to harangue me about some director you’ve met that I need to know, nothing that’s going to help me, just some bunch of auteur fuckwits who want cheap labour and a British accent to give credibility to their pseudo-porn.’
    As I dribbled the remnants of my pathetic breakfast down my chin, Felix grinned at me. ‘Aren’t other people’s lives fun ? You see what you miss when you’ve got your face in someone else’s flusher?’
    â€˜I didn’t exactly choose this position,’ I said, round the drool.
    Jack and Lissa had moved back into the bedroom to continue their argument. Felix grabbed my elbow and dragged me to my feet, keeping up the momentum so that we staggered through into the next room, with me still hunched forward over an invisible toilet.