The Dinner Guest by B Walter (best short books to read txt) 📕

the square into our separate living spaces. As I said goodnight to my parents, I noticed a light on to our left. Either Rachel or Meryl was awake, and if it was the former, I was keen to get to bed before she tried to come out and make conversation with us all.

It was very warm that night, and Matthew was fiddling with the air-con controls on the far wall. ‘Just so long as it doesn’t become fucking arctic,’ I said as I took off my shirt and chinos and got under the covers. It was too hot for pyjamas and the cool, clean sheets of the bed felt heavenly against my skin. Matthew then joined me in bed and we ended up having sex for a bit, but I could tell he wasn’t really into it and we both gave up and lay back to go to sleep without speaking. There was something distant about him – there had been for a while now – although I was struggling to put my finger on it. It was like he was in a boat, floating out to sea, and I was on the shore, trying to hold a conversation with him as he slowly glided away on the still surface of the water, further and further, until eventually neither of us could hear the other.

Despite feeling exhausted, sleep didn’t come, although I could tell Matthew had drifted off straightaway. I got out of bed to walk around and considered taking a midnight swim to clear my head. Just as I was trying to locate my swim shorts, something made me stop. Matthew’s phone was resting on the long desk-like table at the end of the room. It was on charge, connected to a lightning cable plugged in at the wall. Without allowing myself to think about what I was doing, I marched forward and picked up the phone. The screen lit up as I held it and I quickly toned down the brightness and turned on ‘night mode’ so that the harsh white-blue glare of the screen was replaced with an easier, warmer glow. I could see on the lock screen that he had three unread WhatsApp messages, but he’d changed the settings so it just said ‘Notification (3)’ rather than displaying them all as-written.

I looked over at him, apparently sound asleep on the bed. I didn’t know his passcode; I’d only very rarely seen him using it, usually just opening it up when the device recognised his face or his thumbprint.

His thumbprint.

My heart pounding, I disconnected the device from its cable and carried it in my hands as if it were a precious stone, over towards my sleeping husband. I was tempted to just hold the screen in front of his face to see if it unlocked it then, but I worried that shining a light in the eyes of a sleeping person, no matter how low, was probably asking for trouble. Instead, I slipped back into bed and, very gently, moved my body up against him, as if we were snuggling down together affectionately. I sought out his arm and moved my hand along to take it. He allowed me to, responding in his sleep to my touch with slow, vague movements, his hand settling into mine as if pleased by the contact. I was starting to worry how I would isolate his thumb from our bunched-up palms in order to unlock the phone but then something happened that made the whole exercise pointless.

A shout – no, more like a scream – met our ears, coming from outside our room, over by the swimming pool. I jolted upright, Matthew doing the same, and in the midst of our sudden movements I felt the phone leave the grasp of my spare hand.

‘What was that?’ Matthew asked me.

Another shout sounded out, this time containing more words, two of them unmistakably being ‘get out’.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, breathing heavily from the panic of almost getting caught. ‘But it sounded like … Titus.’

He didn’t need telling twice. He leaped out of bed, pausing only to pull on some tracksuit bottoms, then flung open the door and ran out onto the poolside. I did the same and followed, running after Matthew as he disappeared into Titus’s room, a light now shining brightly from behind the curtains of the French windows.

The sight that met us inside was one even I couldn’t have predicted. Titus was standing on the other side of the room. He was completely naked, his hands shielding his frontal nudity from view, his face the picture of confusion – perhaps even fear. And on the other side of the room, over near the far wall was…

‘Rachel?’ Matthew said, clearly baffled. ‘What … what’s going on?’

Rachel was dressed in a cream-white bikini, an outfit she’d sported a few times during our days spent by the pool. I looked from her and her outfit over to Titus and his vulnerable, naked body, backing away from her. ‘What the fuck did you do to him?’ I shouted at her.

Matthew walked towards Titus. ‘Are you OK?’ he said, bending over to pick up a pair of boxers from his discarded clothes on the floor. He tossed them over to the boy, who turned around as he pulled them on. His confusion and fear seemed to be giving way to embarrassment and anger now. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, almost roughly, ‘I was just … it just made me jump, that’s all.’

‘What made you jump?’ asked Matthew.

‘And why’s she in a bedroom with a naked child, dressed as if she’s auditioning for fucking Baywatch?’ I said.

‘I’m not a child,’ Titus snapped.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Rachel said. She looked as if she was about to cry. ‘I … I got the wrong room.’

‘What?’ I shouted back, disbelieving.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and properly started to cry now.

‘Charlie, please,’ Matthew said, shooting me a warning look. He went over to Rachel and said in a kind voice, ‘Can you just