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

… I walked into the wrong room, one night. I was by the pool reading and I fell asleep. All the rooms look the same from the outside around the pool area and … well, when I went back into what I thought were our quarters, I ended up in Titus’s room. It was an accident, but when he noticed there was someone in his room he shouted. Not that I blame him; he must have been freaked to think a stranger was in his room. So Matthew and Charlie burst in, and because Titus was in bed … unclothed … and I was just in my bikini … well, it looked…’

I looked to the side to see Meryl nod understandingly. ‘It looked improper.’ Meryl took a deep breath, then said, ‘Listen to me, my dear. I’m going to let you into something that I ask you to keep to yourself. Both men are very protective of Titus. Understandably so; they are the boy’s guardians. But it’s all wrapped with the situation involving Matthew’s sister, Collette, Titus’s birth mother. She died of a drug overdose shortly after Titus’s birth, same as the boy’s father a month or two earlier over in Norway where they were staying. Tragic. Absolutely tragic. A total waste of life. So much potential, never realised. So all of that is tied up with their relationship with the boy. The pressure, the sense of responsibility to give the boy a stable, loving home – something he was denied when his parents died. Essentially, what I’m trying to say is, don’t take it to heart. They’ve always been a tad over-protective. I’m sure they’re just feeling embarrassed that they over-reacted.’

I nodded. ‘I assumed it might be something like that. I just didn’t know… I’ve been so worried that they think I was trying to rob them or like I’m some sort of deranged weirdo who scares people when they’re sleeping…’

Meryl let out a little chuckle. ‘I’m sure they don’t think anything of the kind. But I understand if you don’t want to come to the book club. In fact, you don’t need to see them again for a long while if you don’t want to.’

I smiled back to her. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll just skip this meeting, then after that I’m sure things will get back to normal.’

Meryl nodded. ‘Well, you can join me at the Ashtons’s wedding anniversary party in July. They’ll be there, but it will be a relaxed environment, and you can mingle and meet other nice, young people like yourself.’

It was my turn to laugh now. ‘I fear I’m not that young anymore.’

‘If you’re not young, I don’t know what I am,’ Meryl said, smoothing out her cashmere cardigan. ‘Right, let’s order up a car and head to Claridge’s. I haven’t been there since Christmas, and we could do with a drink.’

Chapter Twenty-Nine Charlie

Two months to go

Matthew made the decision not to tell anyone else about the odd situation involving Rachel in The Hamptons. He said he didn’t think anything good would come of making a fuss, and that it was likely Rachel would distance herself from us anyway after her embarrassment. It turned out that he was right – at least for a time. The rest of the holiday passed without incident, and she didn’t turn up to the following month’s book-club meeting (Meryl cited a summer cold as the reason). I even allowed myself to believe we might be rid of her and she would, gradually, fade away out of our lives. Of course, I was wrong. And my life started to properly fall apart the night of Lord and Lady Ashton’s golden wedding anniversary.

The Ashtons’s manor in the Oxfordshire countryside was a major part of my childhood. With two hundred acres of grounds, not to mention all the many rooms and passageways throughout the house itself, it was a rich kingdom of exploration for an outdoorsy boy like myself. While Matthew spent most of his youth holed up in his bedroom at the top of his family’s castle in the highlands with his face buried in the works of James Joyce, I spent many sun-dappled afternoons playing hide and seek at the Ashtons’s manor, often accompanied by friends from school. When I was a teenager, I went through a phase of making out I didn’t want to join my parents for long weekends with the Ashtons, claiming it was more exciting in Central London. This wasn’t true. It’s because I was experiencing my first major crush – that kind of intoxicating first love that hits you like a freight train and drags your hormonal brain through a thicket of emotions. And the object of that first crush was Rupert Ashton.

Ten years older than me, he had been twenty-three when my thirteen-year-old self first started to view him as a figure of desire. I’d gone through a phase of being a little shy of Rupert during the ages of eleven and twelve, not really understanding what it was about him that made me both eager to impress him and desperate to run away from him at the same time. I felt shy and awkward around him and his group of friends, and would try to keep out of his way whilst wishing I could be near him at every hour of every day. As I got older, I realised I was falling in love with him, and when I was sixteen I ended up telling him this on one long, warm midsummer night.

It had been a garden party that day, too – a smaller, intimate gathering to celebrate his younger sister’s graduation (a double first from Oxford). I had wandered down towards the trees that lined the property, a bottle of wine in my hand that I’d pilfered from one of the tables, and I had a notion to get utterly drunk on it in a very grown-up, complicated way, using it to drown my sorrows