Read Online Killing Cupid by Mark Edwards, Louise Voss - Free Book Online Page A

if love does come along, you have to seize it with both hands and not let it go.
    Anyway. Back to the class. Brian didn’t turn up, which gave me a horrible feeling that maybe it was him who sent that card. Phil’s still Number One suspect – and God knows how Brian could have found out my address – but I suppose it is possible. Surely not though . . .
    Talking of my various admirers, Alex asked me out. Maybe the card is from him? He must like me. I said no, although I did give it a moment’s thought – it’s not that he’s bad looking, or anything. It’s not even that there might not be a spark, if I let there be. But there’s just something… I don’t know what exactly…which unsettles me about him. Maybe just his own weird energy.
    He seemed cool about me turning him down, though, so I’m sure he’ll just move on to his next conquest. He probably doesn’t even like me all that much; probably is just impressed that I’m a ‘faymuss awfor’. Or, rather, an ‘awfor.’
    I noticed that he's sent me a friend request on Facebook, which I hardly ever go on. Kathy sent me one too, which was nice. But I am not going to confirm Alex because there are various shots of me on there in my bikini in Malta last summer with Phil. Don't want one of my male students perving over them, do I? Though maybe I shouldn't have accepted Kathy either...
    And bloody Phil has unfriended me on there! I know because I tried to visit his profile to see whether he was still listed as 'in a relationship' and I couldn't get onto the page. Guess I must have hurt his feelings more than I thought.
     
    Friday
     
    Dead flowers. Phil has actually left a bunch of dead flowers on my doorstep. I can’t believe it. That’s a really horrible thing to do to somebody. I don’t blame him for feeling fed up – he’s been rejected by me and Lynn – but how could he stoop to something so cowardly and pathetic?
    It must be Phil. All these weirdnesses can’t be coincidence. Has he totally lost it? It’s so unlike him. There was the graphic postcard. Then hang-ups when I answer the phone, six or seven times in the past couple of days. And now the dead flowers.
    The more I think about it, the more angry it makes me. He knows I hate lilies. And these have got brown spots all over the petals, and slimy stems. They stink. What’s that sonnet where Shakespeare talks about how bad lilies smell?
    Just looked it up, it’s:
    “For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
    Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
    That just about sums it up, Phil, you nutter. I feel like going into his office and ramming them up his –
    Maybe I’ll just ring him instead. Tear him off a strip on the phone. It’s not worth the energy I’d expend in going down there myself.
     
    I stuffed the lilies into the bin under the sink, snapping the stems in two, trying to cram them in without letting any of the woody ends rip the bin bag. All the petals immediately dropped off, and that atrociously sticky pollen fell all over my hands, the kitchen floor, the top of the bin. By the time I’d cleaned it all up (which took ages because at first my attempts just left yellow swirly smears everywhere, and I had to practically bleach all the surfaces) I was in such a rage that my best being-rude-to-estate-agents voice came completely naturally:
    ‘Phil Harmony, please.’
    ‘Sorry, he’s on holiday. Can I put you through to his secretary?’
    This somehow made me even more furious. I can’t bear idiots who give you the wrong information on the telephone. Of course he wasn’t on bloody holiday, his holiday had been cancelled. That receptionist always had been dim.
    ‘Hello, Siobhan,’ said Diane when I got through to Phil’s office. ‘He’s not here, I’m afraid. He’s on holiday.’
    Oh – well, of course, he’d have already booked the time off. I felt bad for mentally slagging off the receptionist. She wasn’t to know. She wasn’t to know I’d mentally