Ed pulled the paper toward him and quickly scanned the story. As fiction went, it was rather typical. Anya was apparently brokenhearted that Pasha had followed Ed home. According to an unnamed source, they’d been fooling around behind Ed’s back. “Unless you really have been two-timing me with her all this time, like the story suggests, this looks like bullshit.”
Pasha didn’t react. Instead he went back to the top of the page as if double-checking for something he’d missed.
“What’s up, Pash?”
“Nothing.”
Still Pasha didn’t look up.
“Are you seriously worried about Anya?” She’d called him her only friend in the house. That friendship must run just as deep for Pasha too. Ed checked if his phone had signal. It was easy enough to send a quick text, which Anya responded to right away. “See?”
He tilted the screen in Pasha’s direction so that he could read her response:
Is my heart broken? Don’t be a spanner. I’m saving myself for the boy band, you dick.
“She’s fine.”
“I know.” Pasha folded the paper and shoved it to the far side of the table. “It’ll be a story that management fed the paper, that’s all—a way to keep Anya’s name in the race. I bet that picture is weeks old and doctored.”
That was likely true, but it didn’t explain Pasha reaching for the paper again as if about to read the story one more time. Ed thrust the phone his way again. “Here, you talk to her.” It was worth running down his battery to see Pasha finally relax and smile as he and Anya texted.
So friendship wasn’t a problem, if Pasha’s snorts of laughter were anything to go by. So what the hell had he been expecting to find between the newspaper’s pages? News about a secret lover for real? No. Ed felt certain of that.
A station flashed past as they approached London so much faster than he’d left it. From there they’d change trains to get to Scotland. But the minute they got back to the house after that, they’d have to face the consequences for breaking the rules. Perhaps they’d even get split up for good. Maybe that was what bothered Pasha the most.
“Hey.” Ed waited until a passenger making his way to the toilet passed by, then nudged Pasha’s leg with a knee. “Hey. You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah.” Pasha glanced up from the text message he was constructing. Ed caught a glimpse of emoticons and an uppercase LOL. “Why wouldn’t I be?” He looked down again and added a few more smiley faces.
“You looked kinda worried there for a moment.” Ed cleared his throat and continued. “You know? Like you were expecting to read something awful.” He paused to give Pasha a chance to set him right. Instead he saw his thumbs pause over the phone keyboard. “If there’s something—anything—you think might come out,” Ed said, “you should probably tell me before we get back.”
Pasha’s head rose very slowly, expression as carefully blank as before. “Like what?”
“I dunno.” Ed blew out a long slow breath. “Maybe something about home?” That seemed the only option left to mention.
Pasha resumed texting but then put the phone on the table without pressing Send. He changed the subject neatly. “Anya says there are videos of you singing at the station café onYouTube already. She heard someone from the production crew talking about it.”
Ed let Pasha steer the conversation, for a while at least. “What did she say?”
“Hang on.” Pasha scrolled backward through his text conversation and then read aloud. “Ed’s all over YouTube. The videos are getting a ton of views because he looks at you the whole time. Management were all set to sack you both for eloping—” He glanced up and his smile was wicked. “—now they can’t without looking bad because your epic #TrueLove is real.”
“Cute.” And close to true, if Ed was honest with himself.
“Yeah.” Pasha looked at the phone for a long time before he pressed Send on his last text, and then set it on the table. “You’re almost out of battery.” The train slowed from its fast pace before they passed yet another station. “So it sounds like we might be safe even though we didn’t exactly follow their orders.”
“Until the weekend, at least.”
“Yeah. Safe until then….” Pasha spoke as if he was thinking aloud. “Maybe I won’t have to go home at all. They were only using it as punishment in the first place.”
There was that blank expression again, its return a call to action Ed couldn’t ignore. He was done with pretending this was okay. “What’s up with going home, Pash?”
Pasha’s headshake was quick and dismissive. “Nothing.”
“You can tell?—”
“I said ‘nothing,’ didn’t I?” This time, Pasha had come close to shouting. Patches of pink stained his otherwise weirdly pale cheeks. “Fucking leave it, won’t you?” He bundled the hoodie he’d borrowed from Ed and jammed it between his head and the train-carriage window, eyes closing right away like he intended to sleep.
The train juddered as it picked up speed again, hurtling as fast as Ed’s heart. There was no explaining that fierce reaction.