Chapter 27: Santa’s Baby: Chapter 26

I fall into Josh’s arms as soon as he opens his front door, relieved when he squeezes me tight and lets me cry against his chest.

“I fucked up,” I sob. “I fucked up so fucking bad.”

He doesn’t push me for words, just rocks me gently as my tears stream against his shirt, comforting me like he did when I last felt this kind of pain. When Kian gave his final goodbye, and I watched him walk away.

I don’t bother trying to wipe my tears away, just let them fall, gripping on to Josh with all my might, because he is my true constant. The person who’s been there for me through thick and thin. He’s the person I should have trusted with my secrets the very moment they started spiralling into madness.

Yet another thing I fucked up.

I’m still dressed up like an elf, but my grin at being Santa’s helper has been burnt to ashes.

Go!

That’s the word I hear in my mind. All I can see is Reuben’s mortified face as he sent me away.

“Come here, let’s get you settled,” Josh says when my sobs calm. He takes me by the hand and leads me to the sofa, and there is Ella, with a pillow held to her chest as she looks at me with nothing but love in her eyes. She’s on the verge of tears herself, hurting for me, even though neither of them has any fucking idea what I’m hurting from.

I drop into my usual spot on the sofa, with Josh right beside me. He rests his hand on my knee and tells me to breathe. Calm. In and out, in and out. I listen to him, sucking in air through my nose and blowing it out through my mouth, trying to regain the use of words.

Both Ella and Josh are staring patiently at me, waiting for me to speak. I almost choke as I try.

“I fell in love with Santa. At the mall.” I gesture to Ells. “When me and you went that day, and I sat on his lap.”

“I remember,” she says. “The client with no bookings. Were you his first? The owner of the mall?” She pauses. “Oh crap, have you fallen in love with a client, Tiff? Has Orla found out or something?”

I shake my head, a fresh sob rising from my chest.

“He’s not just a client… the owner of the mall is a, um… he’s a…”

It feels so hard to say it, to admit what I’ve done.

“He’s a founder. Reuben Sinclair. He’s a founder, and I went back to the grotto, and I fell in love with him. And now it’s over. It’s all gone to shit.”

The pair of them turn as pale as Reuben was when I left him. Josh runs his fingers through his punkish hair, and looks over at Ella, the gothic beauty who knows exactly who I’m talking about.

“The mall?” he asks her.

“Yeah, we went shopping. Me, Tiff and Eb. We thought it would be fun to go in the grotto. Just a stupid game.”

“A stupid game, no shit.” He looks back at me. “And the prick has called it off now? Had his fill and turfed you out? I know you get these obsessive streaks, Tiff, but he’s the one who crossed the line if he fucked you over.”

I shake my head. “No. He didn’t fuck me over. It was the opposite.” My lip trembles as I speak. “He loved me.”

“Loved you?” Josh raises his eyebrows. “A founder dressed up as Santa in the mall sought you out, fucked you, and told you he loved you? And then what? Loverboy kicked you to the kerb?”

“No. It wasn’t like that!”

“Sure it wasn’t. What a fucking tosser.”

I love how protective he is. I have to smile at the way he grits his jaw like he’s ready to go and pick a fight with a lion to avenge me.

Ells shifts closer to him, resting a hand on his arm.

“Santa isn’t like that, Josh. He’s a really nice guy.”

He looks at her as though she’s as insane as I am.

“You’ve bought into this Santa crap as well? Seriously? He’s a fucking founder.” His eyes lock back on mine. “Did you know he was a founder when you fucked him?”

“Yes. I knew he was a founder the moment I met him in the grotto.”

“But you’d never seen his face. You’ve always been under a hood.”

“I didn’t need to see his face. I just knew. I knew the way he felt when I sat on him. I recognised him.” I rub my temples, trying to explain it. “I just knew, ok? And then I saw his eyes, and he saw mine, and the rest is history, as they say. Or in my case an absolute fucking nightmare.”

Ella holds the cushion tighter to her chest, and Josh shakes his head, trying to process things.

“Shit, Tiff,” he says, and that about sums it up.

It is shit.

And it’s way more shit than they know.

“It gets worse,” I say.

“Worse? Jesus, Tiff, just take it from the top, will you? Fucking hell.”

I take it from the top. The very top.

I tell them how I fell in love with Reuben right from the off, even though Josh doesn’t want to hear that part, since he’s heard about plenty of my infatuations before. He thinks this is a mega crazy one that’s torn me apart, because I’ve fucked someone I should never have touched in a million years, and I’ve been spat out by him. That I should have seen it coming. But he’s wrong.

I see his expression change as my story continues. He pulls me into him as I cry, reliving the special times Reuben and I shared. How we holed up together, and kissed all night, and needed each other. I manage to smile as I point to my elf tights, and tell him and Ells how being around kids even got to be fun for me, helping at the grotto. Josh looks choked up himself at that, because he knows how hard being around kids is for me, after I miscarried Kian’s baby during a massive row… before he walked away and left me grieving.

Only I didn’t grieve. I partied, and fucked and pretended I didn’t give a shit, because I didn’t want to be a mother anyway. I was a dirty bitch, not a mummy. I swept it under the rug and let myself run wild.

“That’s where you’ve been the whole time, then?” Josh asks me. “That’s why you postponed your proposals? You’ve been holed up with a founder, falling in love with him?”

Ells smiles at me, and there is a knowing in her eyes. She gets it better than Josh does. She met Santa – Reuben – herself when he booked her for a fake proposal last Christmas. He was feigning desperation to see if anyone would support him out of charity.

Ella did, and he rewarded her for it. And in turn she rewarded everyone else for his generosity – sharing the crazy amount of cash around homeless people and struggling families.

“So why did he call it off?” Josh asks me. “Why the fuck did he call time out, if you needed each other so bad?”

Time for another deep breath. I’m shaking as I prepare myself to confess.

“Because I cancelled a founders’ booking. I messaged Orla and said I had flu and was too ill to attend.”

“Holy shit!” Ella says.

“You did fucking what?!” Josh says.

The pair of them sit bolt upright at that. Josh’s hands shoot to his cheeks, and Ella’s mouth drops open.

It sounds so stupid now I’ve said it out loud. I cancelled a founders’ booking. The most powerful men in the Agency. The hidden masters behind it all. You never cancel that kind of gig. Ever. It’s beyond fucking ridiculous.

How could I have possibly expected no consequences? How could I have been so fucking dumb?

“Did Orla pull you up on it when you cancelled?” Ella asks me. “Did Reuben freak out about it? I mean, he must answer to them too, right?”

She knows the gig. Any entertainer who goes within a fifty-mile radius of a founders’ proposal is obliged to uphold confidentiality to the utmost degree. Even we don’t usually talk about them – me, Josh and Ells. That’s how sacred it is.

“Orla didn’t pull me up on it, and Reuben didn’t freak out. It was Reuben who asked me to do it. To call in sick and fob them off.”

My best friends look confused as fuck, and I don’t blame them.

“Why are you in a state, then?” Josh asks. “If nobody freaked, what’s the problem?”

I close my eyes.

“Because the other founders themselves must have suspected something was going on. Two of them turned up to see Reuben at the grotto, and I burst in on them wearing a fucking elf costume with a sexy snow globe in my hand, laughing my head off. I didn’t know they were in there, but I recognised them the second I saw them, even though I’d never actually seen them. Another crazy experience like with Reuben. It was fucking crazy. And fucking horrible.”

“Oh shit,” Ells says. “Well. I guess they recognised you, too. You’re quite recognisable, even with a bobble hat on.”

“Yeah. Oh, shit, and now we’re both in the shit. Both me and Reuben. Brilliant. Just fucking brilliant. No wonder he told me to go. I should have already been legging it out of there as fast as my fat ass would carry me. You know how brutal the founders can be. They might throw him to the wolves as well as me.”

I well up again as Ella nods.

Ella does indeed know what the founders are like. When a douche of a lettings agent she was going to be renting an apartment through found out she was a whore and tried to dig around her references to make an enquiry, the founders tore him down in a flash. He was instantly removed from his job and cast out of the city, never to be seen here again.

The founders don’t take prisoners.

I don’t tell Josh and Ella that one of the guys was from Westminster. It would freak me out more as well as them, but it’s so bloody obvious now. I bet there are others amongst the group that are high profile. The kind of high profile that demands a hood and an at all costs level of anonymity.

I’m such a stupid dumbass.

I wonder what’s happening with Reuben. He looked so fucking petrified himself.

“They’ve cancelled you, then?” Josh asks, and his words hit me like a hammer in the ribcage.

I’ve been so caught up in losing Reuben, that I haven’t even thought about that. I dash for the bag I dumped in Josh’s hallway and scrabble for my phone. I’m back on the sofa when I try to call up the app, but it doesn’t show for me. Incognito mode or not, it doesn’t appear.

Josh calls up the app on his phone and I try my login details, but no. Profile not recognised.

The spread of panic races like wildfire through every cell of my body. I’m shaking. Quaking. Terrified. Ella searches for my profile page when she’s logged in on her version, but there is no sign of it, and all my forum posts have disappeared.

I’ve been kicked out of the Agency.

I have no profile. No proposals. No income. No Creamgirl.

And no Reuben.

Oh, fuck, how I scream. I scream and rock and lose my fucking mind, back like I was in the wreckage of the Kian aftermath. All alone, with nothing left.

My mind races through the four years of my career – so many accolades, and bonuses and regulars. So many reviews. So many clients who meant more to me than I ever figured, now that they’ve been taken away.

User 706 – abusing me in his cow farm, with my grazed knees dragging through cow dung as he pulled me along by my hair. Daddy – User 762 – spanking me after finding naughty notes in my schoolbook and scrubbing me clean in the bathtub. One of Ella’s favourites.

User 6978 – making me drink a whole stream of his piss without spilling a drop and rewarding me with an orgasm every time I managed it. User 1029 and his boyfriend – and some of the hottest DVP I’ve ever known.

Rough play, daddy play, watersports, roleplay, group sex, stretching, groping, chasing… even fucking radiator kinks and my kitty daddy.

All of it gone.

It hurts so much I have to race to Josh’s bathroom and throw up my carrot cake from earlier, and then I lie on the floor in the fetal position. My soul is screaming for everything that’s been lost.

But mainly it’s screaming for Reuben.

He’ll never be able to see me again. No fucking way.

They’ll never let him. They’ll cast me out of the city, and out of his life, and away from anything that could ever risk their identity.

“Calm down, Tiff,” Josh says as he and Ella join me, but I can’t. I don’t want to move or think or feel. All I can do is try to breathe.

“Maybe I can do something to help?” Ella says. “Drop a message to Orla, or…”

Her voice trails off. She knows as well as I do it’s pointless.

“Keep out of it,” I tell her. “It’ll only cause shit for you, too.”

That’s the last thing I want – to drag them into this muddy cesspit with me.

I hate myself.

I hate every stupid fucking bone in my body for ever daring to believe.

“You’re staying here tonight,” Josh says and hauls me to my feet. “We’ll take care of you, Tiff. We’ll go to your place and pack a case and set you up in the guest room.”

Ella nods. “Yeah, stay here. With us.”

She hasn’t got the same amount of alarm in her eyes as Josh has. His stare is more piercing, because he knows just how fucked up I got over Kian and losing the baby. He knew what was going through my mind to ease the pain. How close I was to breaking for good and ending it all.

I want to say I wish I’d never walked into the grotto, but I’d be lying. Just as I’d be lying if I said I wished that I’d never met Kian. Because even through the pain, they gave me so much life.

Everything else I’ve done since has been superficial. Fun, but meaningless. Happy, but empty.

“Come on,” Josh says. “Let’s go.”

I’m slinging my bag over my shoulder when my phone sounds out with a message.

My heart thumps, because it must be from Orla, making things official… with instructions on how I have to get away.

“I can’t face it,” I say and offer him my phone. “Can you look, please? I’m too scared.”

I suck in a breath as I prepare for the worst, because I might not be staying at Josh’s tonight after all. I might be staying far, far away.

“Sure, I’ll look,” he says.

I brace myself. What the fuck are they going to do to me? What the hell is going to happen now?

Josh’s eyes are like saucers when he’s checked out the message.

“It’s not Orla,” Josh says, and gives me back the phone. “It’s Reuben.”