On The Market Chapter 13 - Mac's Party, a pride and prejudice fanfic

Guy Fawkes' night saw Mac's return from his American odyssey. He was a little podgier than on his departure, his Mohawk a little shorter on top and longer on the sides: from a distance it might almost have passed for a normal haircut. And he had what he called a "whole new energy" about him, stemming from his reciprocated love for a dreadlocked modern dancer he'd met in Chicago.

Within minutes of him dumping his bags in the lounge he had shown them a picture of a white faced, brown eyed girl, and a cherished crumpled flier for a performance of 'Unsex me' by the New Millennium Dance Company. The girl was unexpectedly good looking and, given her profession, probably very limber as well. But when Elisabeth thought about it some more it did make sense: by US frat boy standards Mac was still not that podgy and his posh English accent, so out of keeping with his general appearance here, must have had all the girls swooning over there.

'…and then she said, han han han,' Elisabeth heard as she handed him the photo and flier back ' "'ave it large", like she was trying to sound like our drummer, but of course she didn't, and it was so funny...'

Elisabeth and Ben looked at each other. You probably had to be there.

'So did you get any sleep on the flight?' Elisabeth asked.

'Naa, we had to take it in turn watching Bam.'

It took her a while to match the dimly remembered face of the skin-headed guitarist to his nickname, while Mac carried on:

'They nearly turned him back at check in, he was sooooo plastered. He was sick, like, four times, han han, it was disgusting.'

'I see, well sounds like you might want to get some sleep before tonight then,' she said, and found herself poked in the ribs with the TV remote. Ah, so it was meant to be a surprise?

'So what time is it there now?' she asked rhetorically, looking at her watch, 'Ten o'clock, minus five, is it?'

'Minus six.'

'Right, so you can definitely catch a couple of hours' kip before you call her!'

'Man, I need a shower… See you later,' Mac replied, raising his mug to them as he headed out of the lounge. 'Thanks guys, I've looked forward to this cup of tea sooooo much!'

Ben and Elisabeth smiled at him, then at each other, proud parents on the return of their prodigal son.

'So it's a surprise?'

'Was,' Ben replied, and switched the kettle on.

She swam, she shopped, she laundered, she cleaned the kitchen before and after baking, and finally she revived a great New York tradition: the party nap. She went down at five and didn't get up again until she heard the first guests coming in and the music go on. Mac had taken the phone up to his room to call his girlfriend around four o'clock, and hadn't been seen since. In that time, Ben had cleared the lounge and three shelves of the fridge, walked to Morrisson's, walked back with a nicked trolley full of beer, and then duly returned the trolley. When she got into the lounge Bam, the skin-headed guitarist, was there with a petite redhead, presumably his girlfriend. The band's manager came in next, dumped the keys to the Moonbus onto the kitchen worktop and grabbed himself a beer. Elisabeth walked over to Ben and complimented him on his party planning.

'Should we go and get Mac?'

'Wait 'til more people are here.'

'OK. And by the way, by "we" I meant "you". I'm not going up there.'

'Yes,' he said, gravely: 'Relax, have a beer, Tom will be here soon.'

'Oh, cut it!'

She left him to go and get the door again. It was Bombshell and his incredibly pretty girlfriend. Elisabeth had no sooner dumped their coats than the doorbell went again, this time people she did not know, but instantly recognised as Mac's brother, who turned out to go by the happy moniker of Eddie, plus one, who reminded her of those salesgirls at the Coq D'Argent. She got herself a glass of water –ice and lemon, to fend off 'why aren't you drinking' questions- and carried on opening the door: the drummer with two blokes and a tall dreadlocked girl. Next came a whole gang - more friends of Ben and Mac's from their Oxford days. Then someone turned up the volume on the stereo, and Mac eventually emerged, wearing only his trunks and manky vest. He stood there a while, then gasped with pleasure, said 'Omygaaad' like a true American princess, and ran back up to get dressed.

Lily Cheng walked in just as Mac vanished again. Despite having been back for months she still affected a Manhattanite accent:

'Omygod, Elisabeth, thank goodness, izat-vodka? Canna have one!' she said while wriggling out of her white faux-fur coat in the tiny hall. 'Is Mark here?' she added in a theatre whisper.

Elisabeth had no idea who Mark might be, but if Lily was still a fraction as promiscuous as she'd been at college then these days she was probably cheating on one half of the room with the other half –girls included. Hence it was fair to assume that, whoever Mark was, Lily deserved to be made to think that he was indeed around tonight. Elisabeth decided this was as good a time as any to experiment with Will's name-dropping technique:

'Mark? I think I saw him talk to Bam's girlfriend, yes, why, is that a problem?'

'I need to mak'a call? Canna go d'y'r room?' Lily asked, and went without waiting for the answer.

Elisabeth set herself to rifling through the kitchen for some vodka, and in the end found half a bottle left at the back of a cupboard. She poured some over lots of ice, figuring Lily was man enough to have it neat, since Ben had not catered for girlie mixers. Lily got back a moment later and grabbed her glass.

'Wow, thanks!' she said after a greedy gulp.

Elisabeth nodded and shoved what was left of the bottle into the freezer.

'So how are you, darlin'? 'sbeen awhile.'

'OK, thanks, yeah, you?'

'How's your love life?'

None of your business, thought Elisabeth.

'You caught any of these guys yet?' Lily asked, circling her glass-holding index finger around the room. Elisabeth shook her head with an indifferent pout at the floor.

'Not your scene?'

Something made Elisabeth look up then, and she found that Tom had got in, and stood in the doorframe his bright eyes all over her. She looked back at the carpet, stupidly pleased with herself, but Lily had found time to turn around, wave at Tom and turn back to Elisabeth, and she hadn't missed a beat.

'Yes, that makes sense,' she said, nodding her head. 'You like him too, right?'

'What do you mean I like him too?'

'He's alright. He likes you.'

A horrible thought flashed through Elisabeth's mind: all those nobodies that Tom and Sara had never not been unfaithful to, with each other – could they include Lily? She frowned, and a loud cheer erupted as Mac re-entered the room, fully dressed:

'Is that Mac? Ohmagod he's got even fatter!'

You want to be saying this a bit louder, thought Elisabeth. They were standing across the line between the kitchen's lino and the lounge's carpet, Elisabeth on the lino looking into the room, Lily facing the kitchen. Lily lit up, and offered her a Marlborough Light. She accepted it, grateful for something to do other than keep checking whether Tom was going to come her way, which he wasn't. She lit her fag on Lily's, and when she looked up she found that Tom was staring at her, this time from a couple of yards away, over the front of Bombshell's head and the back of Lily's. She didn't look down, but gave him a friendly wave and a smile, both of which were returned, before he went back to talking to his friend.

OK, play it cool if that's what you like, she thought, and gave a little shrug before looking back down at Lily.

'And how's work?' Lily asked.

'All right. Interesting. Steep learning curve, these days.'

'I know, Will was saying.'

'What?' she cried before she realised that, surely, she must have jumped to the wrong conclusion. She took a drag to steady herself, but she had forgotten that she'd stopped smoking so it sent her into a coughing fit instead. When it passed she was able to ask, a fraction more calmly:

'Sorry, what Will were you talking about?'

'Will Kingsley. You know…' Lily raised her eyebrows then blew smoke over her shoulder.

'Too right, I do,' Elisabeth said, peering through the smoke at Lily's flat, moon-round face. 'Lily, is there anyone but anyone that you don't know?'

'Oh no, it's just he used to row with this guy I'm sort of seeing, we all went out a couple of times.'

'I see. Good for you,' she said with a curt nod and pursed lips. Lily smiled and started again with a knowing look:

'I knew he meant you as soon as he said he'd interviewed with some scary French bird with glasses.'

'Great. You don't actually have to tell me this, you know.'

' 'said you were all right, actually.'

'I'm sure he was being polite.'

'Oh no, that's right: he said you were great entertainment value.'

Entertainment value?

'I'm pretty sure he meant it as a compliment.'

'Really? Well that's the worst part.'

Elisabeth remembered to stop halfway through taking her cigarette back to her lips. She let her hand drop back down: entertainment value? Seriously? Patronising git. Entertainment value? Was that what he called getting those servers off of the UNIX team in the middle of an IT freeze? Was decrypting the bloody Reuters feed for level-two order book data what he called "entertainment value"? She was frowning into the mid distance, damning Willy Wanker and all his fellow male chauvinistic pigs to hell eternal when Tom caught her eye, raised a quizzical eyebrow, blew smoke at the ceiling and gave her a smile.

'Well, I suppose that's just like him,' Elisabeth said. She wasn't at all sure who she was talking about anymore, but she did know this: that she wanted to discuss neither Will nor Tom with Lily Cheng.

'So tell me,' she said, 'Who's this guy you're "sort of seeing"?'

'Dean?'

'Dean, that's unusual.'

Why was it ringing a bell? Nothing came to her:

'So anyway, what's he like?' she asked.

'Dishy. They both are, actually, aren't they?'

'I've never met Dean and somehow I don't look at Will that way.'

'Dean's fair though. You know how I like that.'

Elisabeth had no idea and cared even less.

'Point is, these guys look after themselves, knowaddamean? They dress properly, they exercise. Not like this lot,' Lily added with a dismissive nod back at the unkempt crowd behind her.

Elisabeth knew exactly what Lily meant: in practice, she meant that going for a run or to the gym was what they simply had to do whenever they didn't want to talk about data vendors with scary French birds with glasses. She felt she had to mount a riposte on behalf of the rest of the room:

'Ben plays footy two nights a week.'

'I know. He's cute! Do you like him?'

'Who cares? How did you meet this Dean guy then?'

'At the screening of this short I wrote you about.'

Elisabeth remembered an email inviting her, along with half of London, somewhere trendy in Islington. She'd figured she wouldn't be missed.

'His brother's one of the VCs behind the production company,' Lily said.

Brother a venture capitalist, financing poncey films, rower, friend of Will's: she loved this Dean guy already. Not.

'So what does he do?'

'He's at this hedge fund in equities... or is it arbitrage? Global… something or other.'

Ping! went the penny as it dropped, and with a twist of revulsion Elisabeth's mind relived that awful meeting with Will and Toad. Dean: unusual name indeed. Lily was "sort of seeing" Will's go-to friend for the purposes of corporate storytelling. Given the fact he'd suggested she used Charlotte to do the same, they must be thick as thieves. If that was the case then this Dean, whoever he was, probably deserved all he was about to get for "sort of seeing" Lily Cheng but still, it was awkward.

And now Elisabeth's cigarette was out and there was no prop for her to use to regain her countenance, so of course now was also the precise moment Tom chose to check her out again. Bother.

'So are you guys serious?' Elisabeth asked, raising her eyebrows and inclining her head, as she imagined someone might do, who gave a monkey's.

'Naaa…' Lily shook her head, drawing the corners of her mouth down. 'Slept with him a couple of times. Nice enough guy, loaded...'

'Sure,' Elisabeth nodded, as if this kind of stuff happened to her all the time. 'Would you excuse me for a minute?' she said, and took off for the loo without waiting for an answer.

The one off the corridor was busy, so she went to her room. She gathered herself for a minute, and dumped her sweater on the futon. Either the animal heat in the lounge had risen fast, or it was just Lily's choice of conversation and Tom's flirty glances, but she was boiling. She washed her hands, splashed her face and realised that, luckily, it looked less drawn since the nap. She took a deep breath and pushed up the sleeves of her top, and heard the faint mournful chords of "Baby bitch" coming from across the wall. Nice song, yep, pretty much summed Lily up. Like most truly doleful numbers it actually made Elisabeth smile, so she gave herself a friendly slap on the cheek and got out again, through her room and into the corridor, humming 'baby, baby, baby bitch' until lost in thoughts she bumped into something by the lounge door. It took an unquantifiable moment for her to realise that the thing was Tom, that she had her back to the wall, and that he was holding the sides of her head so tight he was hurting her where the branches of her glasses dug into her temples, and straining her neck up to kiss her.

He was kissing her a lot. Breathlessly. One big hungry mouth he had, his lips cold from his last beer bottle, his chest burning and thumping against hers. Her own hands found their way up to the sides of his neck, and with the tips of her fingers she felt the stubbly skin around his jaw line. There was a flash of light as the door opened from the lounge. "Baby Bitch" got louder, and a space opened in front of her face as he turned away to look at – was it Ben's face? She couldn't be sure. The figure backed out and the door closed. First Tom's chest then his arms peeled away, and then he disappeared altogether.

Elisabeth leant her head back against the corridor wall, gasping for air, praying that whoever it was wouldn't open that door again just yet. Pebbles were dropping to the pit of her stomach, rolling turning and grinding. She closed her eyes and felt her lips tingle, and waited for her breathing to settle. The flash of light and song returned and she turned to face it, and walked back into the lounge.

In the brighter light of the room she wondered which one of these faces would now be staring at her with greedy curiosity, or whether just everyone could guess. Tom was already standing way back near the window, talking to Lily and Ben. Perhaps he too looked a bit absent. She made for the kitchen, keeping her eyes down. What now? Get Mac going on about his new girlfriend to pass the time? Or would Tom perhaps, just perhaps, come over and talk about it this time? She looked his way again. Nope? OK, fair enough.

She tried Mac, who did indeed kill a good half hour, and what was left of Elisabeth's will to live.

'She'll be done after the New Year's Eve performance, and she's already looking for jobs over here. We've started sending her resume,' he said in fluent American. Whatever. Someone changed the music to something she recognised from that last gig they'd been to and it made her smile, though under her ribs rocks were still tumbling in a backwash of anxiety. A smoke was handed to Mac and she grabbed it from him before he could take a drag. It was good and green, grassy, and started rasping on her tongue before she'd had time to exhale. She took another two greedy puffs, closed her eyes and kept it in as long as she could, then handed the rollie back to Mac and exhaled, waiting for her lips to stop tingling with memories. At least Mac had stopped talking, that was a result. He looked surprised, so it couldn't have been him in the sudden flash of light at the door. Her stomach constricted further, and jagged painfully.

'Excuse me a minute,' she said, making for the kitchen, and checking the clock above the oven. Tom had been stood there chatting to Ben and Lily for almost forty minutes. She tipped her now tepid water into the sink and waited for the drummer to clear away from the fridge door. She opened the freezer: Lily hadn't finished the vodka, good. She poured herself a full glass, shaking the last drops out of the bottle. She stared at the glass for a minute with her back turned to the room, then squeezed her eyes shut, tilted her head back and downed it. It scorched its way down to her stomach and made the rocks there burn and grate as they turned. Then she drank two more glasses of water, filled up a third and walked straight up to Tom.

Half an hour after that she glimpsed at the time on the alarm clock next to her futon. Tom's chest was still burning hot but this time hers was too, and the air around them was cooler than it had felt in the corridor. His hands were not clasping quite so hard around her head, they were rummaging through her hair and she occasionally had to take her hands off him to push strands back and away from their mouths. His hair was prickly where it was shorter at the top of his neck, and damp with sweat where it was longer towards the forehead. His lips left her mouth to burrow into her neck and she let her head drop to one side and stroked his hair back over his head. She pulled him closer to her, running her fingers under his collar between his shoulder blades, making him shudder. His skin, like his hair, was damp. It felt a little coarse under her fingers. His head came back up and searched for her mouth again. She smiled and reached for his. They parted again, and he stared at her, still holding on to the sides of her head.

'Let's take our shoes off, you've pulled,' he announced with mock solemnity. His voice broke in the middle. She smiled again, but the smile left her with his hands, and they both sat on the side of her low bed, pulling at the laces of their matching DM boots. He finished first and yanked at her left shoe, laughing a beautiful boyish laugh as he dumped it with flourish onto a heap with his, then threw her discarded sweater on top.

Outside the room doors closed and opened, and the lounge's noises ebbed and flowed as they did. Elisabeth got up to turn the key in her lock, glanced at the pile of boots and thought, disturbingly, about a photo on the fridge in the old flat, of hers and Mike's in a similar heap at the top of Helvellyn on a beautiful, long gone summer's day. Tom too was staring at the shoes, and she tried not to think whose DMs he was thinking about. She sat back next to him at the foot of the bed and this time she had to make a much more conscious decision to put her arm around his waist.

Her hand started furling up the bottom of his shirt, looking for skin. He turned and pulled them both down onto the hard bed. They winced, they giggled, and then they went back to kissing, and to taking each other's tops off for the first time, which was excellent fun, so she took her time over it. Their tops were halfway up their torsoes, their tummies too skinny to touch, hers soft under his wandering hands, a thin crest of jet-black hair running tantalisingly down his. Their belts kept digging into their hipbones as they tried to get even closer. She helped him undo her bra, and gasped when his cold hand touched her breast. He smiled hungrily and buried his head in her neck with a moan. She bit her bottom lip, ignored a lurch of her stomach and snuck a hand under the waist of his boxers.

Fifteen minutes later he was sitting on the sill of the French doors with his long bare back turned to her, staring at his wiggling toes and smoking, his jeans pulled up but not buttoned. He was on his third fag: this was how long she'd had her head down the toilet.

She'd started retching after only a couple of forgettable thrusts, and disappeared as soon as he'd finished which, luckily, had taken barely another minute. Now she put a t-shirt on and came to kneel behind him, and placed a hand on the back of his head.

'You OK?' she asked.

He didn't move. He didn't say anything. The door was too narrow for two to sit there, and embracing his sunken chest was awkward, but she tried. It was freezing. Soon she begun to shiver, and let go.

An hour later he was sleeping face down on her bed, half naked, and she was wondering whether her stomach would hold out now, or whether she'd have to go and puke out yet more of her stony gut. Her last drink of water had come right back out, and the fevered rumble in her now empty stomach was incredibly painful. But my, he was beautiful. She could still hear some music next door, someone had got a guitar out; there was laughter.

At four o'clock she opened an eye and realised she must have slept after all. She also realised that it hadn't been a dream: Tom was here. She smiled as she saw his outline next to her under the duvet. She rolled over and pressed her achy, crampy tummy to his warm flank. It felt better, but soon he rolled over to his side, his back to her, with a sleepy grunt. Her hands were ice cold and she didn't dare touch him, though he was so temptingly warm.

Her mind went back to the picture of him earlier on the windowsill. What or who had he been thinking of? Like too many women in love, Elisabeth started painting her own paranoid thoughts inside her lover's head. She had disappointed him. In fact it was a miracle she hadn't put him off altogether, and there was no possible doubt in her mind that the moment he'd turned over and she'd disappeared into the loo his thoughts must have returned to his mythical, perfect, unavailable Sara.

At 7:30am she woke again, and again was surprised that she'd managed to sleep. There was no one beside her now, and she lay for a while thinking hard whether Tom had ever really been there. In the end she had to drag herself out of bed and check the windowsill. There were a bunch of fag-butts there, so perhaps it hadn't been a dream. She pulled her jeans on and went into the lounge. A couple of bodies were asleep there, but Tom was nowhere to be seen. What now? She needed food or she was going to pass out. She found some bread and took a heap of marmalade toast back to her room. She was asleep again after three bites, and finished her breakfast in bed a couple of hours later when she woke up again. Then she had a shower and headed back to the lounge, still hoping she might find Tom there.

xxx

She knew something was wrong the moment she pushed the door from the corridor. Ben and Mac looked first at her, then, ominously, at each other. They explained as gently as they could that Tom was by now on an aeroplane on its way to Tallinn, Estonia, where he would be working through to Christmas.

They were 100% British about it, in the nicest possible way: Mac looked down at his feet when he spoke and cleared his throat a lot, while Ben faced the cooker throughout, concluding Mac's speech by presenting her with a perfect cup of steaming black coffee. In the circumstances, she couldn't have asked for more.

Past the initial shock she wasn't actually that surprised. This was classic Tom: he'd told her all about his Finnish colleague's dietary habits, and nothing about his job. He'd spoken much about Sara without giving away anything of substance. And he'd told her plenty about their fantasy trip to Hawaii, but nothing about this real one. It was Tom's way: without material needs to fulfil he had probably never needed to plan around anything or anyone in his life, nor indeed to clog up his elegant mind with "busy nothings" such as work trips to Estonia.

The more she thought about it, the more Elisabeth saw reasons to take heart. First and best of all, she now knew what he'd been hiding, out on her windowsill. There was a good chance that their first shag, short as it had been, had given him dark thoughts not about Sara, but about Tallinn. Wasn't that just as likely, yet a lot less threatening? There was also a good chance that this trip was why he'd not made a proper move on her earlier. There was an excellent chance, in fact, that he'd been planning on saving it until the New Year. In hindsight that might have been a better idea all around but then hindsight, as every quant knows, is a wonderful thing.

Besides, even by Sunday evening, Saturday night still did not feel quite real. She'd either forgotten or not consciously experienced much of it. Perhaps that was best: after so many weeks of tension, build up and first class flirting the sex would have had to be out of this world not to come as a bit of an anti-climax. She couldn't even say whether what they'd done really qualified as a shag. But she was pretty sure that it was something which, the morning after, would have required either an awkward chat, or an enthusiastic re-match. And now she'd have to wait until the New Year to find out which. Good job then that where Tom was concerned she was if anything too well versed in self-restraint by now.

xxx

It was however unfortunate for Paul Delanoé, Pimms identifier PD01, that he'd chosen the following Monday to join the bank. He must have thought his new boss incapable of focus as she kept abandoning him to go and check her emails, and for the first two days kept returning with nothing but loud sighs.

Paul looked all prim and preppy in beige chinos and a light blue Oxford shirt. According to his CV he was three years older and about ten times more intelligent than Elisabeth. He'd spent three years playing with Europe's largest particle accelerator, then the next two at MIT in Boston. He seemed really cuddly, for a particle physicist. Babyish, even. Perhaps it was the French schoolboy haircut, thick and smooth with a very neat left side parting. Perhaps it was the flawless skin and the close shave. Most likely it was all of those, plus his very un-British habit of smiling a lot.

By day three Elisabeth knew that she was in the presence of programming genius: Paul had not only finished installing the US code on the new UK machine, he had also installed tradePad's software and managed to get it to open up. As he did so he let out a small shriek of entirely justified excitement, nonetheless eyebrows all over the desk started to migrate North en masse.

Paul seemed to spend a lot of time on the phone, talking in a strange voice. Elisabeth knew that people could sound different in different languages: apparently she, for instance, was less shrill in English than in French. But Paul's high-pitched cry was weird even taking linguistics into account. Then at 11 o'clock there was a delivery for him, of pink-blush lilies.

No one dared ask, but the word GAY was on everyone's mind. Especially as he'd chosen that day to wear a pastel pink shirt. And he was so happy about his flowers that his voice went up an extra pitch when he next spoke French on the phone.

By far the best thing about it was how hard Andy had to try not to ogle him over the top of Newbie's head when Paul went on like that. As for Elisabeth, she had quit wondering on day one, when over lunch Paul had told her far more than she wanted to hear about his boyfriend in Paris. They'd been together for five years and had a thoroughbred greyhound called Cher. Now that quarantine laws had been relaxed, Cher and the boyfriend would soon be moving to London (cue photo of a skinny greying man and matching grey dog, in matching studded leather collars). It was going to be great because people were so much more open minded here. Ah yes, she thought, perhaps down the Admiral Duncan in Soho on a Friday night, but around this trading desk?

Since he'd done such a great job she sent Paul home early and the minute he'd left all the traders turned to her with eager eyes. She pretended not to notice and started to ask Neil about an expensive trade in British American Tobacco in the week's transaction cost report. Andy logged off for the day, put his coat on, and cleared his throat:

'So, Lizzie, is he, or what?'

'Is who? What?'

'Well, Paul!' said Newbie.

'Is he what? French? Yes, definitely.'

'Is that what they call it these days?' Will cracked next to her, and the boys all duly laughed. She had to bite her lip not to follow suit, and was not at all sure she could carry on pretending not to get it. But there was fun in trying:

'Well, you know, I'm just not sure. He hasn't said anything, but I think you might be right.'

The boys looked at each other: they weren't buying it, but nor could they press her further.

'Why don't you ask him if you're not sure?' she said to Andy. 'But in the meantime, you guys might want to watch your mouths a bit, just in case.'

Andy grumbled something and took off.

'Oh, and watch your emails too, Will. Just so you know, Paul has been added to the 'UK Equity Trading' distribution list.'

She watched Will frown and turn back to his screens, then turning to hers she saw it, topping a very good day already, Tom's first despatch from Estonia:

From: Tom Reilly

To: Elisabeth R Bennet

Subject: Dispatches from the hell side.

Sent: Wed, 10/11/2009 20:23

For four days I've been wondering whether you are feeling better, and whether I really could have been so underwhelming that shagging me literally made you sick? You might as well tell me, it's hell out here without you anyway.

From: Elisabeth R Bennet

To: Tom Reilly

Subject: Dispatches from the buy side.

Sent: Wed, 10/11/2009 17:25

It wasn't you, it was the vodka! And perhaps Mac's weed too, a little bit. Anyway, now you'll never try and get me pissed ever again.

But I'm fine now, thank you. Much better than fine for reading you. So hang in there and then please please get back here, I miss you too.

All of a sudden life was looking great again.