Jones knocked on the door and, when he heard a murmur that sounded like 'come in', he did. He tried to breathe normally and not look so jittery because he knew he wasn't in trouble. Sasha was a bit intimidating but when she'd introduced herself to him on Saturday morning she'd been friendly enough. Her voice had been a bit sharp when talking to Dan, like she was annoyed with him about something, even when she was telling him about everything she'd done to discredit Jonatton, and Dan had just looked down at the cheap tabletop like he was being told off, which was all a bit confusing.

Jones had looked at them both and wondered, despite himself, whether they'd ever once... been together. There was something about the way they danced around each other, turning the air all muted, like morning smog, with the stuff they wouldn't say, Sasha searching for eye contact and Dan going out of his way to look anywhere else. It made him nervous. He'd never been with a girl, never even kissed one. He found them attractive and occasionally they worked their way into his dirty dreams, but he'd fallen in love with Dan pretty fast and pretty deep. And pretty young too. But Dan'd had girlfriends before and sometimes Jones wondered if he missed it.

Sasha wasn't really Jones' type. If he had to describe a type it'd probably be someone along the lines of TankGirl or Courtney Love, while for men it tended towards Kirk Cobain and Daniel Johns. And Dan. Sasha was beautiful but she was a bit too perfect for Jones. But maybe Dan liked that. Whenever the topic had come up, usually when they were messing about in bed and talking about what turned them on and Dan was drunk enough to actually talk about that sort of thing, he claimed that he only went for bookish people with thick, round glasses and tweed skirts and that Jones was a bizarre anomaly that he never wanted to try and analyse.

Sasha wasn't exactly bookish, but she was definitely something. She'd reminded Jones of a teacher he'd had once, who never had to raise her voice to keep the class under control. She could just look at you and you knew you were acting like a nob and that she couldn't be less impressed if she tried. Her voice wasn't a boom or a gun shot or a whip crack, it was the scraping of a blade along an alley wall before it was jabbed in the direction of your kidneys. But with a glossy smile and perfectly on point eye liner.

She'd invited both Dan and Jones to her new office, to fill them in on developments, as she'd called it, but Jones hadn't wanted to go. Just like with that teacher, Jones couldn't shake the feeling that Sasha had talked down to him, even though she was trying to be nice and show she was on his side, because she was just so much smarter than him and he was bound to not understand most of what she was saying.

It'd made him even more nervous about his shift at Stanley's and he'd been off the beat all day, though no one seemed to notice. In fact, he'd got nothing but hugs and reassuring smiles the whole day, which again, was supposed to make him feel better and instead just made his skin feel all prickly, like putting a scratchy woolen jumper on damp skin. But people had wanted to hug him, to reassure him, and to forgive him, he supposed, for keeping his relationship a secret for that many years. Fancy that, he'd thought at the time, needing to be forgiven for keeping his private life private, for not wanting to get beaten up for being a poof.

But hugs hadn't been the only thing he'd been given. Sveta, one of the colourists, had given him a big box of chocolates, and everyone else had bought him coffee. Six coffees, to be exact.

He'd been wired by the time he got home and dark purple sparks had been darting in front of his eyes like little warning bells. He hadn't eaten much breakfast, he'd been too nervous and Dan had been starving, so he'd let most of their beans and toast go to him, but he hadn't eaten lunch either, and didn't remember whether he'd eaten dinner the night before. It was all getting a bit fuzzy around the edges.

He'd had a hard time getting his key into the lock when he got home, cringing at the clicking scrapes of his key against the door, a sound he had associated for too long with Dan coming home pissed, and when he finally got in, he felt like he was about to cry and he didn't really know why. He'd drunk more coffee than this before, stayed up longer to keep the nightmares away before, gone longer without a decent meal, so why was he falling apart now? Dan needed him, regardless of what he said about feeling better in his mind, Dan still needed him - it was his turn for fucks sake! - and instead he felt like he was breaking apart. Like an old piece of birthday cake gone dry instead of soggy so it just fell apart in your hand when you tried to pick it up and then there were only crumbs left, clinging to your fingers like ants.

He'd stumbled to the kitchen, thinking maybe a drink of water would help, and had found Dan, making grilled cheese, with a look of intense concentration on his face. That had, for some reason, made Jones want to cry even more, and he crossed to the sink to drink directly from the tap, while Dan tutted at him like a proper old woman that they did still own some glasses, but Jones could tell he wasn't really cross. And when they sat down on the couch with the plate of grilled cheese - the toast cut into odd shapes where Dan'd sliced away the mold - wrapped in the blanket with his shoulder pressed to Dan's, he'd felt a lot better.

Dan'd held him and told him how Sasha was alright, even if she couldn't name her ten favourite bands because she just "wasn't that into music", and Dan'd shaken his head in despair, and things had been ok. He'd drifted over to his decks at around eleven, setting them back up the way he liked them, and fiddling around with old mixes as he watched Dan fall asleep. He'd been tempted to carry on through the night but went to the bathroom instead and rooted around until he found his sleeping pills.

One with water, that was all he ever took, then it was back down the hallway to the lounge room. He really, really wanted to cuddle up on Dan's sofa but part of him still didn't feel deserving of sleepy Dan cuddles so he curled up on the other sofa instead and closed his eyes, wishing that sleep would just hurry up already...

Jones felt a jolt as he was knocked out of the memory and back into the present. Sasha was gesturing for him to sit down. She was on the phone and she was smiling and she didn't look quite as scary today, she looked more excited than anything.

"Oh, that is so generous! Thank you so much... Yes... No, no I have, he's just this moment walked in to my office..."

She smiled again as Jones lowered himself into the chair, which was shaped like a giant hand and was really not comfortable. The office around them was scattered with boxes but Sasha had already made her mark on the space with photographs of people he assumed were her family. There was one that he found he couldn't stop looking at. A man and a woman were standing in front of a little terrace house, smiling like they couldn't image anything ever going wrong. The man, Sasha's dad, he supposes, had an arm around a snarky-looking teenager who could only be Sasha, while the woman, her mum, was trying to hold two tiny, cheeky girls still long enough to have their photo taken.

It made him smile even though it made him sad at the same time. It was an old photo but there weren't any others of the family all together and Jones wondered why that was. His brain had a habit of assuming that everyone had some sort of tragedy they were getting over. It made it easier to be nice, thinking that maybe they were working hard at being normal, the same as him. Unfortunately he'd discovered that some people (like Nathan Barley for one) were just spoilt children who didn't understand that they weren't entitled to whatever they wanted.

"... Yes, Mrs Ashcroft, of course I will..."

Jones perked up when he heard that name. He loved Dan's mum, she was a proper mum, he reckoned, and he really wanted to meet her one day, even if it meant going to Leeds. But the thought that she and Sasha were talking made him feel strangely anxious. He didn't like people talking about him, and he didn't really want Mrs Ashcroft knowing what'd been written about him, even if it wasn't true. He wanted her to think he was good enough to be going out with her son, not just some idiot kid who ended up the butt of a joke made by a trashy magazine.

"... I will tell him. Thank you again. Goodbye."

Sasha finished her call and put the receiver down with a satisfied breath. She smiled at Jones, and it was a genuinely excited smile too, the sort that made Jones smile along with her, even if he didn't know why they were supposed to be excited, but she didn't keep him waiting for long.

"Thank you for coming by, Jones," she told him, folding her hands neatly in front of her. "Dan's mum says hello, by the way. Couldn't he join you today?"

Jones looked at her perfect fingernails and slid his own hands between his thighs to hide his chipped and bitten nails from view.

"He didn't feel up to it, sorry," he replied, trying not to sound annoyed, because he wished Dan was here as well, instead of hiding in bed under the pretense that he'd overused his leg and needed the morning off before his doctor's appointment that afternoon.

"Hiding more like it," Sasha retorted and Jones huffed a small laugh through his nose, because she was right. "But I'm glad you're here," she continued. "I thought I should talk to you, because we've never really been introduced and Jonatton is flinging as many rumours around out there as he can, trying to take down the rest of us along with him as he burns. I'm sure he'll put out there at some point that Dan and I were involved or some such tripe, but I wanted you to know that it's not true. I wanted you to hear it from me that, yes, I was interested in Dan, but he never requited it."

Jones cleared his throat and looked down at the bracelets and beads that decorated his wrists, trying not to blush.

"I... don't actually know what that means, sorry."

"Oh," Sasha startled, blinking twice before regaining her composure. "Don't apologise! My dad used to say I spoke like a thesaurus, and my little sister calls me Hermione Granger to annoy me, it's my fault entirely."

Jones could tell she was smiling, her voice was warm and open, but he'd never been any good at telling whether people were taking the piss until it was too late, so he played it safe and kept his head down.

"Ok."

"Jones," she went on more gently. "What I meant was, Dan never showed me any interest in return. He and I worked together, occasionally we were at the same parties and things like that. I won't deny that he was the only person at SugarApe who I actually liked, and that I tried to indicate to him that I was single and interested. But," she paused, and Jones thought he hear a bit of melancholy creep into her tone. "We never did anything. You're a very lucky young man, Jones. Though, to be perfectly honest, Dan is probably a luckier man for having you."

Jones did look up then, and the sassiness of her expression made him think, bizarrely, of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

"Thanks," he told her and she nodded in return.

"You're welcome. I also wanted you and Dan to know that we've put in an official complain to the Media Complains Council and that as of this morning SugaRape has virtually no companies willing to pay for advertising and only thirty percent of the staff it had on Friday."

She stopped, as if waiting for a response, but all Jones could think to say was: "Oh."

"Oh, indeed," she said, raising one eyebrow at him in a conspiratorial manner. "But I can't take all the credit. Most of it, but not all. I heard from Rufus and Ned (though how they got my mobile number I do not wish to know) that they were joining the 'Revolution.' Just like DJ Jones told them to."

"Oh." Jones couldn't stop himself from grinning at that and Sasha's own smile stretched just as wide.

"They've left the magazine to start up their own little business and, despite the fact that they're insufferable, I hope they do well at it."

"What're they going to do?" Jones asked. Despite her slightly haughty way of holding herself, Sasha was an expert story teller.

"They're starting a 'Make-Your-Own-Meme' website," she told him drolly. "Because someone told them to work for themselves and not 'the corporation' and to do the thing they love most in life." She gave him a pointed look. "And apparently what they love most in the whole wide world is the improper use of Photoshop."

Jones squeezed his eyes shut to try and stop the laughter but it was no good. It bubbled out of him like lemonade from a bottle of that'd been dropped on concrete.

"I like you," he giggled and Sasha seemed to preen at the compliment.

"I'm glad. I worried you wouldn't. Because Jonatton had me research who you were. I thought he wanted to write a piece on you but... well, that wasn't really the case was it."

Jones' laughter fizzled out at that. Not because Sasha had unwittingly helped Yeah? but because he didn't like the thought of her worrying over whether Jones liked her, and because he hadn't liked her much, until just now.

"Will you get in trouble?"

Sasha gave him a strange look. It was the sort of look Dan gave him when Jones accidentally woke him during the night because he'd been thrashing about in his sleep in the grip of a nightmare. It wasn't an angry look. It was the sort of look that said: 'Aw...' and it never failed to make Jones embarrassed.

"No," she told him gently. "I won't get in trouble. Jonatton will though. Your boyfriend's mother is putting together a case of libel for the High Court." The sly grin was back on her face and Jones felt himself begin to blush at the fact that she had referred to his boyfriend. That was going to take time to get used to.

"Wow."

"What was that?"

"Um," Jones mumbled, twirling a lock of hair absently. "Boyfriend. Sounds weird. I've always just thought of him as... my Dan."

"That is incredibly sweet," Sasha murmured. "He really is a lucky man."

Jones felt himself get hot and itchy at those words. He was lucky to have Dan, not the other way round.

"Yours is good too," he said, trying to hide his smile.

"Indeed," Sasha agreed, shuffling some papers about on the desk. "He... he's trying very hard. I like him."

"You should tell him so," Jones said, standing and pulling his satchel back onto his shoulder. "He's well smitten."

"Perhaps," she said slowly.

Jones settled his headphones around his neck and looked down at the woman he'd thought was scary only half an hour ago and now reckoned wasn't that much different from him, just better at showing the world something they wanted to see, maybe.

"Thanks, Sasha," he said, offering his hand which she took in her own and shook firmly. "You're a good mate. I'll try to get Dan to come round and say hi, yeah?"

"Sure," she said softly, and Jones left the office with a grin on his face and a decent beat in his head.