Lofty stretched out, his back clicking, and pushed the blanket away from him a little as he reached out to grab his phone. He vaguely remembered it vibrating at some point near dawn, but had ignored it. Now though, he keyed in his password, but stopped for a moment when he saw a little number "1" hovering above the email icon.
He never got emails. Unless it was junk mail of course, in which case, good luck to whoever was trying to sell him double-glazing now. Despite that imagery, he couldn't quite push the nervous twisting in his stomach down, and he glanced up at the time. 10am.
Finally, the email app loaded up and Lofty looked back down at his phone, rubbing sleep from the corners of his eyes and yawning; there was one email in his inbox and it was from… Holby City Hospital.
Dylan sat up in bed suddenly, head thumping. He couldn't quite wrap his head around what he'd done the night before, and he had work in an hour. Until then, if he could distract Lofty from his email, he'd have time to delete the slot in theatre and it would be like nothing had ever happened.
He tried to reassure himself of the new plan as he dropped his feet over the edge of the bed and placed them deep in the shag rug between the wall and his bed.
Anger was all Lofty could feel: it was burning in his chest and boiling the tears that he trapped frozen in his throat. His body quaked and his palms sweated, but this felt different to ordinary panic – this felt like his mother killing his hamster, it felt like leaving Max when they'd sworn to live next door to one another until they were 18.
It felt like betrayal and he didn't even try to hold himself back as he threw his phone at the mirror above the mantelpiece where the fairy lights still sparkled.
"Pathetic!" He screamed at the top of his lungs, watching the crack as it crept down the shiny surface as a cause of his phone. Those fucking fairylights, he fumed as a hand reached out, grabbing the heated strands and tearing them from around the cracked mirror, before grabbing his phone from where it lay amidst the broken splinters of glass.
"Dylan!" Ben couldn't stop screaming and roaring in anger, but fell deadly silent as his father appeared, hair messy and pyjamas hanging awkwardly from his frame. "Dylan…"
"I'm so sorry Ben…"
"No you aren't" Lofty whispered in response, "If you were sorry…" He didn't know how to finish his sentence. There were so many things Dylan could have done differently, but the upset and anger ricocheting through Lofty's veins was too strong for him to word how he felt.
"Ben…" Dylan's voice was soft.
"Please just leave me alone" Lofty whispered in response, clenching his fists absentmindedly, despite the glittering flecks of glass embedded in his palm like grit-marks.
"I-I"
"Don't." Lofty's voice was a firm whisper and he stood stock still in the midst of the wreckage, where he waited until his father eventually made his way back to his room to get ready for work.
Dylan tried to ignore the guilt
His heart dropped, breaking all thought as he heard the bang of the front door and he yanked his trousers on, ignoring his pyjama shirt still half-buttoned around his stomach as he followed his son out. He only paused for a moment as he passed the door to the sitting room, revealing shattered crumbs of glass and burnt fairylights still decorating the carpet. David and him would have their work cut out getting the glass from the carpet that evening, he thought.
He had to run and find Ben before something bad happened to him; his legs shook as he too fled from the boat, adrenaline fuelling him into forgetting his appearance.
Tearstained and aching, Lofty emerged from the bathroom. His anger hadn't lasted, and now an overwhelming wave of lost trust drowned and backwashed over him – it only took a slam of a door to drain the last ounce of rage from his blood and now he wanted a hug and for someone to tell him it'd all be okay.
Softly, he knocked on Dylan's bedroom door, more than ready to apologise, and opened it slightly, wincing as it creaked loudly – he wasn't used to the amount of noise he'd made earlier.
His dad wasn't there.