Page 11 of One Last Try (Try for Love #1)

Mathias

Two more days of training pass by, and two more days of pretending I’m not simping over Owen Bosley’s fucking cooking. Takeaway is just not scratching this itch, and I have yet to figure out how the AGA oven in this ancient cottage works.

Tonight I have Indian food for the third time in a week. Chicken jalfrezi, rice, two lots of sag aloo, garlic naan, and a can of Coke. Flick, my new team nutritionist, is going to give herself a pulmonary when she finds out.

I tidy up the kitchen, wash out the takeaway containers, drop them into the recycling bin, and head to bed.

I spare one last look at Owen’s pub. It’s gone midnight, and downstairs is quiet, dark, but the lights are on in the flat upstairs.

I can’t immediately spot him—perhaps he’s in the bathroom—but there’s an open laptop on the coffee table and papers litter the sofa.

I don’t wait for him to come back into the room before I switch off my own light and sink down onto the mattress.

What feels like only moments later, a crashing sound echoes throughout the cottage.

It’s coming from outside. I jolt up in bed, and peer out the window into the street below, expecting to see a fox, or a cat, or even a drunken person falling into my bins, but nothing.

Everything is quiet. The light’s still on in Owen’s flat.

He’s there, hunched over his laptop. The TV looks as though it’s been forgotten about and waits on the “Are you still watching?” screen.

I grab my phone and glance at the time—three fourteen a.m. I blink. My sleep-addled brain can’t make any sense of it, but I have training tomorrow and I can’t afford to spare the minutes to work it out.

I’m just about to sag back down into the bed when I hear the sound again. It’s a weird sound—hollow, echoing—like a gong or metal reverberating or like . . . someone crashing into a cast iron bath tub.

My cast iron bath tub.

Holy shit, they’re inside the house.

I’m out of bed in a second, the covers thrown off me, adrenaline whisking away the last of my sleep haze. Now I’m in pure fight mode.

Someone has broken into my house and is in my bathroom right now. Fuck knows what they think they’ll find in there. I don’t keep any medications around. No painkillers stronger than paracetamol and Deep Heat.

The burglar moans loudly. Wait, why? It’s a guttural, masculine cry, and immediately after, they pour something into the toilet. Whatever it is splashes, thunders like a waterfall. It sounds like liquid being poured from a great height. Sounds like . . .

Fuck’s sake, the burglar is throwing up in my toilet.

I yank the door open—they’ve forgotten to lock it—and raise my fist in case I need to strike out .

The first thing to greet me is the sweet stinking cocktail of booze, stomach acid, and partially digested food.

A man whimpers. He’s slumped over the bowl like there are no bones in his body, like he’s made of liquid.

He’s wearing all black, and he’s my height, maybe even taller.

He’s muscular, a gym bro. His black hair sticks out at every angle, and I falter.

He lifts his head towards the door and swings unfocused black eyes towards me. I drop my fist, because despite his size he’s not so much a man, more like . . . just a kid. The newcomer can’t be any older than twenty, surely. Just a silly drunken kid who has somehow found his way inside my house.

“Oh my fuck,” he says, his dark eyes widening. “You’re Mathias fucking Jones.” And then he leans over the bowl again and another fresh wave of vomit splatters the porcelain.

I’ve never been in this situation before and I haven’t got a clue what to do.

On the one hand, a young man has broken into my house and is redecorating my toilet bowl, but on the other, he’s only a kid.

Judging by his Ralph Lauren boxers I can see peeking over the waistband of his trousers, and his polished .

. . Givenchy—fuck me—Chelsea boots abandoned by the bath tub, this kid isn’t exactly in need of a place to crash.

He probably has his own mansion with a plethora of toilets to vom in. So why’s he here?

I haven’t been downstairs yet. Presumably he’s broken a window or kicked in the door and I’d slept through the noise . . .

That doesn’t seem right. I’m a light sleeper.

Part of me wants to investigate, figure out the extent of the damage, and another part of me doesn’t want to let him out of my sight.

What if he tries to follow me? What if he throws up all down the stairs?

Man, I would find this motherfucker’s parents so fast and force the cleaning bill on them.

“How’d you get in?” I ask.

My mystery spewer ignores me. Instead he hugs the bowl tighter.

I prod his knee with my bare foot. “Answer my question. Did you break a window?”

He swivels one eye in my direction, grunts like a darted wild animal whose tranquillisers are beginning to kick in, and then folds onto the bathroom floor, curling around the base of the toilet in a foetal position. Just like that, he’s unconscious. As quickly as snapping my fingers.

I flick my gaze between the screen of my phone and the passed-out puker, not knowing who to call.

The police? Do I call the police? How long would it take them to get out here in the middle of the sticks?

Would they blue light it? Or would I be expected to wait around for hours before anyone shows up?

And what would they even do with him? Probably bundle him into a cell to sleep it off.

I could call Simone and ask her advice, or call Dan, but we don’t have that kind of friendship, and honestly, we likely never will.

It’s also gone three in the morning and I doubt either would want to hear from me.

It’s media day tomorrow, so it’ll be one of those days where everyone is super, super busy waiting around doing nothing.

Okay, this kid must have parents, or a guardian, or some form of adult who cares about him.

Somebody must have paid for those Hugo Boss jeans and that .

. . I peer down at the tiny badge on his breast pocket, tilt my head to make it out .

. . Tommy Hilfiger shirt. No twenty-year-old is making that kind of money on their own, unless he’s one of those Minecraft YouTubers.

Or maybe he has an OnlyFans for his feet.

And now that his face is visible, I see he’s twenty at most . Either that or his skin care routine is as spenny as his boots.

This dipshit must have a phone on him, or a wallet with ID. I prod him again with my foot—no way I’m going in there with my bare hands. This time it shunts him hard enough to knock his forehead against the porcelain. I don’t laugh at him, that would be mean, but I don’t not laugh.

“Come on, kid, wake up. I need to call your parents or some shit.”

I kick him again. His head thunks against the bowl.

And then someone moans. Not me, not my mysterious barfer. A third person. The voice is feminine, and I realise this asshole brought his drunk fucking girlfriend with him too.

Now I’m pissed .

“Lan?” she whines, or at least I think that’s what she says. “Where are you?” There’s something vaguely familiar about the cadence of her voice.

The sound came from the spare room, so I leave the unconscious idiot on the bathroom tiles and dash across the hall.

She’s face down on one of the kids’ beds, heels still on her feet, sparkling black dress so high up her bare thighs I can almost see her knickers, and a neon-pink borg fleece jacket still on.

She must hear me enter the room because she lifts her head, blonde hair falling like swathes of silk over her face, obscuring her identity for a moment.

But then she spots me, recognises me, and bolts up into a sitting position.

She pulls the hem of her dress down and just blinks at me, looking as though she might join her boyfriend in his puking party.

Daisy fucking Bosley is in my spare bedroom, drunk as fuck.

“Where’s Dad?” she says. “Where’s Lando?”

Before I can even answer her question, she’s clutching her face and groaning. She shimmies back down on top of the covers. “Don’t tell my dad about this, okay?” And then she’s closing her eyes and whining like an injured animal.

Fuck that. I’m not being told what to do by a teenager. I make my way downstairs, already googling the landline for The Little Thatch. Thank fuck Owen was still awake when I last looked out my window.

There are two abandoned pizza boxes in the hall next to the porch, a couple of pizza bones have escaped their confinements and are scattered across the welcome mat, distressingly close to my selection of “everyday” trainers.

The front door is wide open, but otherwise there’s no sign of breaking and entering.

I pick up the crusts, drop them back into the box, and take the boxes to the kitchen for disposal tomorrow as I locate The Little Thatch, Mudford-upon-Hooke, on Google and hit the telephone icon. A mobile number appears on the screen.

It’s ringing. Owen doesn’t answer my first call attempt. Nor the second. I stand in the open front door and watch his pub for any sign he hears the calls. Maybe the phone’s on silent. I try again, and I’m just about to tug on some shoes and march over when he answers .

“Hello?” He’s panting, out of breath, which probably has more to do with the adrenaline rush of receiving three calls from an unknown number at three a.m. than running downstairs to collect the phone.

“Hi, Owen, it’s Mathias. Mathias Jones,” I say.

There’s silence on his end. I’m certain he’s holding his breath.

“I wanted to let you know your daughter is drunk and passed out—”

“Oh my god, where are you? Is she okay?” I hear the tinkling of keys, like he’s ready to drop everything to come get her.

“She’s here at the cottage, asleep in . . . her old bed. She seems to be fine. Can’t say the same about her boyfriend, though.”

“Her boyfriend?” The absolute confusion in his voice is clear, and my heart flips over in my chest.

Fuck, this is why the pair came here instead of going to Owen’s. What if she’s not allowed to see this boy and I’ve just thrown her under the bus?

“Don’t tell my dad about this, okay?”

Damn. Well, I’m not cleaning up this mess on my own.

“Uh, yeah . . . some kid named Lando . . . or something like that.”

Owen laughs. “Oh, okay, Lando’s . . . her best friend, not her boyfriend. I’m coming over now.”

Before he finishes his sentence, I see his silhouette slip out of the pub’s side entrance, and he’s jogging across the street. His shoelaces are undone. They flap around his ankles as he runs.

His eyes go wide as he spots me waiting in the porch.

He slows, laughs. “Um . . .” Laughs again.

“I’m sure you’re fully aware of this, but .

. . um . . .” Owen indicates towards the entirety of me, and I can’t be certain under the soft glow of the street lamp and the light spilling out of the cottage, but it looks like he’s blushing.

And then I glance down and remember I forgot to pull on sweatpants before I stormed the bathroom, and I’m standing in full view of Owen Bosley in only my Glastonbury 2017 T-shirt and my underpants.