Sophie Weston - The Bedroom Assignment

Zoe decided she was too alert to go to bed. She made herself some hot chocolate. Hot chocolate was Zoe’s long-term comfort drink. She had been brewing a lot of it lately.

She poured it into the heavy dragon-adorned mug her father had brought back from a trip. He had given it to her just before he’d told her he was moving out. It used to be a family joke: she got the things with dragons on them; Artemis had cats; Harry had crocodiles. No one had given Zoe anything with dragons on it since that day. She was glad.

She would have been quite glad if the dragon mug had been broken, but somehow it was too sturdy. Other mugs came into the house and got pushed off tables or dropped on the stone patio or trodden to dust when someone left them on the carpet after watching television. But solid old dragon just kept on going.

Seven years now. She had been sixteen then. That was why her parties always said, ‘Sixteen Again’. At sixteen she had turned into—what was it Suze called her? Little mother of all the world. Yes, that was it. At sixteen Zoe had turned into the household’s Responsible Adult. And she still was.

At least the thick dragons kept the drink warm. That was useful. The dawn had a chill to it.

Zoe went out onto the patio and sat down on the worn old bench. She held the mug under her chin, brooding.

Artemis was right when she said that Zoe never let a man take her out more than four times. Sometimes she did not let them take her out twice. They looked at her, saw her long legs and fashionably slim figure. They listened to her and heard a sharp tongue and a cool party girl with loads of friends. And nobody—nobody—saw that it was an act.

Responsible adult. Hot babe. Cool gal. The last virgin in the northern hemisphere.

‘What a mess,’ said Zoe wryly. She shivered, in spite of the hot drink between her hands.

Miss I Can Cope. That was what Suze had called her. She believed it, too. Zoe was not sure how. She knew that her family saw what they wanted to see. But how could her best friend be fooled?

Because you’re good at the performance.

Well, good enough. Up to a point. One day soon someone was going to find her out. She felt the chill touch her again. Maybe she had met him now.

She had so nearly given herself away tonight, with the way she had stared at the Mogul Prince. He had seen it, too. She knew he had. He had looked at her so hard that she’d thought he was going to be able to draw her. And his face had told her absolutely nothing.

Had he seen through her act? Had he?

No, she told herself. Of course he hadn’t. It had just been a trick of the disco ball lighting. And her own uneasy conscience, of course.

Heck, at one point it had even sounded as if he and Suze were play-acting. How was that for paranoia?

You’ve got to do something about that, she said to herself, as she had done so many times before. Stop performing. Tell someone.

But who? And how? And would they believe her, anyway?

The men in her life took their cue from her friends. And her friends knew that she was a sophisticated twenty-three-year-old with a cool life and a hot wardrobe. They even asked her advice about their love lives, for heaven’s sake. And Suze was forever asking her to look out for any social incompetents who turned up at her parties. Because Zoe knew all there was to know about men and the dating game. Didn’t she?

Not one of her friends would believe that twenty-year-old Artemis knew more about love than Zoe did. Heck, seventeen-year-old Harry probably knew more. And one day soon, if she did not tell them, she was going to trip up spectacularly over her half-lies and evasions.

Or she was going to get stuck in the performance. And she would be performing for the rest of her life. And not one soul would know her. Ever.

‘Aaaargh,’ she said aloud. And dashed the dragon mug on the weedy paved slabs.

It did not break.

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