Killing Cupid Read Online Free PDF Page A

thought I might bump into her. I didn’t.
    When I got home, I knocked on Simon’s door.
    ‘Enter at your own risk.’
    I went in. The room stank of dope and sex. No sign of Natalie. Simon was on his iMac, looking at porn on the Web. The girl on the screen looked very young; I had to look away.
    ‘Did anyone call for me?’ I asked.
    He reached for his cigarettes and lit up.
    'Yeah...actually, some chick did ring.’
    ‘What? When?’
    ‘Yesterday afternoon when you were at work.’
    ‘What did she say?’
    He grinned. ‘She asked if I wanted to save money on my gas bill.’
    ‘You git.’
    ‘She was nice, actually. Maybe I could have fixed you up on a blind date.’ He laughed and coughed simultaneously.
    In my mind, I grabbed hold of his stupid, grinning head and shoved it through the screen of his computer. In reality, I just muttered, ‘Arsehole,’ and left the room.
    ‘Don’t get eggy, Alex,’ he called after me. ‘It was only a joke.’
    I came into my room and slammed the door. Then I turned on my own PC, staring at the flickering screen while it booted up, the hard disk grinding away. I could see my reflection in the monitor screen. My hair was all over the place and my eyes looked puffy. I needed a bath.
    But if the phone rang while I was in there . . .
    I logged onto Facebook and typed Siobhan's name into the search bar. There were five Siobhan McGowan's in the UK, plus some more in Ireland and a page full in the States. Two of them were listed as living in London on the search results. Of those two, one had a picture of a baby as their profile picture; the other had a picture of a cat.
    Siobhan doesn't have a baby - but I remembered her telling us she had a cat when she first introduced herself to the class. I clicked through. Because her privacy settings were preventing me from seeing her full profile, I was only able to see a small amount of information, including the fact that she had 82 friends. Twice as many as me. I scanned the list. None of the others from class were on there.
    My mouse cursor hovered over the 'Add as friend' button. Should I do it? Why not. After all, we were friends, weren't we? Certainly better friends than half of the people I have listed as friends, most of whom are colleagues or people I haven't seen or wanted to see since I left school.
    I clicked the button then had a tremulous little daydream about how long it would be before I saw the words 'In a relationship with Alex Parkinson' appear on her page.
    Then I hovered over the 'Poke' button but thought that was taking things a bit too far.
    For the next two hours I refreshed the page repeatedly. I learned that one of my 'friends' was bored, that another had a cold, and that one of them had just finished watching the second series of Prison Break on box set. But Siobhan hadn't yet confirmed me as a friend. I checked Twitter but all I found was an account in the name Siobhan MacGowan with a single tweet that had been made six months ago: 'So this is Twitter, eh? Wonder what all the fuss is about. Am going to tweet every day.' Couldn’t be her, unless she’d accidentally added an extra ‘a’ into her surname - unlikely, I’d say.
     
    Monday
     
    I decided this morning it was time to stop moping around. Stop being pathetic and passive. Do something, Alex. I went into work with a plan, albeit a dangerous one. I was going to commit one of the few sackable offences.
    I sat down at my desk and put my headset on. My supervisor, Jackie, looked over at me, making sure I wasn’t wasting time before logging on. As we’re consistently being told, Bookjungle is the biggest online retailer in the world – not that you’d know it from our wages – and we have to keep our customers happy by letting them talk to us like we’re shit and not keeping them waiting when they want to tell us this.
    I took a couple of calls from people moaning about delays in receiving their books, then did what I’m not supposed to do.
    Checking