I sent it at 2:07am. I know the exact time because Sophie dropped the screenshot into the flat chat before I’d even put my phone back in my bag.
Coming home I swear xxx
Three kisses. That was the tell. I never do three unless I’m lying or trying to get a table. Sophie clocked it immediately. Mia reacted with the eyes emoji. Democracy in this flat is dead and I am, regrettably, still the president.
How the night actually started
We were meant to do one drink. That is always the sentence. One drink in Soho because Mia had a plus one going spare and Sophie had just closed a campaign and wanted to feel like a person again. I had a dress that needed an audience. That was the whole brief.
By midnight I had lost Sophie to a man who works in “strategy,” which is what people say when they don’t want to tell you they do ads. Mia was on the smoking terrace building a new religion with two girls from Peckham. I was at the bar with a boy who kept touching the small of my back like he’d invented it.
He was fine. Not peng. Not mid enough to walk away from. The sort of face you agree to in bad lighting and then have to reassess under the hallway bulb at home. He bought two rounds. I let him. I am not above being purchased in units of vodka soda. Sue me.
We kissed near the toilets because that is where the music drops enough that you can hear yourself think, and thinking is overrated at that hour. He asked if I wanted to go back to his. I said maybe. Maybe is my favourite word. It keeps the door open and the story moving.
The lie, in high definition
His flat was in Zone 2 and a half, the kind of new-build with a concierge who has seen every walk of shame in SW and stopped judging in 2019. In the Uber I did that thing I always do. I opened the group chat.
Sophie: where are you
Mia: tell me you’re not doing the thing
Me: coming home I swear xxx
I even added a little voice note of the street so it sounded like I was walking toward a night bus. I was not walking toward a night bus. I was in the back of a Toyota with a man whose aftershave was trying too hard and whose hand was on my thigh like he’d paid for a subscription.
Sophie screenshot it in real time. Of course she did. She lives for evidence. She works in PR. Documentation is her love language.
By the time I was in the lift my phone was a small courtroom.
Sophie: the three kisses
Mia: she only does three when she’s about to be a slag
Sophie: or when she wants Nobu
Mia: same energy
I put the phone face down on his kitchen counter and let him pour wine I would not remember the name of. Look. I know how this reads. I know I am the problem. I also know I am very good at being the problem.
What they have on me
The group chat is called who’s coming home tonight. It started as a joke when we first moved into the Parsons Green place. It is not a joke anymore. It is an archive.
They have the texts. They have the blurry photo I sent of his bathroom because the tiles were unexpectedly nice and I am, unfortunately, still a blogger when I am horizontal. They have the 3:14am “still alive” that I sent after he went to get water. They have last month’s version of this exact night with a different name and a worse sofa.
Sophie keeps a mental ledger. Who stayed over. Who made tea in the morning. Who left before she put the kettle on. Mia just wants gossip and the option to steal my lipstick if I don’t come back for it.
I told them once that privacy was a human right. Sophie said privacy ended when I started writing about our bins. Fair.
The worst screenshot is not even from last night. It is from February. Me, 1:52am: with Mia, home in 20. Mia was in bed. I was in a cloakroom. Sophie printed that one in her head and brings it out at brunch like a party trick.
Morning in our kitchen
I got the Uber back at 8:40 because he had a meeting and I had a face that needed a sink I trusted. Parsons Green at that hour is all dog walkers and people who did yoga instead of sin. I did not make eye contact with any of them.
Sophie was already in the kitchen in that grey cardigan she wears when she is about to be morally correct. Mia was eating cereal over the sink like a raccoon we dressed in last night’s mascara.
“President,” Sophie said, without looking up from her phone.
She turned the screen. There I was. The 2:07am message. The three kisses. Underneath it, Mia’s reply from 2:09: liar liar dress on fire.
I put my bag on the chair and started making coffee like I paid rent, which I do, technically, even if my parents still think of it as “her little London thing.”
“He was called Ed,” I said.
“Of course he was,” Mia said.
Sophie asked if Ed had a personality. I said he had a nice mouth and a story I could use. She did that small exhale that means she loves me and also wants me sectioned for my own good.
There were shoes by the door that were not mine. Mia’s. Different night. We are a household of loose ends.
Why we keep the chat
People who don’t live like this think a group chat is just logistics. Who’s buying milk. Whose turn it is to speak to the landlord about the mould that is definitely not mould, just “character.” Ours is a little CCTV system with better lighting.
They screenshot me because I would screenshot them. I have Mia’s 4am voice note from the night she cried in a McDonald’s about a boy who collected vinyl and nothing else. I have Sophie’s typing bubble that lasted six minutes before she admitted she’d snogged the strategy man after all. We are not better than each other. We are just faster with the camera roll.
Is it humiliating? A bit. Is it also the only reason I text anyone when I leave a club instead of dissolving into the city like a rumour? Yes.
I used to think I wanted mystery. Mystery is lonely. Screenshots mean someone is waiting, even if they’re waiting to take the piss.
Sophie says I perform for the chat. She is not wrong. Half the reason I went home with Ed is that I could already see the paragraph. The other half is that I like sex and I like attention and I am twenty seven and not finished being messy yet. You can want two things. I usually want five.
The bit I didn’t send them
Ed asked me to stay for breakfast. I said I had a thing. The thing was my own bed and the particular quiet of our street when the bins have already gone. He put his number in my phone. I let him. I will not text it. I might. I probably won’t. The uncertainty is the fun part until it isn’t.
In the Uber home I almost sent a fourth message. Something honest. Not coming. Don’t wait up. I’ll tell you in the morning.
I didn’t. Honesty at 8am hits different to honesty at 2. At 2 you still believe you can outrun the evidence. By morning the evidence is already in a folder.
Sophie had made extra coffee. That is how I know I am forgiven. Mia asked if he was good. I said he was keen. Keen is not the same as good, but it photographs better in a sentence.
I sat on the counter, the one we are not supposed to sit on, and let them scroll through the night like it was a shared album. My lie. His bathroom tiles. The three kisses that gave the whole game away.
Look. I could delete the chat. I could live alone and lie to nobody except myself. I don’t want that. I want two girls in my kitchen who know the exact timestamp of my nonsense and still save me a mug.
Democracy is dead in this flat. They have the screenshots. I have the stories. We call that a fair system.
Anyway. I’m going out Thursday. I’ll say I’m coming home.
I might even mean it.
