Contest Entries, One-Shots & Random Bits

That Summer

  Scarlett closed her eyes. Fucking hell! She felt like screaming. She was used to travelling around the world - her career demanded it of her - and with that came the occasional missed flight. It was inevitable really. Sure, it was annoying that she taking her first holiday in five years to visit her family when she happened to encounter a delay, but still, she could handle it. She'd be able to deal with it if she had a hotel room to herself, if the silence that surrounded her was natural, or she felt comfortable enough to fill that silence with music.

But no. The silence between two forced room mates who would rather run down a busy street naked then spend time together was a heavy, oppressive one. Did time really have to pass so slowly?

Her phone buzzed. Needing a distraction, she grabbed it from the bedside cabinet quickly, typing in her passcode at the speed of light.

Finally! She thought upon seeing the reply from her closest friend, Matt. Opening it, she immediately realised she'd been wrong to believe that she'd get any kind of sympathy.

S: Of all the people in the world, of course I get stuck with Jazmin Heighton on NYE...

M: That's what you get for abandoning me. Karma... just saying.

He was probably right, but could at least be sympathetic about it. She'd had to leave a New Year's Eve party a friend of theirs had organised early, in order to catch her flight. Much as they'd joked about it, neither of them had actually been trying to leave the party early - they rarely got a chance to let their hair down with the whole gang in one place. Scarlett would certainly prefer to be drunkenly dancing her way into the new year in a castle ballroom than in her current predicament.

She dropped her phone with a clatter so loud that Jazmin, in her eyes the devil incarnate, looked over, flicking her dark eyes lazily between the fallen iPhone and the irritated woman, catlike and almost amused.

"What's up? Boyfriend too busy to reply?"

"Matt's not my boyfriend." Scarlett snapped back, instinctively on the defensive, despite an earlier promise to herself that she wouldn't enter into any form of communication with the queen of evil during the next few hours.

"Sure." The reply was drawled and disbelieving.

Scarlett had to fight not to scream out that he wasn't at the top of her lungs. Bitch, she thought angrily, before realising that the single expletive was hardly a great response. Even if it was true. Scarlett was aware that, on occasion, she had been known to be a bit of a bitch, but knew that whatever she'd said or done in the past was nothing compared to Jazmin's track record. Jazmin was notoriously difficult to work with, arrogant, lazy and manipulative.

She also hated Scarlett. Yes, she'd brought the other woman's hatred on herself by publically calling her out for her laziness, but the outright lies that had been designed to destroy her career had been a rather extreme retaliation.

Scarlett spent the next few hours bored out of her mind - she did a brief, travel-friendly workout, ignoring the poisonous glares she received as she tried to make the best of the situation - before admitting defeat and flopping back on her bed to mull over why Jazmin was the worst person in the world.

This was the woman who had slept with Ally's ex-fiancé.

The woman who had tried to split up Luke and Jessy - something which could easily have destroyed both of them.

The woman who had tried to end both Scarlett and Ella's careers.

She'd ruined the prank Matt and Immy had been trying to play on Daniel by warning him about the bucket of water on top of the door. Admittedly, the prank had been a childish idea, but it would have been amusing all the same and Jazmin had robbed the world of that amusement. That alone was enough to make her a terrible person, Scarlett reasoned internally.