The Accidental Hacker

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

My mystery man was occupying more and more of my thoughts, which was disturbing considering that I had no idea who he was. Tom wasn’t a lot to go on.

I did try looking up John le Carré adaptations but the only one listed on IMDb was Our Kind of Traitor with Ewan McGregor, Damian Lewis and Stellan Skarsgård, but that was post production, while the one Tom had got a job with was going into production next year.

A google search brought up a few articles about House and Loki joining up for an adaptation, but no details on other cast members.

I searched Our Kind of Traitor but the only Toms were in the crew, not the cast.

I tried to talk myself out of liking him, he could be a serial killer, or rapist, or thief, or a liar, or a cheat.

The list of what he could be was endless.

Unfortunately the list of what I knew he was, was very tempting. I knew he got my weird sense of humour. I knew he was kind, thanks to his compliments and willingness to forgive me. I knew he was charming, I knew he was intelligent and I knew he was funny.

Of course, I didn’t know if he was interested in me. Probably not, certainly not to the degree I was interested in him.

Maybe he was gay. I could live with that, we could be good friends and moan to each other about our respective boyfriends.

I did my best to put him out of my mind, spending my days painting in my studio, so I wasn’t always waiting by my computer for him to message me.

Besides, he was right, I should visit a few galleries again and for that, I needed some new original work because I’d been gradually selling most of them. I would probably never stop painting pop culture because I love it, but I was short on abstract work, so I definitley needed to bulk that area of my portfolio up before I visited any galleries.

Tom and I texted back and forth a little but nothing serious, and we didn’t get a good chat going like we had the last time. I sent him a meme I thought was funny, he texted back with a meme of his own. I suppose we averaged about two texts a day. I tried to start conversations with him, asking what he was up to and when he said he was working, I asked if he was filming anything fun. He replied that he was working on reshoots and had to have his phone off for most of the day.

I mean, he was perfectly nice about it, and apologetic even but for whatever reason (after all, he could be lying about work) he didn’t want to speak to me.

I tried not to take it to heart and got on with my life.

I thought the reshot thing was bollocks too. Please, I’ve met my fair share of so-called actors since I’ve been in London, or more accurately, barmen who call themselves actors. I didn’t call him out on it though, if his ego needed to tell strangers that he was an actor, then I wasn’t about to burst his bubble.

It did make me cringe when I thought about when I told him, that I didn’t want a boyfriend who was trying to prove something. Was that why he hadn’t ask me out? Had I put him off?

Truth is, as long as he was following his dreams and was happy, I couldn’t care if he was a professional extra or a mega star.

However I had told him the truth about my dog portraits, so why couldn’t he be honest with me too?

I had a run of orders on my geek shop and addition to my usual orders, I ended up selling one painting each of painting of each Avenger, as well as Fury, Coulson and Loki, plus a commission of Maria Hill (I’ve never been asked for her before) to a single buyer in London, which was very odd but not unwelcome. I assumed that he or she was an avid fan of the film.