About half-an-hour later the coach pulled into another motorway service station. It was 12 noon, and they were stopping for a quick lunch before they continued with the journey. Ben started to feel sick as he worried about his friends, or even worse, the rest of his peers, noticing his soaked jeans when he got up. He had hoped they might have dried out a bit, but when he lifted his hoodie up to look at his crotch the wet patch seemed as dark as when he’d first woken up to notice it.
He decided that maybe he would just pretend to be asleep and sit here, with his hoodie safely covering his lap. He wasn’t sure he could face Chloe now anyway, he had been staring out of the window since she’d handed him the hoodie, for although he was grateful for her discretion he was also very embarrassed, and he wasn’t sure he knew what to say to her. He shut his eyes and listened to his peers shuffle off the coach.
“Oi, wake up,” Chloe nudged Ben, “We’ve stopped for lunch. C’mon.”
Ben nervously turned to look at her, she stood up, grinning at him. “I might just stay on the bus,” Ben told her.
Chloe raised her eyebrows, before sitting back down, “Ben, I told you, tie your hoodie round your waist and no-one will notice. If you stay on the bus people will want to know why. And if it’s really necessary I’ll say I spilt coke over you or something, but quit worrying and come and get lunch.”
Ben raised his bottom from the seat, and tied his hoodie around his waist in an attempt to conceal the wet spot. The sleeves hung over the front, and actually he thought maybe it wouldn’t be too noticeable. The darkness around the top of his legs and his crotch could probably just be dismissed as shadow. When he looked down at his seat though the wet-patch he’d left was instantly obvious, and he knew Chloe had noticed it to. But she just shrugged and picked a magazine up from under her seat, threw it onto Ben’s, and then started to walk off of the coach. Ben quickly followed.
As Chloe had promised nobody noticed Ben’s wet jeans, and he felt much better for the rest of the journey, happily laughing and joking with his friends, and almost forgetting about his accident completely. Shortly after 2:30pm the coach arrived at the Youth Hostel, a large Victorian building set inside huge grounds. After standing in a large foyer for twenty minutes, whilst the teachers argued with a dumpy woman sat at a computer, the group were split up and sent to their different bedrooms.