The next morning I was reluctant to go downstairs. I had heard Eleanor arrive home not long after Lucy and I had gone up, and I didn’t share Lucy’s twisted enthusiasm to share the news. Lucy was blinded and love-struck. Eleanor was a wise woman who saw through me well before I recognised my own [...]
I slumped down in the couch and waited for Eleanor to come home. I needed her to talk some sense into me. I needed her cool level-headedness to extinguish some of the drama, because it was all getting a bit much. In the state I was in, and with too much whiskey polluting my blood, [...]
When the door bell rang a few hours later, a few hours in which I hadn’t moved from my bed because I was too numbed by the whirlwind of events and emotions of the past twenty-fours hours, I expected it to be either Lucy, or, as a way of uncontrollable wishful thinking, Lou, for another [...]
Lucy arrived at one o’clock. I was alone in the house so all I had to do was take her hand and lead her up the stairs, to my room. “What’s gotten into you?” she asked when I closed the door behind her and pushed her against it. “I need you.” I knew how it [...]
I rang Lucy’s bell and I hoped, given the amount of buzzers I had pressed in the last twenty-four hours, it would be the last one in a while. While I waited for her to open the door I thought about what I would say, which strategy to deploy. It was only when the door [...]