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‘You weren’t joking when you said you were a lark,’ Jen mumbles, turning on to her side. She’s naked. Her breasts roll together, and she covers them with the duvet.
‘Sorry,’ he says, his voice hoarse-sounding. He’s investigating her father. He’s investigating her father. She thinks he is called Kelly. This can never, never work.
Her eyes fly open and meet his. She props herself up in bed then smiles at him, a slow, happy smile, like she can’t believe he’s there. ‘Don’t go,’ she says to him, bold as that, across the room. She naked, he dressed.
‘I …’
This can never, never work.
‘Stay here with me.’ She folds back the corner of the duvet, inviting him back in.
This has to work.
‘I should go …’
‘Kelly,’ she says, and he loves the sound of that name on him. Something old and something new, all at once. ‘Life’s too long for work.’
Life’s too long. That’s so clever. He puts his head in his hands, standing up, like a madman. He loves her. He fucking loves her.
Life’s too long for work.
She’s right.
She’s so fucking right. His clothes are off, and he’s back in the bed within a minute, with her. ‘Do you like mornings yet?’ he says.
‘I like them with you.’
Ryan’s been up all night, for the third night in a row. He’s finally back home, at his bedsit. He tore his body away from hers today, at almost midnight, feigning tiredness, and came back here, where he has spent the entire night in his kitchen, sitting at the MDF table, making coffee after coffee after coffee.
Jen is all he can think about. Jen – and what to do about Jen. Sleeping with the enemy, I see? Joseph texted him earlier. A crass, reductive text that removed the heart of it all, made it sound like only sex. Ryan stared at it before he replied, trying to figure out what to do.
At 00:59 this morning, he made his decision. He’d forgotten that the clocks were going forwards. 01:00 becomes 02:00, and he has decided.
Quit the police, or lose her.
In the end, he thought, in his shitty little bedsit, fake ID on the table, it wasn’t a decision at all.
He’s waiting underneath the streetlight on the corner of Cross Street, stepping from foot to foot, telling himself he has no choice. None at all. He’s freezing cold, and his hands are shaking with too much adrenalin.
Ryan is in love.
Ryan no longer wants to change the world. Ryan wants to be with Jen. Jen, whose father is a facilitator of the organized-crime group he’s investigating.
Jen, who thinks he’s called Kelly, both parents dead, left school at aged sixteen.
Jen, whose eyes shine like she’s been crying-laughing.
Jen, who said to him, on their first date, that she thought otters were dicks, that she wanted kids, too, that she’s only ever wanted to help people, whose body fits into his like it’s always been there, like it’s part of him. Jen, who says she eats too much, who kisses like she was invented only to kiss him.
Her fucking father. Her father has been supplying Joseph Jones with a list of empty properties which he has used to dispatch foot soldiers to steal the cars. He acted on conveyances of timeshare properties and kept a log of whose week was whose. That is how he knew when people would likely be away, leaving their first home vacant. Such a simple crime, born out of the day-to-day information lawyers have access to.
And now. Ryan drags both hands through his hair, looking up at the sky. He wants to scream, but he can’t.
The man appears. An associate of an associate of an associate. Hopefully far enough removed from Joseph, but who knows.
The stranger is stocky, short, balding. ‘Bag there,’ he says. Ryan might be back on Cross Street, but he’s here for a different reason this time. He passes the stranger the bag of cash.
The man counts the money, then gives him a wolfish smile, passes him a small, crumpled envelope from the back pocket of his jeans. Ryan takes it, and leaves, fuelled only by panic. No backwards glance.
