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No. Our apartment isn’t forty steps up; it’s seventy. There’s nothing like pulling a twelve-hour shift and crawling up those steps, and that’s not including the times when I have to carry shopping. Admittedly there’s a lift, but it stuck once and I had a full-blown panic attack and it took Archer two hours to calm me down.
I haven’t been near it since.
But that’s not even the worst part.
The worst part is at night when the streets are rife with drunks, when the bars close up and people filter out. Sometimes they linger and continue the party across the street, sometimes trouble finds its way down here and youngsters take advantage of the streetlamps set few and far apart—and sometimes people just smoke crack down the alleys. It’s impossible to sleep some nights from the noise, but it’s entirely different when you walk into it.
I feel the stares of passing men as I make my way across the small car park and I’m thankful for the November chill giving me the excuse to wear my faux coat; I shrug it tighter around myself as if it’ll save me from a good knifing.
What a strange conundrum, to find comfort in things that offer no protection at all. What an outlandish illusion, to think reassurance outweighs the greed of men.
XOYO is a twenty-minute walk from my apartment, but with these heels, I make it thirty. They have some DJ on tonight, which isn’t really my thing at all, but as I hand over my coat to be put in the cloakroom, the beat thrums through my feet and into my blood. Smoke curls around my ankles and lights strobe across the ceiling, illumining the raised arms of the crowd in flashes of neon green and blue.
A platinum-blonde head sits at the bar. Emmy argues with a guy rocking really right, really skinny denim jeans and a button-down, and I grab her elbow before she starts throwing fists.
Her face lights up when she sees me, and she leaps from her stool to fling her arms around me. ‘You actually came,’ she shouts into my ear above the music. She wears a backless dress, and my palms meet sweat-slick skin. Her face shimmers with glitter as she pulls back to beam at me, and her loose, beautiful hair is scattered with it. Although I don’t think she’d appreciate it if I told her she looks like a mermaid princess. ‘And you lookhot.’
‘You know, your utter shock and disbelief is more hurtful than you think.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘You know what I mean. I just haven’t seen you dressed forout outin so long. At work you always look—you know, a bit sunken, subdued, like a pigeon took a shit on those croissants you like every morning—‘
‘Okay. Let’s drink.’
‘Yes, bitch.’
We sip cocktails and throw back shots of pink Sambuca, and then we’re dancing, and my body seeps pleasure. I feel like what I imagine sex would look like, my hips swishing, my hands in my hair, my head tipped back, my fingers running down my throat as I caress my own body. The music pounds through me, into me, and I feel every tension leave me.
Emmy moves next to me, against me, but there’s nothing sensual in it. Just two best friends finding release in their own way, our bodies speaking of all the ways we wish to be touched, worshipped. For once, I feel powerful, sexy—
I rush to the bathroom and spew into the toilet. I fall to my knees, barely feeling the piss-wet tissue on the floor, and heave.
‘Are you okay in there?’ a girl asks from the cubicle next door.
‘Um… can you pass me some tissue, actually—?’
A roll flies from beneath the cubicle.
‘Thansmuch,’ I mumble.
‘Love you,’ she says, and the door shuts in her wake.
I sit on the toilet lid as everything cartwheels around me. I feel myself fall and my head slams into the roll holder, knocking me awake. But I dig my phone from my clutch purse and squint at it, trying to focus as every name in my messages folder doubles. I’m going to text Archer, demand to know where he is—
But I scroll too far and see another name, one I haven’t seen for nearly two years.
Chase.
I close my eyes against the memory of him, willing myself to forget the green of his eyes, the dimples in his smile. And sometimes I think I might actually be able to move on from him, but then I hear a song or smell something that reminds me of him, and every vessel in my body closes and chokes me, and I’m back in my room, and he’s lying beneath me, and my body remembers everywhere he touched—
I open our chat before I talk myself out of it.
I’m outside.
That’s the last thing he ever sent me. It’s funny how, despite all our conversations, that night is the one I remember most, when he stood in my driveway and waved up at me. It’s the moment that hurts the most, because I regret being so horrible to him. I should’ve just let him in and kissed him and told him how I felt; maybe then he wouldn’t have left.
I hate myself for even thinking it. For trying to find ways I could have stopped him from following his dream.
I never even told him goodbye. Couldn’t even bring myself to reach out to him the next day, to face his house being empty. His absence at lunch had been bad enough; I didn’t eat for weeks and spent my lunchtimes in a classroom catching up on work and resitting exams.
