Invincible Summer by Alice Adams Read Free Book Online Page A

because they couldn’t bear to leave a problem unsolved. One of the quants had even once stayed up all night sorting out a particularly thorny pricing issue she’d gone to him with, unable to bear going to sleep without answering her question. She’d come in the following morning to find him at his desk in the same clothes, surrounded by coffee cups and twitchier than ever, but triumphantly wielding the solution. Sometimes it felt as though the cream of a generation was packed into her building, the Oxbridge engineers and rocket scientists. (So who was building the bridges and making the space rockets? It didn’t bear thinking about.)
    ‘A treat indeed,’ smiled Eva, half-joking but mostly just relieved to have found a friendly face.

Chapter 6
Vauxhall, August 1999
    L UCIEN LOOKED OUT across the swaying sea of his people and smiled benevolently. The bass thumped, smoke swirled, and several hundred pairs of hands reached for the roof of the warehouse in South London where his weekly club night, Candy, was rapidly becoming a raging success. Technically he was the promoter rather than the DJ, but he’d picked up enough know-how to mix a few records together while he was in Goa and he liked to take a half-hour slot early in the night just to get this feeling. Plus, the visibility helped with picking up girls. If they’d already seen him up here behind the decks it meant he didn’t have to shoehorn being the promoter into every conversation. Not that he really needed the extra boost; success with women came easily to him. He knew he was slightly effeminate-looking, tall and slender with long sooty eyelashes and chiselled cheekbones, but he didn’t care. If anything, it worked in his favour. He was non-threatening in appearance, the antithesis of your common-or-garden meathead, so he tended to get a friendly reception when approaching girls. And Lucien liked girls, liked them a lot, although of course it could be said that he didn’t like them very deeply, or rather, he liked many of them very deeply but only for very short periods of time.
    Lucien had a gift: to see straight into the souls of people and know what they needed to hear, right at that very moment. He’d explained this to a girl named Star he met at a beach party in India, and she told him that she could feel him reaching inside her as he looked into her eyes, so he carried on looking into her eyes all through the tantric sex they had when she took him back to her hotel room. At least, he’d done what he imagined tantric sex was supposed to be like, sitting up and facing each other and it had taken him forever to finish because he’d drunk too much and done too much speed. He’d got an infection afterwards, maybe because it had gone on for so bloody long or maybe because she’d given him something. Either way, it had been a nightmare finding a doctor who spoke enough English to prescribe him antibiotics and it had cost a packet, so he felt a sort of karmic justification for never paying back the two thousand rupees she’d lent him the night before.
    He was a free spirit, really, different from the others with their conventional outlooks and tedious career aspirations. They’d been back for six months now and even Sylvie was starting to talk about getting a proper job. Benedict was still a student, avoiding the real world for however many years it would take him to complete a PhD that would apparently land him some boring job that paid bugger all at the end of it while he, Lucien, was doing better than any of them, because he had an entrepreneurial attitude and also because he was just the type of person who attracted good things by giving off the right vibe. The years they’d spent slogging away in the library, he’d spent selling overpriced drugs to the clueless but affluent students of Bristol and making more money in a weekend than the others could make in a month even now.
    Still, it seemed as if Eva was doing quite well for herself these days.