Invincible Summer by Alice Adams Read Free Book Online Page B

Apparently she’d been promoted twice in the two years she’d been in her City job. He didn’t know exactly what she did, something stultifying to do with finance, but by the sound of it she made a decent amount of dosh. She’d changed quite a bit in the time that he and Sylvie had been away travelling, losing the old pudginess and dressing better too, less of the tie-dye and Doc Martins. And apparently she didn’t drink pints anymore; in the bar where they’d all met up before the club she’d ordered a white wine spritzer and he’d almost laughed out loud. The newly-constructed Eva seemed faintly absurd to him, but he could see that she had a bit more of an edge to her now, an attractive aloofness. There had always been a kind of connection between the two of them but there was just something offputtingly wide-eyed about her. She was the sort of girl who sucked you in and then started trying to get you to open up about your feelings, always trying to have conversations about the big issues or find out what made you tick . Lucien hadn’t come this far by being the sort of person who dwelt on such things, and he wasn’t about to start now. She’d suckered him into talking about his childhood once, looking at him with wounded eyes as she told him her mother was dead. For some reason it had made him blurt out a bunch of his own private stuff and he’d regretted it ever since because after that when she looked at him he felt weirdly naked, and not in a good way.
    Still, there was definitely something about her. There had been that one drunken fumble years ago in Bristol, but he’d had to avoid her for ages afterwards because it had been obvious she was hoping for something more, which he most certainly wasn’t. She seemed much cooler towards him now, though, and that had always been like catnip to him. Should he, could he, talk her into a rematch tonight? Might be tricky, because she had Benedict staying at hers, but still, Lucien wasn’t one to balk at a challenge.
    At that moment his eyes happened to alight upon Benedict standing in the far corner of the room, intermittently visible in the strobe light engaged in animated conversation with a man who appeared to have a tattoo of a cobweb covering half his face. Probably shouldn’t have given him that pill, on reflection. It had just been a bit of a laugh, offering a pill to Benedict, who’d always been so straight. Lucien hadn’t thought he’d actually take the bloody thing but apparently there was a contagious recklessness in the air tonight, because when Benedict had seen Eva doing one he’d swallowed audibly and said, ‘Go on then, before I change my mind,’ and grabbed it out of Lucien’s hand, gulping it down with a swig of Evian. They were decent pills tonight too. Lucien was coming up pretty hard and he’d only taken one so far. He was going to make a good bit of wedge on this batch, a lot more than the take on the door by the time he’d paid the DJs and lighting guys and bouncers.
    Better go and do the honourable thing, he supposed. In any case, it probably wasn’t a bad idea to get off the decks before he made a total twat of himself. He’d messed up that last mix as the pill kicked in, and for a horrible moment the hands had stopped waving and all sort of lowered to half-mast. He’d managed to pull it back by dropping in Blue Monday fast and hard, relief washing through him as the semiquaver kick-drum reverberated through the crowd and lent renewed vigour to the pumping fists; a good recovery, but still, better to quit while he was ahead.
    ‘Bill, take over here, would you?’ He motioned to the real DJ who was sullenly awaiting his slot at the end of the mixing desk. ‘Got a bit of business to sort out.’
    Lucien clambered down the steps to the dance floor and pushed his way across to the far corner where Benedict was by now having his neck massaged by Spider-Face.
    ‘A word, mate.’
    ‘Ah, Lucien. Superb night, thanks for sorting me