Twenty Miles by Cara Hedley Read Free Book Online

said. The ice creaked in her ear. She flung her arms and legs out, made a snow angel in the sheet that covered the ice. Buck sat down next to her, arms around his knees.
    ‘You’re a natural,’ he said. Sig blew rings of frozen breath, her eyes narrowed against the raw blue of the sky.
    ‘Nope,’ she said and heaved herself up. Buck held her elbow as she got to her feet.
    ‘Here,’ he said and faced her, held both her forearms. His grip was strong, almost bruising. When he skated backwards slowly, Sig inching forward in his wake, she imagined music.
    ‘Making up for the Legion, eh?’ Sig laughed, stared down at her shuffling feet.
    Friday nights, Buck sat in a darkened corner of the Legion with Chuck and Harold and sipped beer. He watched the dance floor while Sig swooped by, feet and hands blurred under the dimmed lights. She laughed into the faces of neighbours, effortlessly balanced a gin in her hand through the dips and twirls. Bert Mulcahey, a notorious pervert but incomparable dancer, liked to inch his hand down Sig’s back, pushing his luck. It was all an act, and he set Sig off every time, her head tilted back, laughing and slapping his arm. Buck’s eyes caught sharply on these exchanges; those sitting next to him could practically hear the rip. He blinked hard, cleared his throat, tore off a strip of skin next to a stunted thumbnail. Sig never mentioned these reactions to him; he would be embarrassed, she knew, probably didn’t even realize he was doing it. He smiled, told her to go have fun when she came over to sit, with her damp band of hair, forehead glistening under the weak light cast into the hall’s outskirts.
    When Sig looked up, she saw his eyes circling her face. Her blond hair poked out around the perimeter of the balaclava, trapped her breath in stiff, white tufts. Buck’s own breath travelled in small clouds toward her face, faintly sour, the smell of morning twisted into flannel sheets. Icicles clung, heavy, to her eyelashes, and their shadows teased the rounded edges of her vision. The lake boomed under their feet.
    A s the egg began its obese somersaults, a dull gonging against the sides of the pot, Sig leaned against the window frame and scanned the mess in the yard. Then she surprised herself. She leaned over and grabbed her pack of smokes from the table and lit up, rightthere in the middle of the kitchen. She inhaled deeply, lungs wincing with guilt. Since the girl had gone, a kind of anarchy had overtaken the house, the rooms stretching into obtuse outlines, hours billowing in and out of them like slackened sails. She snorted and smoke jerked from her nostrils – she felt like a teenager whose parents had left her alone for a weekend.
    The egg timer chimed and she threw the cigarette into the sink and turned on the tap, ushering smoke toward the open window with her hands as she crossed the kitchen floor. Near the stove, she stumbled, toe catching on the linoleum.
    ‘Goddamn!’ she gasped and grabbed on to the edge of the stove, looking behind her on the floor. Nothing. Jesus, she might as well be literally drunk if her legs were going to act like it. She glanced at the liquor cabinet, a Pavlovian tickle at the back of her tongue, and then looked at the clock. Not yet, she told the ready mouth.
    She poured the water from the pot over the cigarette in the sink and then took the egg into her hands, passing it back and forth between her palms, letting its heat leak into her skin. She rapped the egg against the edge of the counter and began to pick away at the gash of shell rubble, sharp shards falling over the garbage can. Some still clung stubbornly to the flesh of the egg, resisting the clumsy intentions of her fingers. It should not be so hard to peel a goddamn egg. She breathed around a knot of frustration and leaned against the counter, took a break.
    It was that she had too much time for the egg, this act she’d done on automatic pilot throughout her life – always while