Wasted by Nicola Morgan Read Free Book Online

right way up.
    It doesn’t.

CHAPTER 8
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
    JACK has walked Jess home. They do not kiss because the game has not allowed them to. But he catches her hand as she opens the gate and something snatches her throat.
    â€œSee you tomorrow,” he says. It is dark but she can see his eyes in the streetlight. It should probably be moonlight but it isn’t.
    She says something ordinary. Maybe she says
Yes
or
See you
or
Thanks for walking me home
or something. It doesn’t matter because it wouldn’t make any difference to anything. They are now linked anyway and they both know it. Nothing needs to be said.
    Of course, either of them
could
choose to say something that would stop this relationship dead. “Free will” should allow them to let any words out of their mouths. Like,
Sorry, I think we’re making a mistake. I don’t want to see you again.
Or
I am only interested in you for what you can bring to the band, by the way.
But it’s not going to happen. Because although they technically could say that, the words that come from their mouths have to come from something that already exists inside them. Everything has a reason, purpose or cause. One thing leads to another and for now everything leads them to feel desire.
    The coin landing the wrong way has only increased that. So, maybe it did make a difference.
    Jack watches as she goes up the path and turns her key in the door. He sees her walk inside, turn the light on and wave to him. He waves back, stands a moment longer and then walks home. He reaches home safely. Although many things could happen, they usually don’t. And for everything that happens, there are billions and billions more that don’t.
    On that short journey, he walks slowly, though he doesn’t particularly mean to. Time has clunked into a new groove and there is more in the world to be sensed now. There are more star patterns than he thought and space is deeper and there is energy in every cell of him and the nearby chippy smells mouth-watering. Around him, the night is warm and close and treacly. He lifts his hand – the one that touched Jess’s – to his face and then punches the air and all his excitement comes out in one word: “Yesss!”
    Lucky Jack. He has a girl for his band. Not just any girl, not just the sort of girl you’d get if you measured the probability, or if chance was really random, or if dreams were in any way realistic, but
this
girl. A girl with wide brown eyes and caramel skin and a voice smooth and rich as chocolate.
    Jess, meanwhile, walks into the kitchen and gets herself a drink of water, which she carries slowly up to bed. She feels alive. As though before she has merely been sleepwalking and now she is fully awake. In the bathroom mirror, before she removes her make-up, she stares and tries to see what Jack must see. She knows she must be the same as this morning, and yet it feels as though everything has changed, as if she’s on the edge of something huge and invisible.
    Soon, she is in her bed, childhood toys staring down from the top of a wardrobe. They are probably thick with dust because she has not touched them for a long time but she still knows they are there. One day they will no longer exist; it is not possible to imagine the moments when each will be thrown away, but for each toy that moment will happen.
    Sleep is nowhere near. She gets out of bed again, sensing the carpet between her toes and her pyjama straps on her shoulders as she walks towards the window. The night is hot and thick and windless.
    Something important has happened to her that ordinary day and she had not been expecting anything like it at all.
    She thinks back to the luck that meant that Jack had heard her sing. And when she tries to take in the factors that had to be right for it to happen, when she tries to contemplate how easily it might not have, her mind is boggled and overwhelmed. It is best not to