What She Left: Enhanced Edition by T. R. Richmond Read Free Book Online

now?’
    ‘Yes,’ I answered as casually as I could, but it came out self-conscious and like the old me, but he didn’t know the old me, and it occurred to me that maybe if I’d tried some cocaine, I wouldn’t be that me.
    ‘I want to sleep with you,’ he whispered in my ear as we stood up. I felt a million miles from the girl back in Corby who’d wondered how she’d touch a man and how she’d be afterwards, if she’d look different or be different, even if itwas only to the people who knew her best, Mum and Dad (not Robbie, that numpty wouldn’t have noticed if I’d grown an extra leg!). ‘There’s plenty more booze back at my place. Plenty more of everything,’ he said, touching his nose.
    ‘I’m a good girl,’ I laughed.
    His place was cold and a pigsty and we drank white wine then vodka and he played Eminem and when the neighbours banged on the wall he banged back. Later, he sprinkled cocaine on the coffee table and did what they do in films, cutting and scraping it with a credit card. Then he rolled up a note and sharply inhaled and I watched the white powder race up into his nose.
    ‘Your turn,’ he said.
    ‘Not too much,’ I said, feeling suddenly more sober, then drunkenness crashed back over me.
    ‘You’ll like it, I can tell.’
    ‘I’m scared,’ I slurred.
    He told me not to be a baby, then ‘don’t worry it’s fine, it’s absolutely fine’, and the way he said ‘absolutely’ had that same languid slow-motion quality about it, except everything did now: the way his hands worked, the shadows of the leaves from the tree outside patterning the wall, even the music was slightly warped.
    I leant forward and thought:
A new you starts today, Alice
. But I can’t have been too wedded to the old one because it didn’t stop me. I felt a clean, shocking rush as I sniffed it – sniffed it all in as I’d seen on the films and it felt immediately better, everything did.
    ‘Good?’ he asked.
    ‘Good.’
    And one of us said something about shipping magnates and fridge magnets and we laughed and poured red wine, Ididn’t know we were drinking red, and I thought I’ll have to be careful with this stuff, I could get to like it rather too much.
    Then this morning as we lay in his bed he said: ‘This is what I call
freezing time
.’
    It had snowed and his heating was on the blink. Images of last night flashed into my head: him nibbling my ear whispering I was beautiful, his shoulder blades: big boney lumps. He made tea and we read the papers and he announced he was off home today for the weekend – back to Bucks or Berks, I didn’t catch which, for his brother’s twenty-first. A marquee job. ‘Going to be a monster night,’ he said.
    ‘What was last night then?’
    ‘That was a mere prelude.’
    But you never sleep with people on first dates, Alice
, I thought.
    Never stopped me last night.
    You never do cocaine.
    Ditto.
    I hadn’t been sure whether I should go or stay to try to salvage something, find in him one trait I adored beyond how fit he was. Everyone has that.
    ‘Seriously, thanks for your company last night,’ he said.
    There, maybe that was it, that comment; he so meant it. And he did that a lot, I’d noticed, starting sentences with ‘seriously’. I thought: in a few years’ time you’ll be in a suit in some swanky office and we won’t be students any more. I tried to commit this room to memory. The wine bottle with a candle in it, the dead spider plant, the snaffled ‘men at work’ road sign propped between the wardrobe and the wall. I knew I might well not see him again, or I was bound to, but maybe not in
this
way. He’d become the bloke I’d gotoff with after the photography talk, someone the girls teased me about, Mr Marketing Man or Mr Something Passing Stopped.
    ‘Is this what we’re going to be then,’ he asked, ‘fuck buddies?’
    I’d laughed when I’d heard that expression on an old episode of
Sex in the City,
but now it seemed brutal and less