The Cure

Chapter 56

Lola was trying to ignore the throbbing between her legs as she followed Nate back up the corridor, as much irritated as she was turned on; he'd got her again, leaving her a slick, quivering puddle of desperation until cigarettes were the last thing on her mind.

She frowned playfully, her eyes still burning affection and amusement as he threw her a glance over his shoulder, his mischievous grin creasing his cheek.

Obviously, it was for her own good. It had taken her several months after – that day – to even consider playing gigs again; by the time she answered her boss' blizzard of calls, accepting to resume her rightful place at Dempsey's Sunday gig, she was on twenty cigarettes a day, inhaled mostly undesired, to feel the tight pressure, a black heaviness on her chest; deliberately masking the other, more smarting ache that now resided there.

And it had been even longer until she had dared fish out the now-battered business card, long buried, but never forgotten, amidst cookie crumbs and tampon wrappers in the graveyard layer of her rucksack.

Its association with that day – where her very being had been simultaneously split open by a golden axe of potential, and crumbled like bad stone with grief – had been too potent to contemplate, until now.

She ran her fingers along the card's grubby edges with her heart in her throat, cauterising steel about the memories that threatened to spill blackly to the surface.

She had only looked long enough to memorise its dusty address, and she hadn't told Nate of her intention when she left for work, into the balmy morning bath of midsummer, amidst bird-chirrup and the soft sweep of his lips against hers.

The building was small, but neat, new, the whitewash bathed golden in an early-evening golden glow, with a boastful and sufficiently professional plaque at the door; she steeled herself as she pushed the door and headed into the sharp whoosh of an overly air-conditioned room, perching uncomfortably on red leather upon the secretary's request, a beige plastic cup of bad coffee twisting between her fingers.

After thirty minutes, when her streaming thoughts had finally convinced her that they had forgotten her, that they had had a change of heart, she stood up with an irritated chuckle; but she had barely made it to the door when a flustered-looking Mr. Hargreaves spun through the waiting room, talking hastily on his phone.

He caught Lola's eye, holding a finger up as he finished his conversation, and smiling as he hung up.

'Thought we'd be seeing you again,' he said simply, holding out a hand and gesturing towards his office.

She wasn't nervous, she noted distantly as she took a seat in front of the sprawling desk, watching the man before her steadily; her chin was pressed effortlessly into the air. No insistence necessary.

Because she wasn't scared of anything anymore.

What was there to be afraid of, when the worst possible thing imaginable had offered itself up on its gory, black marble plate, an inescapable, uncontrollable finality?

She had been gobsmacked to find that she hadn't died, too. That the story didn't end.

Life still ticked away in quotidian quantifiability. The seagulls' wings still beat angel white, floating boastful about sunrays about the coast. The trains roaring past her bedroom window still shook bad plaster from the ceiling.

And Nate was still there, rooted and pulsing with life against the grim gales of grief, insistently, simply, silently present, a hand to the lower back against funeral black, a glancing thumb to her cheek when she sat up gasping from a nightmare.