Lola looked around at the increasingly rowdy afterparty; the walls were sweating with the breath and heat of thirty people crammed and crowing under the white-blue flickering fluorescence; they were due on stage in two days, not that anybody would know; Miles was topless, Jules had thrown up twice and somebody had lit a cigarette; Lola tensed when she smelled the brusque potency, her throat pulling, thirsty for a hot rush of smoke and its heady relief, the dark release.
She thought wistfully of the half-empty packet crushed courageously beneath her fist that night, while Nate slept, her hair still damp from her bubble bath, still ruffled from his adoring hands.
What an idiot she had been; it had been a hot and reliable glory, an inhaled escape, and she denied it to herself, now, breathing only the eventual price of freedom, of a future, in the whack of the wake of a bass drum, under the weighty, adoring watchfulness of brown eyes.
They were on her, now. She knew it. And she couldn't bear to look at him, because her heart threatened to overflow; she focussed on the feeling of the leather sofa against her back, her fingers twisting in her lap, a fraught bubble shivering with the delight of existing pulsing in her chest.
She hadn't told him she loved him.
Not yet.
But she almost didn't need to, Nate thought as he watched Lola's teeth worrying at her lip, her thumbs fretting, picking at hangnails about the fingers turning in her lap.
Because when she knew his was one of the featureless faces amidst the weeknight crowd, she always covered Helplessly Hoping, and sung it as if he was right there, as if he was awkwardly sliding his breakfast over the bar with a small wince of a smile, understanding her for the first time.
Because she wrapped up leftovers and left them on the stove when he got in from nights, even though her cooking was invariably appalling.
Because sometimes, she even washed the dishes.
And the way she looked at him, when she thought he was immersed in his studying, or eating, or laughing; as if she found beauty in the concentrated furrow of his brow, or brushing crumbs off his fingers, or the crease at his cheek and the crinkle about the eye; it was enough.
He caught her eye across the stifling room, between tattooed elbows and the light rainbow spray of champagne that Miles threw about in decadent, hyperbolic celebration, sprinkling them with sticky gold; she glanced away, her cheeks pink, an abashed smile about her lips.
For now, it was enough.
YOU ARE READING
The Cure
Romance*FEATURED ON @storiesundiscovered TALES OF THE HEART* There were two things Jen could conclude from her intimate, admiring study of Nathaniel Wells - the sleepy smile creasing an arch into the olive-skinned cheek, the thick dark hair falling into hi...
