You Are So Not a Fallen Angel

Chapter 7

Chapter 7:

Over the course of the next week, I kept my eyes peeled for any sign of chocolate brown hair, kissable lips and bright blue eyes. Of course, as it is normal when you desperately want to find something, or someone, there was not a hint of him. There weren’t even people that looked a little like him and sent me into a tizzy. I spent a couple of days walking around Blackwith End, scrutinizing every passerby for a glimpse of my mysterious stranger. However, I got bored, and sunburnt, after a while and so retreated to the safety of my poolside and try to come with an alternative way of finding him.

My shock and irritation over what had happened at the bookstore had melted, leaving behind simple, healthy obsession. I thought about him all the time. I thought about him while I sunbathed, I thought about him while I swam, I thought about in the shower, and I thought about him as I was falling asleep. I pictured his face, trying to recall the exact shade of his eyes, the shape of his lips, the faint dimple on his left cheek. I reconstructed in my mind the way that single lock of hair was always falling in his eyes, and I shivered as I recalled what it had felt like to be carried along in his arms. Why had I resisted? Why hadn’t I let myself be carried aloof? Maybe he would have taken me up to his celestial domain.   

Much as I raked my brains to come with a way of finding him again, I drew a complete blank. Lorris had no phone number or email address that I knew off, and he had not given me an address to where he was staying. Even angels had to sleep sometimes, right? But it wasn’t a question of looking him up in the phonebook, not that I didn’t try. The only clue I had for finding him was that he seemed to turn when I was in danger, but that wasn’t much help, unless I could convince Cole to assault me again, and Cole was staying well away from me, glowering at me through his swollen and bruised eye whenever he saw me on the street.

I was, in short, at a dead end, with no chance of getting myself out of it. I would just have to wait for Lorris to appear of his own free will. Easier said than done. I had been bored before. Now I was bored and impatient, a fatal combination. I tried to distract myself by reading book and drawing pictures and writing really, really bad poetry. It’s hard to find anything that rimes with angel. When it all got too much, I researched angels on the internet, but didn’t come up with anything remotely useful. It was either biblical stuff, or crackpot nonsense. There weren’t any tips about how to cope when an angel comes crashing into your life, and nothing that told me how to get said angel to come back once he had gone.

On Saturday, my mother finally tired of me “moping around the house like a wet sponge” and told me to make myself useful, by sending me off to local shop for a few essentials, like bread and milk and sweet white wine. Flora tagged along, muttering something about it being “something to do”. Flora seemed also to be suffering from existential ennui. She seemed to have realised that her rich relatives did not live the thrilling life she had expected and it was just boring here as it was at her own house. More, even, before she was separated from her friends. I did not have a lot of sympathy, mainly before this was hardly her first visit, and so it should not have been a shock to her.  

We trailed up to the village shop and I told her to go to the bakery while I popped into the shop. Proper division of labour, to get the job done quicker. And it spared me from having my cousin following me like an irritating, sighing shadow.

I got the shopping done in record time, and Flora had not reappeared by the time I emerged, weighed down by my two carrier bags. The sun was beating down rather hard, and I couldn’t be bothered to wait for her. Figuring she would be able to find her own way home, I send her a text and set off down the street towards my house.

I paused under the wide, leafy trees that grew just outside the church, enjoying the respite from the heat of the sun. I leant of the wall surrounding the churchyard and ran a hand through my hair, lifting it off my sweaty neck. I watched the people going by on the other side of the road. People I knew and people I didn’t know. Full-time inhabitants of the village and tourists just down for the day, to enjoy the delight of a true, English village. Some were in an obvious hurry; others ambled along at a tranquil pace. The hustle bustle of everyday life.