TAKE IT EASY • TC ✔️

47. A Turn for the Worst

It was dark in the closet. It was dark and cramped and there was barely room to fit one of them in there, let alone two, but they'd managed it somehow. They'd managed it so that she was sitting between his legs, half on them, half off, her back pressed against his stomach, her head resting against his chest.

His sweater was a little scratchy but she didn't really mind. She kept rubbing her cheek against it because he was warm and so very tangible, because she had nothing else to do as they sat there together, fingers twined together in the darkness, talking softly. He was doing most of the talking, his words rumbling in his chest, and she was just happy to have her ear pressed up against him, happy to feel her face bump up and down with every little chuckle, happy to feel completely still in the pauses between words.

He said something and she couldn't really make out what it was, but she shut her eyes again because there was nothing to see, and just held on. Held on to his hand, his arm, any part of him she could reach. She pressed herself further into him, shuffling closer into the gap between his legs, pushing him right up against the wall. He laughed and she laughed too. Tilted her head up, closer to his, so close to- and then they were walking out of the closet into the bedroom, down the sprawling staircase into an entryway with weird wooden panelling and huge windows. She'd been there before.

He took her hand. Come on, we're going, and she didn't know where, so she just followed him through a set of swinging doors. They were in a metal room with a huge hamster cage and she wanted to ask why but she didn't. Just stood there looking at hamsters shelling nuts and she turned to ask him, well, several questions, but he was sitting next to one of the hamsters and Lu realised she was in one of the kitchens from Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. No one was cooking anything, though, just hamsters talking and the methodical cracking of shells into paper baskets. This seemed plausible, so she sat down too, cross legged, her knees close enough to touch his, and they shelled pistachios and talked about the weather and though the hamsters wouldn't look at her, he never stopped.

Lu didn't know where they were anymore. They weren't in the closet, nor the big house with the horrible walls or the metal kitchen with the swinging doors and the pistachios and the hamsters. They were standing there and she didn't know which way was which because everything looked the same and she turned around to ask Timmy why they weren't still with the hamsters and then Timmy was kissing her and she was so fucking confused.

So fucking confused.

And he was smiling and kissing her and smiling again and Lu wanted to smile too but she couldn't because she was kissing him and Timmy was close. Like, really close, and his arms were around her waist and then they stopped kissing each other and she looked at him. Looked at him and realised, however briefly, that she'd made a terrible, terrible mistake. One that she could never face up to, and it would be easier just to ignore it, just to ignore Timmy until he went away.

But then he kissed her again and Lu felt like she was floating and she wanted to ask him which way was which because she hadn't seen any signposts on their way here and he let her jump into his arms and does it look like I would know and Lu shrugged because if anyone had any idea what was going on, it might have been him.

And then they sat down in the nothingness which stretched out for miles and miles around them and Lu sat on his lap and they said nothing, did nothing, until all that nothingness was too confusing and it was a sensory overload and Lu didn't even know how because it was just nothing, but it made her wake up and then she lay there, swallowing thickly as the light of Sunday morning filtered through her curtains.

It wasn't that it was a weird dream – not to say that it wasn't, because it was – but what really got to Lu was the fact that five minutes after she'd woken up, she could still remember practically all of it. The bit in the closet, the thing with the house and the hamsters and the nothingness and-