Their voices echo down the lane, not loud enough for me to hear. Both stop at a door halfway along, Ellie fishing keys from her bag and handing her coffee to Kat while she unlocks the door.
If only I’d tried to visit Ellie, she’s asked me often enough. I could have stumbled back into Kat’s lifemonths ago. Hell, maybe years ago. How long have they been friends?
They head into the building, the door closing behind them with a finality that makes me ache.
I wait.
Ten seconds.
Twenty.
Longer. Long enough for them to be well in. If either comes back out, it would be awkward to explain why I’m skulking outside, even if my foster-sister lives here.
Eventually, I brave getting closer.
The windows sit low against the brick wall, curtains pulled across them, but poorly drawn. There’s enough of a gap to let me peer inside. I feel like a creep, but if that’s what it takes to see more of Kat, then a creep I’ll be.
I crouch beside the first window, trying to minimise myself.
A bedroom sits on the other side of the glass. Filled with cushions and books and bric-a-brac. Soft and feminine. A stark contrast to anything in my life.
Clothes flung over the back of a chair, far too pink and girly to be my Ellie’s. Unlit candles and more bottles of perfume than I thought imaginable cluttered the shelf.
Empty. My chest tightens anyway.
Kat’s room.
I shift a little, careful not to scrape my boots against the brick. Beyond the open bedroom doorway, I can see a small sitting room and kitchen. Well, a little of it.
A tiny kitchen-come-living space. It looks tidy, but full. Stacked tubs of pasta and rice. Boxes of cereal and bottles of wine.
A flash of blonde dances across the doorway.
She reaches up to the top cupboard, and her shirt slips further off her shoulder, and the light catches something at her throat.
I freeze.
A cord. Thin and worn smooth with age. And hanging from it, sitting in the hollow of her collarbone, a small pale stone.
Heart-shaped.
The world around me shifts. The kitchen, the window, the brick against my palms, it all goes distant and muffled, because I know that stone. I know it the way I know the stream and the woods and her perfect face. I held it in the water, then held it out to her, and watched her face as she grinned.
She kept it.
For fourteen years.
I press my forehead against the cold glass andclose my eyes. A mixture of relief and pleasure winds through me. She kept the stone.
All this time.
She was nevernotlooking for me.
My lungs cease to inflate. Of all my visions of what it would be like to see Kat again, I never really considered that she’d be hot. That her skirt would inch up, showing me far more leg than I was used to seeing.
Guilt hits first. I kept sex at the end of a distant wall, having little interest in it. It’s been years since anyone touched me, and I vowed never to let anyone get near me again. Not like that.
I’ve never seen the attraction in it.
