Just for the Rush. Jane Lark

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      I sat down on the cushions, upright, facing the fire, with my knees bent up and my arms hugging my legs.

      He’d put his phone in a docking system and the music played out through speakers, Maroon 5, ‘Maps’. He went into the kitchen and came back in a couple of minutes with a bowl of nuts and a bowl of olives, then he handed me my refilled glass and finally sat down near me, leaning back against the sofa, holding his glass. His knees were bent up too but slightly parted.

      ‘Oh fuck it…’ he said it out of nowhere, for no apparent reason, and then he drained his glass, set it down on the hearth in front of the wood-burner, and moved the bowl of olives there too, and the nuts. Then he lay down, with his knees bent upward and one hand behind his head.

      He looked up at me as the next song came on. ‘Animals’, it was the V album. It was what he’d been listening to in the car when I woke up.

      His eyes shut. Then he started singing.

      ‘You know your phone is full of breakup music, don’t you?’

      His eyes opened but he still sang the next line, smiling at me. He had a good voice. I hadn’t heard him sing before, but his voice blended with the song and made it better—

      ‘So what, I bet you have a freezer full of cartons of Ben & Jerry’s.’

      ‘You got me.’

      He shut his eyes again, and sang – the song was really laddish.

      ‘Did you love Sharon?’

      ‘That is a banned subject.’ He hadn’t opened his eyes.

      I sipped some of my champagne then twisted sideways so I faced him. ‘I know, but answer the question please? I’d like to know, seeing as we’re planning on having sex.’

      He stopped singing and his eyes opened. ‘Yes, I sort of did.’

      ‘When did you stop loving her?’

      ‘I probably never did, properly, but I didn’t start realising that until about a year ago.’

      ‘How did you decide what you felt wasn’t true any more?’

      He stared at me, one hand still behind his head. ‘We weren’t like you and Rick, we lived fast and we played hard. We weren’t in each other’s pockets the whole time. And, believe me, it’s been pretty easy to cut her off. She’s proved herself to be an absolute bitch. But anyway, I really don’t want to talk about that. What about you and Rick?’

      ‘I do still love him like a friend. But there’s no desperation. I want to feel desperate when I love someone.’

      His gaze held mine, the pupils at the heart of his eyes wide in the electric light.

      I drank the last of my champagne.

      ‘Do you want more?’

      ‘No it’ll give me a headache. I wouldn’t mind a lager, though, if we’re going to stay up.’

      ‘I don’t drink lager. Ale? Do you want a bottle of ale?’

      ‘Yeah, okay.’

      He got up and went into the kitchen. Then came back with two open bottles. He flipped the light switch off when he came past it.

      The only light in the room then came from the flames in the burner. He handed me a bottle, then tapped the neck of my bottle with the base of his. ‘Happy morning. Technically we’re not staying up late, we’re up early.’

      He put his bottle down on the hearth beside his empty glass, then turned his back on me and walked around behind the sofa.

      He opened the cupboard under the stairs and reached into it to get something off a high shelf, something that he’d obviously had hidden away so his cleaner wouldn’t find it. He pulled out a tin. ‘Do you smoke cannabis?’

      ‘Shit, I didn’t know you did that.’

      ‘Do you smoke it?’

      I breathed out, my heart dancing to the beat of his music. ‘No.’ Not even when I was at school. Rick and I had got together a month before my sixteenth birthday; I’d never had an adolescent stage when I’d tested out life.

      ‘Do you want to try it?’

      ‘I don’t know. What does it do to you?’

      ‘You sound like you’re fourteen. It relaxes you. It’s a downer.’

      ‘A downer?’

      ‘I’m not so good at relaxing; my head races with too much stuff—’

      ‘You drink too much coffee.’

      ‘I know, that’s an upper, it keeps me punched up and thinking fast at work, but I keep cannabis up here so when I get away from the city I can chill out.’

      ‘You don’t smoke it in London.’

      ‘Not so much now.’

      ‘Is it addictive?’

      ‘Do you want me to look up FRANK on my phone? There’s a whole website there that’ll tell you the risks and what it does. Or are you going to call the police…’ He dropped down on the cushions next to me again and settled his back against the sofa. ‘They wouldn’t do anything, you know, there’s hardly any here. I’m not a dealer, only a casual smoker.’

      He opened the tin, then glanced up at me and smiled. His look took the piss, calling me naive.

      I sipped from the bottle of ale and watched him pull out a long, white bit of paper. He lay it on the lid, then put what I thought was tobacco in that. I’d never been a smoker at all, so I knew nothing. Then he lifted out a bag of greener-looking stuff and sprinkled that along the tobacco.

      He glanced up. ‘I haven’t put too much in, so you can see if you like the feeling first. But I wouldn’t put too much in anyway – you only want enough to relax and feel good.’ He looked back at what he was doing and rolled the paper up into a tube about the tobacco with his dexterous long fingers and thumbs.

      I drank my ale while I watched him.

      He licked the edge of the paper, then grinned at me as he rolled the joint so it sealed.

      The last thing he did was tear a little bit of card off the packet he’d taken the paper from, then he rolled that up and slotted it into the end of the joint.

      He looked up and grinned at me again as he lifted it to his lips and then, sucking on the other end, he held a lighter flame to it. It flared as it lit. He took it out of his mouth and blew out the flame, so the end glowed and nothing more.

      ‘You don’t smoke,’ I said really stupidly.

      ‘No.’ He sucked on the joint again, breathing it in deep, and held the smoke in his mouth for a while, then blew the smoke out upward.

      ‘But СКАЧАТЬ