All the Little Things Sarah Lawton (red white royal blue TXT) 📖

it be like this after the explosion of everything in my life? I can’t stand it. I can’t stand her. I force out words, brambles in my throat.

‘It will probably be cooler by the sea, if it’s not raining by then. It always rains when we go on holiday.’

She smiles and I know she’s thinking of the week we spent in Spain, near Valencia, when it rained so hard that everywhere flooded and people’s cars floated off down the street. One man actually drowned. Imagine drowning in your car, rain filling it up drop by drop, slowly stealing the air. I think I know how he must have felt.

‘Hopefully not as much as Spain, hey?’ She croaks out a laugh, and I feel a flicker of hope that at least she’s not going to be moody and annoying all day. She rubs at her shoulder and looks at me.

‘How did you get that bruise?’ she asks me, nodding her head at my shoulder. I reach up and realise I have a mark where Alex bit me yesterday, in the woods, when he came.

‘I just banged it on something,’ I lie, easily. Lies slip out so gracefully, so much softer than sharp truths. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’ I don’t ask her about hers as she tugs her T-shirt to cover it because, again, I don’t really care. I want to get out of the house and find Alex but he hasn’t texted me back yet. I’m pissed off, and starting to think he’s ignoring my messages. Is he angry about what happened with Molly? He doesn’t have to be, but boys are like that, I suppose. Jealous. I just want to see him and pick up where we left off. I want him to make me burn again.

Rachel

I didn’t leave the house on Sunday, except to go to the studio to retrieve my phone, which I found myself checking for messages from Alex, like a teenager. I claimed a migraine and hid in my room, not that Vivian cared. I knew I should ask her about why she had come home so late when she was supposed to be staying at Molly’s, but I couldn’t focus on anything. She slipped out of the house for school on Monday looking as exhausted as I felt, everything about her a little limp and jaded. I promised myself I would speak to her properly that night, thinking their petty drama would probably have resolved itself by then anyway.

I had been keeping such a close watch on her for so long that I had completely neglected myself, and I spent much of the morning trying to tell myself that what I had done was understandable in the circumstances. Who wouldn’t have been flattered? I was vulnerable, a bit broken. Maybe I deserved some pleasure for once, however brief and potentially damaging. I wouldn’t do it again, and I prayed he wouldn’t tell anyone. He hadn’t given me the impression he was the type, but that didn’t stop my imagination.

Eventually, I went back to the studio to face my shame. I leafed through my work, trying to trace the point at which I had started using Alex’s face as the inspiration for the faery prince. I had only known him for a week. A week, and I had fallen into bed with him like some idiot from a terrible movie, a Lolita in reverse. I couldn’t get to the bottom of the feelings that I had for him. I wasn’t sure I even had any; everything I was feeling was aimed at myself, arrows of guilt and disgust peppered with absolution. I hadn’t done anything illegal, obviously, but surely it was immoral. I was embarrassed, and afraid that if people found out I wouldn’t be able to live with it – not here. You couldn’t be anonymous in the village: your business was everyone’s business. Scandal was currency, and this would go a long way, especially at a time like this, when the whole place was swamped in grief for the Beaumont family, what was left of it. I tried to stop thinking.

The retro clock on the studio wall seemed to get louder and louder the more I tried to clear my head. The ticking turned into a whine of white noise in my ears and I thought I was going to pass out; I had to grip the desk as my vision swam in front of me. My focus came back as the hum passed, and I looked again at that picture, of Alex, of me, caught together and pulling away, the desperation, the struggle. I picked it up. It was good work, but I tore it slowly into strips and squares, ripping through our faces, dropping us like confetti into the waste bin.

I was making yet another cup of coffee when the doorbell went. My first worry was that it might be Alex, and I felt a fist of sudden anxiety worming up from my stomach to clutch at my throat. What would I say to him? What would he want, expect, from me now? I hadn’t heard anything from him since Saturday and had tentatively begun to hope that he had got his older woman conquest and would just leave me alone. I crept through the hall and looked through the spy hole in the door.

It wasn’t Alex, it was Abi, Molly’s mum. I opened the door.

‘Have the girls left yet?’ she said, in a cheerful voice. ‘Molly isn’t answering her phone and she wanted me to write her a note for PE but I didn’t get round to it so I thought I’d drop it in. I’ll take it up to the school if I’ve missed her.’

I was confused, clouded. ‘Molly hasn’t been here, Abi,’ I told her. ‘Viv came home late Saturday night and she’s been here on her own the rest of the weekend.’

Abi visibly paled at my words. I saw her swallow. ‘She texted me, Rachel. She said