The People at Number 9 by Felicity Everett

Author:Felicity Everett [Everett, Felicity]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Harlequin (UK) Ltd
Published: 2017-03-14T22:00:00+00:00

15

There was nothing so wrong with the after party, and yet Sara realised an hour in, that she was miserable. Lou had given her a fragrant kiss on arrival, and seemed gratified to be told that Sara had found Cuckoo really incredibly moving. Then a man with a goatee had come along, whose good opinion seemed to matter to Lou a little more than Sara’s, so she had drifted away feeling like a spare part.

While Neil fought his way to the bar, Sara stood by the toilets observing the scene. The décor was a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of the traditional gentlemen’s club, its rickety floorboards, button-backed armchairs and reading lamps undercut by artworks of lacerating modernity and a soundtrack of ambient music that would have caused apoplexy at the Drones club. There were a lot of people there. They couldn’t all have been at the film, but since everyone was dressed in the same stridently non-conformist way, it was impossible to tell whether they were guests of Lou and Gavin or just regular club members. This made the prospect of mingling even more daunting and Sara determined only to approach people she had definitely seen before. She spotted a guest from Lou and Gavin’s housewarming making a beeline for her, and readied herself with a smile, only for it to die on her lips when the woman barged straight past her into the Ladies. Neil bought her a drink and then left her in order to take Lou a congratulatory glass of Champagne. Her shoes were chafing and she was tired of standing in the gusts of jet-propelled air wafting out of the toilet, so she threaded her way through the crowd to a back room, where she subsided gracefully onto a leather Chesterfield next to an old woman wearing owlish glasses and magenta lipstick. The room was hot. Sara could feel sweat collecting on her top lip. She slipped off one shoe and rubbed her heel surreptitiously.

“Did you enjoy the prem-ee-er?” the woman said, in a gravelly American accent.

“You mean Cuckoo?” she said in surprise. “Oh, I did. I absolutely loved it.”

The woman pursed her magenta lips, nodded sagely and closed her eyes. Sara waited for her to open them again and vouchsafe some finely honed critical response, but realised after a moment that her companion had nodded off. She sat, marooned, torn between her need for another drink and the dread prospect of making her way to the bar. She had all but resigned herself to sobriety, when she glimpsed, through the forest of legs, a familiar pair of battered suede brogues.

“Hello, stranger,” she said, tapping Gav on the shoulder. He turned, a little reluctantly, from a pretty redhead he’d been talking to.

“Oh, hi Sara,” he said. “Rohmy, this is Sara.”

The redhead slowly relinquished her grip on Gavin’s lapels, which she had been clutching in a humorous attempt to convince him of her point of view, and acknowledged Sara with a grudging smile.

“Hey, maybe Sara knows…”

If Gavin felt any frustration at Sara’s interruption, he didn’t show it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.