The Trivia Night by Ali Lowe

Author:Ali Lowe [Lowe, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Alice

Transcript: The voice of Alice Daniels in the office of Dr Martha Davis.

It was eight o’clock when I woke up, which is so unlike me. I’m usually already in the kitchen making sandwiches and whatnot by six thirty. Pete would tell you I’m an ‘up and at them’ type of person, definitely not a lie-inner. After all, the early bird catches the worm! But no, the morning after the trivia night, not only did I lie in, but I woke up somewhere else entirely.

I seem to remember needing to move my leg, but it was trapped by a soft limb, a calf without hair, smooth and light like a marshmallow. Nothing like Pete’s heavy cumbersome legs. Up higher, a thin arm, Lara’s left, reached across my belly, a henna tattoo snaking up her wrist and a single solitaire next to a wedding band on the third finger of her hand. Her fingers were slim, and her knuckles jutted out, almost like she needed more flesh on them. Extraordinarily dainty fingers, not sturdy ones – if that’s the best description – like mine. Fingers that might snap easily. I hadn’t noticed how slender they were the night before, when they had beckoned me, sweetly, on to the dimly-lit deck.

I felt the urge to stretch, but I didn’t want to startle my bedfellow and have to talk, so I didn’t move, just lay rigid. Played sleeping lions. I stared up ahead, up at the non-descript white ceiling, and watched the fan whirr around slowly, spreading us in a cotton blanket of air, listened to its hum, like the purr of a cat. I inched my head to the right, taking in the sunlight streaming in from the French windows. The garden beyond was filled with toys, tons of them, that I hadn’t noticed the night before: an easel with chalks spilling around the base, a hosepipe attached to a rocket launcher, a pink ball, a red bike resting on its side with a purple helmet swinging from the handlebars. Ridden through the gate and dropped there by Sienna en route to the house. A white-washed Wendy house with its own veranda, and a slide leading down to the lush green grass below, sat in the bottom right-hand corner of the yard. So many toys – way more than Freya and Lottie have (with them it’s just books, books, books). I wondered if, had I seen these things the previous night, remembered that Lara was a mother, seen the house as the home of a small child and not a sort of adult play space, something would have clicked in me, woken me up to what I was doing, and I would have gone home. But it wasn’t really so much a serious pondering as the moral side of my mind posing the dilemma, inviting me to feel guilty about what we’d done together.

Lara stirred and exhaled deeply, slowly, her chest rising and falling contentedly, as if she were in the midst of a beautiful dream.

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.