ah fuck it.

By the time Kerry got the car back down Camden High Street, the rain had thinned to a mist that silvered the lamps and made the road look lacquered. His tires hissed over wet blacktop. Gio stayed in him like smoke caught in curtains. Her eyes when she went cold. The look on her face when he pulled back. Christ. He kept replaying it with the stupid masochism of a man pressing a sore tooth. The flirtation. The almost. The way her mouth had curled when she called him blondie. The way she’d looked wounded at the end, which made something in him feel mean.

He hated that.

Hated that he’d chosen caution and somehow made it feel like rejection. His skin still held the fever of wanting her. His body knew it, even if his head kept arguing.

The building where he and his mum lived sat wedged above a shuttered Tesco and a chemist, second floor up a narrow stairwell that always smelled faintly of old cooking oil and radiator dust. But first he found Deepti at the entry landing in her coat, keys in hand, waiting to go. She leaned against the rail, black hair pulled up messily, silver hoops flashing when she turned. Pretty in the effortless way that had never once complicated itself between them, because she belonged to the old architecture of his life—neighbor, co-conspirator, almost like a cousin.

“She had a bit of an episode,” Deepti said quietly, voice clipped London with only the faintest trace of somewhere else hidden generations back.

“Nothing violent. Just talking to people who weren’t there. Then she tired herself out and went down easy.” Kerry’s shoulders dropped.

“She asleep now?”

Deepti nodded.

“Like a lamb.”

He reached for folded notes in his pocket and found almost nothing. Coins, mostly. A ten, wrinkled with sweat. His slight drunkenness made him feel worse for it.

“Take it,” He said. “I owe you more.” A lot more.

Deepti gave him a look that made him feel fifteen.

“Don’t be stupid. Pay me when you’re not living on fumes.” She pushed his hand away.

“Go sleep.”

He insisted once more and she refused again, softer. For a second he nearly told her about Gio, about the whole botched night, but didn’t. Some things sounded pathetic once spoken. He kissed Deepti’s cheek in thanks and watched her go down the stairs into wet London, then stood there with his key in the lock thinking, absurdly, of Gio wringing rain from her hair.

Inside, the flat held its usual hush. Cramped, overfurnished, dense with inherited ghosts. German clocks. A walnut cabinet his grandfather had dragged across countries. Porcelain shepherdesses. Lace runners. His mother’s little feminine kingdoms everywhere—pressed flowers in frames, cheap glass angels, a chipped ceramic swan by the sink. In the main room, the lamp cast amber over floral wallpaper gone nicotine-yellow at the seams. He checked her bedroom door first. Open a crack. Sibyl asleep on her side, one hand under her cheek, younger-looking in sleep, almost his sister. That sight always split him.

He went to his room and shut the door. Small, overheated, records stacked against the wall, amp in the corner, ashtray full. The liquor hit him all at once there, a mean delayed wave.

Tequila hot in the gut. Weed still crawling through the bloodstream. He sat on the edge of the bed and laughed once under his breath because he was hard again just thinking of Gio at the window, nipples pebbling under the wet shirt, the shape of her in the lamplight. It irritated him, how quickly desire made a fool of him. He scrubbed a hand over his face. Then, because he was twenty-one and blood-ridden and no saint, he got it out of his system in the blunt, lonely way he sometimes does, head full of tawny eyes and tequila breath and what he hadn’t done. Quick. Guilty. Necessary.

Isn't that the truth? It wasn't always from lack of effort —something willful in her resisted the time-jump between Southern California and North London so that her nights may as well have been her mornings, and the early morning hours of the night could have very well served as her afternoons. Mornings, afternoons, were meant for sleeping off whatever bullshit she'd crammed up her nose or swallowed down her gullet the night before.

But that, too, is the method of her craft.

Cee paces outside the Fonda Theater with her hands crammed into the deep pockets of her oversized canvas. Her hair, cut short and sticking up waywardly from behind her ears, is tucked beneath a dark blue beanie that keeps sliding off her skull. From inside the venue, Cee can hear the pounding thrum and wail of the performance inside. Out here, all she smells is gasoline, hot dogs sizzling on electric griddles, sweet sewage staining the gutters. Traffic fumes. Her stomach growls impassively at the scent of cooking beef, slabs of greasy bacon, diced green peppers and onion. She knows better than to look in the direction of the vendors, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the venue's crowd just as plainly as she. Despite wanting a hot dog, she can't afford it yet.

Pale blue eyes dart to check the Casio watch fastened loose at her narrow wrist. 6:43 p.m. She pockets her hands again, fumbles for a pack of cigarettes, and sticks a Camel stem in between her lips.

She reasons that she gets more calls at night —the weighted bag of prescription pills sagging at her fanny pack, packed zip of brown ruffage, couple 8-balls pressed neat into tiny baggies —and anything else she has on her will likely be weightless, emptied, by the time her beaten Casio reads 3 a.m., she ought to have made enough coin to earn a trip to the convenience store and head back home. It's a reasonable effort.

But tonight? The marine haze that hangs over the city seems thicker, instilling a new weight in her bones. There's a constant impression of a rock pressed somewhere deep against the organ of her heart. There's an image, rampant, burning at the walls of her skull so that anytime she closes her eyes, that's all she can fucking see.

Cee lights her cigarette with a dying lighter. She thinks about Gio, again, for the thousandth time tonight. She knows too well that her plane has landed hours ago. Doesn't even have to count ahead to know what time it is in London, to know that Gio's had access to a phone, to know that Gio's just refused to call her.

It shouldn't be surprising. And it isn't. But it still feels like a punch to the gut, every time she finds herself compulsively sifting through her bag for the international burner phone she'd picked up at the Metro (blue, plastic, nokia) —flipping the cheap plastic open, 0 missed calls, 0 new voicemails. It shouldn't bother her like it does. Gio doesn't really owe her anything anymore, least of all a phone call to specify that she'd made it over alright —it was her first flight, she didn't like planes, surely she wanted to call someone? Surely she'd need to call Her?

Like clockwork, a phone in her fanny pack begins to buzz. Cee immediately stiffens, nearly dropping her cigarette in her effort to open up her bag and dig frantically for the source.

It's her blue phone. She immediately flips it open, punches green, clutches the cheap plastic to her ear as she hurries away from the open street —toward an alleyway that housed a dive bar, Japanese restaurant. It smells like thick sewage over here, but she's too amped to notice.