The jet jerks, tires rolling forward, gaining momentum along the landing field. Claire’s knees knock together, and she stills, frozen. Doesn’t hate flying; will not admit she hates flying. She hates the recycled air, enclosed space, the turbulence--------- how it doesn’t quite make sense; a large, aluminum machine just soaring through the air for hours at a time. 

       They’ve given her an office that almost screams cliche. A new level of corporate that is, in some way, laughable. But she shouldn’t laugh ( though she’s tempted with every second she’s in the building ) and doesn’t. Claire knows better. So she’s left to shuffling papers and reading yet another email about yet another fire still left over from an already limitless disaster. 

          He’d sent the text,  clutching the phone in the grip of a child afraid of dropping it,  of watching it snap and shatter around his feet.  Things are already shattered enough.  With pain pinching behind his face,  and a heavy head  - with an even  HEAVIER  weight swinging as a pendulum in his chest -,  he’d swallowed whatever it what that had him fleeing over the threshold,  drowned the fiend telling him to carry on,  carry on,  with coffee,  and choked it with nicotine.  Oliver Lucas is a coward;  for,  it wasn’t an immediate action upon his waking,  and it wasn’t the instantaneous view that this was the right thing to do.  No.  Oliver Lucas took time,  to wring his hands and beat his knuckles;  to recall the genial touch of her pressed against his face.  She was kindly,  she was good.  Swiped the blood off his face without question,  fixed the broken bone herself.  Zara let him in,  did all of that,  and he left her.  And such wasn’t blatantly wrong to him until after caffeine and a box of cigarettes.  Oliver Lucas is a coward.

          Just wants to see her,  talk  ---  they never talk.  He never talks.  Flighty gelding too afraid of the noise to do anything else but  BOLT  before the danger comes too near.  The truth isn’t supposed to sting like this,  he thinks  ---  but perhaps that’s simply because he’s never,  in his life,  acknowledged any of it.  He’s a blind man.  He’d sent the text.

         It’s the green season,  there’s a faint tinge of petrichor to pinch,  just so,  at Oliver’s bruised senses.  He walks with his hands in his pockets and his eyes downcast;  there are grey clouds staining the early evening sky,  and the grey etching of  GUILT  sat snug beneath his skin.  It’s obstinate,  it won’t leave.

          She’d been gentle,  and wanting.  Peeled back his second skin with the tenderness they’d lost,  and she hadn’t choked at the site of his bloody,  bloody mess.  He’d brought it into her home,   INVADED  her space,  just as swiftly as he’d exited.  Left her there.  She wanted to fix it.

          He’s seen her red-eyed,  gaunt,  pieced together just with the bare fabric of reality that which drags them all from their pits every morning.  Behind which,  there’s no vitality.  That sticks.  Zara Young,  curled against the shower wall beneath the dropping shards of boiling water like scathing glass;  he’d tucked her in;  he’d left her.  That sticks.  That fucking wok. . .  stood at her door in a way he’s holding himself now;  HUNCHED  and bent at angles.  The wok,  the wok  ---  he hadn’t wanted the wok.  It’s stupid.  He hadn’t wanted it;  he hadn’t;  he doesn’t.  And it sticks.

          So this,  thinks the ignorant craven,  is a resolution.  Conversation  ---  it’s what people do,  isn’t it?  It’s what people do.

           ❝ The good news is that we won’t be facing jail time, bad news   -we might have to testify.❞ 

        Oliver Lucas is not a morning person ---  but strangely enough,  he’s always up to see the sunrise.  It’s seldom out of choice.  Today has been just the same;  but today he forgoes the morning coffee on the balcony.  He’s in the kitchen,  a bowl held carefully like a child in the crook of his elbow,  curls already displaced upon his brow.  There’s a frying pan heating to his right.

        She,  still with some veil of sleep upon her face,  has found him armed with a whisk.  If she’s perplexed by the sight of him with flour flicking his knuckles and his shirt collar fallen wonky  (  he’s unbuttoned it  ),  then he seems not to notice.  Greets Zara,  instead,  with the deft quirking of a brow.  Appears like a boy caught,  with wider and innocent eyes.

        ‘  What?  ’

        There’s flour dusting his cheek,  too.  He’s failed to notice. Misses the kitchen when he is not in it and,  like a zealous fool,  is perhaps a little too close to getting carried away.  

                    Red wellington boots.  A child’s tuxedo,  and those sodding,  bright red,  wellington boots.  Twenty-three years ago.  The lad was small,  bouncing at his mother’s side,  and shy.  Looking at him now,  the whiskey-downing,  back-clapping,  bastard son of Joseph Lucas seems not at all like his more youthful counterpart.  And Robert hates him.

                    Charlotte took a shine to him;  right there,  the wedding day,  and those red wellington boots.  The boy had grown to be reckless,  over-privileged and assuming  ---  and a drunkard,  aged fifteen.  No one else saw it,  no one else wanted to;  no one wanted to see the boy’s eyes ringed red,  or the sleepless nights clinging to that jaw of his.  He’d jut it out,  hands in his pockets of his Armani,  and would drop conceit like bile from between his teeth.  He’s laughing now,  carousing with the faceless crowd just as much as a  STUCK PIG  can carouse with the dinner guests,  he supposes.  Holds his liquor better now;  holds a lot more of it,  too.  Happy Birthday,  you bastarding shit.  And Robert hates him.

                    He’s mantling a brandy at a bar swathed in low-light,  hunkered down in the dark whilst his wife smothers herself with all that gleaming attention on the dance floor.  Across from him Richard Astor,  the bloody great hulk of a man,  spits niceties at a pretty blonde who is not his wife.  Robert doesn’t know her;  doesn’t quite care.  His company’s sober enough,  and that’s all that matters.

                    The bar to the left of him swings,  there’s a smudge of deep purple in his peripheral.  Yes,  he’s wearing purple;  fine thing,  too.  Royalty,  isn’t it?  Richard wants to throw his glass in his face.  Oliver Lucas sweeps himself behind the bar with the flourish of a man just on the very edge of sobriety,  teeters on his heels just so,  swoops to collect a bottle hidden away below.  There’s one curl out of place on his head.  There will be more than that.

                    Still has a boy’s face.  Handsome,  yes,  objectively.  And it is objective;  Charlotte doesn’t fuck a man for his personality.  But it’s a boy’s brow that which bends;  a boy’s mouth crooning around the timbre of elitism that they all share  ---  it’s stuck in the air and,  for once,  Robert can’t find fault with that.

                    ‘  And I thought I was fucking miserable.  Sitting on you own?  ’

                       There’s a swift  GLUG;  he’s clumsy pouring his own drink.  Robert Enfield tilts his jaw,  bequeaths glacial,  ostensible jest.

                    ‘  Wife’s been too busy dancing with you.  ’

                    ‘  If you’re envious we could dance,  ’      Whiskey makes him a shit  ---  more of a shit,      ‘  I’d have to lead,  though.  Always.  Can you do the graceful side of things,  Enfield?  ’

                    It’s not funny.  Robert makes a noise,  a splintered guffaw,  that declares so.  And if Oliver’s perturbed he makes no showing of such.  Robert points;  his finger hovers over the bar like a wasp.

                    ‘  But you.  You can dance,  can’t you?  Young man like you,  oh,  you can dance.  ’

                    Oliver’s eyes wander fleetingly to his glass,      ‘  Perhaps you should stick to the lemonade for the rest of the evening.  I hear one’s tolerance reduces with age.  Damn shame,  that.  ’

                    Robert Enfield is a blunt rake of a man,  forty-five,  and bloody woeful.  Always a down-turned face;  he keeps his stresses around his eyes.  Even here,  Oliver can see them twitching;  and feel them  SWEEPING.  Down and up.  Oliver allows it;  is no stranger to being the meat on the shelf.  Enfield’s a business partner,  not a friend.  Meat,  he deals in meat,  and the eldest Lucas has never really wanted anything to do that side of things.  You can’t get drunk on beef,  the Enfields weren’t interesting.  And then he sold himself to his wife.

                     He treads on ice,  and it’s always thinning,  he thinks.  Enfield’s nodding into his glass,  damn shame,  and lifts his head like a hyena.  He thinks,  the prick’s still smiling.  And he is,  Oliver’s perpetually painted with that false leer of his;  armour of some kind.  Robert knows the look;  the boy’s out of his depth,  he has been for years.

                    Oliver’s looking over the man’s shoulder,  catches eyes from across the room.  Sea foam,  they’re frowning,  and denying.  Charlotte’s sticking to the crowds,  she’s not rescuing him from this,  merges into the masses with an apparent teasing quirk of a brow;  all yours,  Lucas.  They have their fun,  still.  They’re caught.  The ice creaks.

                    ‘  You like my wife,  Oliver?  ’

                    The younger lightly swings the bottle of whiskey from its neck between his fingers.

                    ‘  I’ve always liked your wife.  ’

                       Beneath,  the waters are murky,  he doesn’t understand.  Can see this predator but cannot see its  TEETH.  Enfield has him pinned here,  with his hunched shoulders and his brows making for his hairline in mock interest.  This isn’t about dancing,  and the man’s not drunk.  No.  Oliver knows what drunk looks like;  it’s warm,  smudged at the edges.  Robert Enfield is cold,  and his edges are sharp. 

                    ‘  Lemonade,  Enfield. . .  ’      He’ll stick to the charade,  fine,      ‘  And the tap water’s free.  ’

                    Twenty minutes and he can leave.  Zara,  sat at their table,  that wry smile he’ll take as a welcome and,  thought you’d be late.  Oliver can make it twenty minutes.  Looks to do so and makes to twist upon his heels.  Away,  away from the knotting in his stomach and Charlotte slipping out of sight;  away from the uncertainty he’s afraid of and those hyena’s eyes;  away  ---

                    Someone reaches,  drags him back by his wrist.  The bottle between his fingers drops,  SPLINTERS  upon glossed wood with a great crack!  The shards are sent scattering across the bar,  and onto his shoes.  Christ,  it echoes!