starter for @gutterbrat
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.
After all of that, he lies back staring at the ceiling, pulse settling. But the wanting doesn't vanish, it only changes shape. Becomes restlessness. Becomes obligation. Cee will be awake. Cee is always awake on the other side of the world. He reaches for the phone on the floor beside the mattress, cigarette already in his mouth, and starts dialing, half dreading the sound of her voice and half needing it. Because whatever this was with Gio—whatever spark he’d nearly stepped into—belongs now to a much bigger mess.
