Blazed(32)

I winced at a particularly sharp yank at my hair. " 'They all died'?"

"No! Happily ever after!" When were you lobotomised? It wasn't like her to churn out rose-tinted romantic clichés. Not even a little bit.

"Ugh, Jesus. I'll be sat right here waiting when you, strange alien imposter, return my dear unromantic, cynical Esme."

"Keep saying that. I'll be waiting to hit you back with my 'I told you so'."





MRS REYNOLDS ONLY had to have her offer of another day off sick with full pay refused once before she let it drop. Maybe it was a wisdom that came with age, but she knew the points of my personality that were negotiable and altering my routine was not one of them. Instead, she showed me the fridge full of orange juice she'd stockpiled to give me a vitamin C kick and relegated me to paperwork duties to keep me off my feet.

The tedious process of cross-referencing the stock information she'd complied over the week and the information we had on our system was just monotonous enough for me to get lost in it's rhythm. My head bobbed to the sound of Portishead I picked out from my MP3 player and soothed me to a state of near-hypnotism, moving almost automatically without thought. She always had me do something slow paced like this when she knew I was going through a rough patch, offering me an opportunity to shut down and recover when others wouldn't let me. The typical tactic was to distract me, wearing me out so I couldn't brood over my problems, when peace was what I really needed. How else would my body catch up?

I had heartburn to rival a nuclear holocaust when I got home that night. Racked with dry heaves and draped over porcelain, Esme held my hair and traced shapes on my back while I panted through the spasms that tore through my stomach.

We had sat that way too many times before— naked and mutually post-orgasmically exhausted. What good had ever come from living my life that way until Blaze came, a man who took me out of that pattern whilst simultaneously satisfying all the criterion I set for a 'normal' night? Why was I so scared to go home alone just once rather than add notches to my bed post, leaving me feeling dirty and devalued?

"Am I wasting my life?" I looked over my shoulder at Esme, resting my cheek against the toilet seat. "Is this work- drink-f*ck-sleep cycle doing as much damage as I think it is?"

"I can't answer that definitively for you, Emmy, but it's not great." My eyes closed, acknowledging the confirmation of my thoughts. "I love to hear you purr and watch you drift off when you're satisfied, but it's sobering to hear what you say to yourself when you're asleep." I flushed, unaware that I'd ever spoken in my sleep. "We've all learned to accept that this is who you are— you and your pernicious hallucination who tells you to hate yourself— but it's hard being your friends, for no reason other than the fact we're so useless to help you and doomed to watch you spiral out of control."

Her honesty was hard to hear but I took note and considered it carefully as she slept next to me that night. I don't know that if she'd told me how they felt sooner it might have changed my perspective, but in that moment I was ready to reconsider a way of living I thought was working for me.





I WOKE UP on Friday morning bloody minded and determined, sporting a mentality I could only liken to the force of will I'd adopted when I first sat down to draw Syncretic Sciences. My aim was simple; to act like the entitled young woman I was without sacrificing the simpler life I'd fought for by shunning high society. Esme helped me pack the ill-fitting, unbecoming clothes I'd lived in not so long ago into bags, destined for the charity shop next to Double Booked to be exiled from my wardrobe indefinitely. For the first time in years I had surplus income thanks to Blaze's gentlemanly tendency to cover the bill whenever we went out, so I spent it on a new bed I had no intention of sharing with strangers. My second chance bed. If I couldn't be someone Hunter and Blaze wanted to love, I'd become someone they wanted to miss.

The bags of unwanted clothes sat along side the box of Blaze's belongings on the coffee table when I left for work, just a pile of dead weight I'd been insisting on carrying around. It all looked fairly innocuous when it sat there so innocently, but I knew how damaging it could be to keep it. The time to dwell was over. The ghosts residing in those objects would be laid to rest, or so I hoped.

I wasn't Emmeline Tudor, but I wasn't the same Emmeline White who'd cut herself over a catty remark when she was seventeen. I was new, improved, and damned if I'd let my past catch up with me again.



THE latter part of July saw a minor influx of custom, enough for there to always be at least one person browsing the shelves at all times. As dire as that might have seemed, these were the beginnings of our prime days before another minor improvement around late August. The rare occasions when customers tried to spark a conversation were the times I tried the hardest to force my new outlook, smiling politely and chatting back when I might have usually grunted a dismissive, monosyllabic response and wished them away.

It stung when people recognised me from the pictures at The Roses despite my drastic image change, and asked me some fairly intrusive questions about my fabricated relationship with the ever pre-eminent Blaze. Women mostly wanted to know if he was well hung while the men wanted to shower me with compliments and insist that they'd make a better bedfellow. As complimentary as it may have been, and as familiar I was with that kind of attention, I felt ill at ease and out of my element, almost lost in a place I knew so well. The more small talk I forced, the more claustrophobic I felt until my earlier positivity was almost completely sapped.

I took a late lunch and opted to escape the confines of the shop to roam the side streets I knew would be quiet. My Thursday vitamin boost had done wonders and the only remaining evidence that I'd been ill was a slightly runny nose and the lethargy I could no longer fend off. It helped that I'd been pounding decongestants as much as the dosage recommendations would allow.

The distant throb of traffic in the distance played as a soundtrack alongside the steady click-clack of my kitten heels through the thoroughfares that stemmed off the main streets into smaller, more intimate areas of the city. In my mind I was searching, though I didn't know what for. I'd already seen most of the shops and townhouses that filled the streets during aimless wanders with Blaze, who had an innate ability to seek out jewels in a huge coal mine of conurbation.

I took the time to sit at an abandoned children's playground hidden between a splash of poorly kept greenery and a vein of largely boarded up retail units. All but one swing hung uselessly from their chains— a perfect epitome of how I felt inside. Change wasn't as easy as I hoped and the optimism was hard to hold on to. If I could have bottled it I would have and shared it freely with anyone else as forlorn and demoralised as me.

But the single swing that still stood functional felt like a reminder that even in the most dilapidated spaces there were survivors, something that refused to go down with the rest of the pitiful wreckage. No matter how poorly managed it was, there was always something fighting against fate, a spark of hope in perpetual darkness.

What was stopping me from being that something— if not for myself then for the friends who took my crap on a daily basis?



MRS Reynolds had a look of roguery about her when I got back to the shop, suppressing a smile given away by the deep dimples in her cheeks. Her hands rested on a brown paper package bound up in parcel string. Unremarkable, yet strangely the most out of place item in sight.

"You've had a delivery," she spoke with tethered laughter, "of the utmost importance, I'm assured."

The sparkle in her eyes unnerved me but told me that there was no option to open the parcel in private. I pulled at the string and sucked in a shaky breath when the paper fell open.

The world wanted to play games with me and I was in no mood to take my turn.





Eleven





THE BROWN PAPER package contained a red gingham swing dress, a pair of white sandals and a small white card tucked into a ribbon around the base of a floppy straw hat much like the one I'd worn to lunch with Ivy. I recognised every item from my own wardrobe apart from the hat and my chest tightened with my knowing who must have been in the flat to find them. The card bore nothing but the words 'I'm sorry' in lavish calligraphy and detailed directions to an unnamed location on the reverse.

"Go on then." Mrs Reynolds peered over my shoulder and shoved me playfully. "You have somewhere to be. It would be rude to keep them waiting." Instantly, I suspected she knew precisely who was waiting and that the package had been hand delivered by the same person. It made too much sense that it would have arrived at a time I would have usually been working rather than during my usual lunch hour. He must have been watching or had her in cahoots— this was just his style.

But I was past the point of incitement. "I still have three hours left of my shift."