Blazed (23 page)

"Am I wasting my life?" I looked over my shoulder at Esme, resting my cheek against the toilet seat. "Is this work- drink-fuck-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. 

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."

"It's hardly a rave in here. I think I have the place under control." Groaning indecisively, I pulled one sandal up from the paper with a fingertip and sighed at it. My mind played through all the scenarios possible. I didn't have a good enough sense of direction to figure out where I was being led to— that alone triggered alarm bells. It didn't necessarily have to be Blaze who sent the package when enough people knew where I kept my spare key. 

But what it all really boiled down to was that I'd been focusing so hard on wanting him to turn up that I'd been blocking out how nervous I was to see him again. I'd been dreading a chance encounter in the street, nightmare visions of seeing him wrapped around another woman making the deepest pits of my stomach cartwheel and backflip. It was too likely that I'd snap and act foolishly, either breaking down into tears or throwing myself at him just for him to push me away and tell me that he didn't want me that way anymore. A worst prospect was the disappointment and self-pity if I got myself worked up to see him and it wasn't him waiting for me.
 

"What do you have to lose?" Mrs Reynolds' question niggled at a point that I also had to consider. I had
 
nothing 
left to lose. I'd lost everything already. My two men were gone, my family barely present in my life and my friends were feeling dejected. Was I really going to torture myself by seeking him out?

Of course I was. I was one of
 
those 
people.

THE message on the card filled my mind as I followed the simple directions, finger restlessly brushing across the penmanship as I walked. 'I'm sorry' for what exactly? Sorry that he left? Sorry that he ever arrived? What good was an apology if the reason remained a mystery, and why all this supplementary cloak and dagger bullshit? Just the card would have done without the stupid treasure hunt. 

The directions led me to the same restaurant we'd ended up at the day of our smoothie date, specifically to the mezzanine, but the manager there already knew that much. His smile was a little too wise when he led me to the foot of the staircase and paused to pass me a glass of white wine.
 

"Mr Lundy will join you shortly, Miss White." Mr Lundy? My mouth dropped open an inch to enquire but I just didn't have it in me to speak in that moment. If I did, it wouldn't make sense anyway. Now that the possibility of seeing him was gone, I had to battle through a blind date with a man I didn't know. My strength was best saved for that.

Slowly, I ascended the steps with high hopes for more wine waiting, barely noticing the gentle lilt of music coming from the mezzanine. As soon as I noticed that, I noticed the scattered pink, red and white petals creeping up the top most steps and the scent of fragrant blossoms.

The terrace looked much different from the last time I was there. The tables were missing, replaced with a large arrangement of multicoloured satin cushions set in a closed circle and a white blanket between them, laid out across the wooden decking. The petals that had trailed in surrounded the cushions, and around those were four
 cross-hatched privacy screens interwoven with honeysuckle. That was the overpowering perfume that filled the bizarrely intimate scene.

"Do you like it?" The voice snuck up on me, sweet and cajoling, sudden enough to make me jump but soft enough for it to only be a small surprise. Eyes stuck to the display, I stiffened on the spot and tightened my grip around the stem of the wine glass.

"You did this for me?"

"You said nobody had taken you on a real date before. I had to rectify that situation."

I still couldn't bear to look at him as I paced towards the cushion circle— it was worse knowing that he'd abandoned his responsibilities for some kind of extravagant pity parade. I'd avoided dates on purpose and it was to avoid shitty situations like these. 

"I was told I was waiting for a Mr Lundy."

"You didn't think I'd put all my effort into this just to send another man, did you? You wound me." Not as deeply as he wounded me, but he was surrendering information I'd been hungry for since we met. Blaze Lundy? Christ, no wonder he kept it under his hat. It was a small insight into a man with too much character to contain in one body— a secret shame. "I think my mother thought giving me an awesome forename would make up for it. You can imagine the hassle I got in secondary school when they started teaching us French." Lundy— Lundi, the French translation of Monday. Yeah, I could see that leading to a bad nickname. So did that mean...

"Monday,
 Lundi, Lundy... Lundy's Miracle?" Was the band closer to his heart than anyone would ever realise?

"They certainly were. They did me proud." Fabulous. Why the hell was he telling me now? I felt him take a step towards me and took an instinctive self-preservative step forward to keep the distance. The minute he touched me
— hell, even the moment I could smell him would be the moment I came apart at the seams. "Whatever I did wrong, I'm sorry."

"You don't even know what you did?" I snapped back at him, glad to feel the
 invigorating stab of annoyance through my stupor. 

"Well no. I've been staring at my phone since Sunday waiting for it to ring or just buzz with a message."

"You said you'd call 
me
, genius!" Feeling the ire building, I divested myself of my sandals, more than a little sick of their straps digging into my ankles. I'd always hated them for that reason and I was irrationally pissed off at Blaze for not realising that it was why he'd found them in a box instead of loose like all my other shoes. "You sack me off with a classic line then turn up all resentful that I didn't chase you?"

"How do you know classic lines if you've never
—"

"Because I don't live under a fucking rock!" Spinning around, I catapulted each sandal at him in turn with impressive aim and force. It was the worst mistake I could have made.

Blaze never looked more divine in two pieces of a malapropos grey three piece suit that had to be stifling in the heat, a world away from his usual casual attire. He'd really gone all out. His eyes snapped up to meet mine after he deftly caught the projectile footwear and hit me with the full force of all that contradictory knowledgeable wonder I'd grown far too fond of over the summer months. I held my breath, like breathing would intensify the strength of his power over me, willing myself to stand strong and not succumb to the trembling legs that wanted to buckle, pulling me down to the ground to kneel in front of him.