“Isn’t that right?” says Rosie. “I was just telling Fox this bloke I’m seeing, that who knows, he could be the one?”
“With a name like King-o?” Fox asks. “I doubt it.”
“That’s his nickname, you idiot. And yes. Why couldn’t King-o be my one?”
I nod. “Exactly. He could well be.”
Fox scoffs. “And I suppose, what, Lucas is your… one?”
I pause, face flushing. Because it feels like a huge thing to say out loud. I mean, I do think he’s my one, don’t I? Lucas Moreau. Balloon Boy. The one who found me, against all odds, when I needed a friend the most. When he needed home the most.
But I say nothing. Because there is no clarity right now. It all feels like a mad, confused jumble in my mind.
“Do you love him?” asks Rosie, and the words ring out, bold and brash, in the quiet.
“Yes,” I say. “Of course I love Lucas.”
“Yes, but… do you actually love Lucas. Do you wish it was you, picking out the white dress, watching him fall asleep, waking up to him every morning…”
“I…”
“Having a family with him,” says Rosie, eyes fixed on me, hands beneath Fox’s head unmoving now. “Washing his pants, post-stomach-bug,” she carries on. “Sucking his dick.”
“Terrific,” says Fox, getting up in one swift sit-up. “That certainly turned dark at breakneck speed.”
“What I’m saying, Emmie,” says Rosie, “is do you love Lucas? Really? Or do you just love the idea of him?”
* * *
Raindrops trail down Louise’s window as I draw her curtains tonight. I turn back to see her smiling at me, her face lit amber by the pink bedside lamp.
“Miserable out there,” I say, and she closes her papery eyelids for a moment.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says. “I like the rain.”
I raise an eyebrow and smile. “Really? I’m not sure I’ve met many people who like the rain.”
Louise nods gently, pulling her duvet up to her chest so it fits snugly under her arms. “Makes you feel alive, I think. A reminder that the world is bigger than you. That’s why I like storms especially.”
I give a shudder and pull my face into a grimace. “We’ll have to disagree on that one too, I think, Louise,” I say, and she gives a sleepy chuckle.
Louise has been spending more and more time in bed lately, but she always tries, a couple of hours before nine, her bedtime these days, to be out of bed and out of her bedroom.
“I like to go to bed at night,” she says, and I admit, helping her up and into bed has weirdly become one of my creature comforts. The both of us wish it wasn’t this way—Louise being in pain, needing help to get into bed, to get comfortable, that sometimes, an hour out of this bedroom, in the conservatory downstairs, among her books and trinkets and plants, is as good as it gets—but if it has to be this way, then this is as nice as it can be. Me, drawing her curtains, shutting out the cold and the world, Louise, pulling her favorite bedsheets high, the room always smelling of the purple fabric conditioner she uses and her beloved patchouli oil. We drink herbal teas, in china cups bought from a shop in Brussels in the seventies, when Louise was young and supple and free. We read books and short stories together, the sound of rain our backdrop, and our soft and sleepy talks by lamplight, the last thing we do before she falls asleep.
I settle down, like I have done so often recently, in the wicker chair beside her bed. Eliot carried it up the stairs a few weeks before Christmas, from the conservatory, so I had somewhere to sit while I read to her. “Which book?” I ask now.
Louise shakes her head slowly, eyelids closing and opening, eyes cloudy, yellowy. “No book tonight, if that’s quite all right,” she says.
“Of course.”
“Tell me something,” she says softly.
I smile. “What about?”
“You,” she says. “Tell me about Emmie Blue.”
I lean to get the two cups of tea I set down on the bedside cabinet moments ago. “I think you know all there is to know about me, Louise. I’m thirty. I live here with you. I work at the Clarice. You really don’t want me to go on, do you?”
“I don’t mean that,” she says, stretching, taking a mug from my hands shakily. “I mean… oh, I don’t know.” Her eyes rise to the ceiling, as if she is thinking, searching for something. “Happiness,” she says. “What is that, to Emmie Blue?”
“Wow,” I say with a smile, “that’s a… big question.”
“Is it?”
I bring my shoulders to my ears, look down into the green, minty tea in my hands. “I suppose when I was younger, a few years ago, I would have said… a family. A normal, safe family life.”
Louise watches me, says nothing.
“You know,” I say, “a home, with flowers in the window, a relationship with my mum where maybe she pops in for lunch now and then. Children, one day, maybe. Someone…” I swallow, words becoming increasingly difficult to say. “Someone to love. Someone to love me.”
“Love,” says Louise. “So you think love is happiness?”
I hesitate, laugh, nerves turning it into a high-pitched giggle. “I—don’t know. Yes. Yes, I suppose it is. For me. Is it for you?”
“Love?” asks Louise.
“Yes,” I say. “Have you ever… been in love?”
“Me?” Louise pauses. Her eyes close. She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No I have not.” And before I can say anything else, she says, “So, a nice three-bed semi, a family, and someone to love you…”
I laugh again, my cheeks unabashedly burning red. “Yes,” I say. “To me, that sounds perfect.”
“Oh. And flowers in the window.” She nods, knowingly. “I see,” she says kindly. “Okay.” Then she drinks.
“You think I’m mad, don’t you?” I say. “Is this the part where you tell me I have my head up my arse for saying such a sugary, silly thing?”
“No,” she says, lowering the mug to her lap. “Not even close, Emmie. Silly is something I would never use to describe you.”
I smile. “Well, that’s a little bit of a Louise Dutch compliment if ever I heard one.”
“Take them where you can find them.”
The rain pummels the window, and Louise changes her mind and asks me to read just a chapter from the historical romance we’re midway through at the moment, and when I get to the word “member” she winces and says, “horrible things,” which makes me spit out my tea.
It’s almost ten when I stand to leave and go to turn out her light.
“Do you know why I like storms?” says Louise as my fingers reach for the switch. “They’re a little reminder that we’re not at all in charge, but Mother Nature is. And while the world might not look exactly how we’d prefer it to, it is enough, if we just stop and look. The whole sky lit up. The smell of the rain. Safe inside. What more could you need?”