Memorandum
If what he wants is honesty, he's not going to get it here.
In the half-dark, slumped against the bar, she seems utterly defeated. She's incredibly drunk. Her glass slides from her hand and rolls against the wood, clinking and grinding and the residue of amber liquid seeps out, staining the lacquered bar with dew.
He watches the barman pick the glass up, take it away; wiping up the spill with a deft swipe of the cloth draped on his shoulder.
Lucas blinks, looks back at her. She hasn't moved, her hand still cupped like she's holding the glass, staring at her smudged and warped reflection in the shiny wood.
He touches her shoulder, slides his hand to the small of her back. Her hand clenches, she blinks, looks up at him. Her eyes are shiny as the bar before them; his reflection in them indistinct as they glaze over.
She's really drunk.
Stumbling, leaning against him, whispering things under her breath that she would never tell him out loud. Her shoulder presses heavily against his chest as he guides her out the door, her head lolling and her hair brushing against his mouth.
Outside it is cold enough to see her breath, and he thinks he can distinguish better what she's saying here, staring up at the London Eye, her words, their syllables spelled out with each puff of white smoke.
He thinks he sees fear, or maybe just fatigue, but it disappears too quickly to be sure.
To her dilated pupils the world is warped in a hazy fashion, the lights of the Eye creating rings and halos around themselves, dancing yellow in and out of her vision.
She turns back to Lucas and he is dark in contrast, muted; dark coat, shadowed face, dark hair. The fact that he is backed by a cacophony of lights and the echo of cars reverberating off the backs, sides, fronts of old buildings makes him seem more silent, more still, unreal, just watching.
He is just a silhouette, covered in inky blackness, a chasm to feed her guilt into. She wonders if she reached out right now, reached up and touched his hair, whether her hand would pull back stained.
Her fingers skim the jet-ink black over his temple, silken, and then he moves.
He grabs her wrist. Quick, his long fingers wrapping around her radius, pressing into the tendons just beneath her palm. His gaze is cold, near fearsome, but somewhere beneath the hawkish planes of his face she thinks she sees regret.
"I'm taking you home," he says lowly, bitterly, as though he has finally had enough of this game.
She's had enough too, more than, so she doesn't protest as he pulls her away from the lights.
Lucas leaves her at her flat, watches the lights flick on in the picture window on the third floor, a beacon against the rest of the dark, and he realises how late it must be.
He watches her shadowed figure come in and out of focus, cropped by the panes of glass, and he sees a figure of skin and bone, of scraped back hair who hasn't bothered to take her coat off.
It swamps her tiny frame; makes her look fragile. Broken.
It clicks then. All the warnings, all the reckless moves, her reaching for him in the half-light and the unnatural way she clung to him; her incoherent speech.
He thought it was all down to drunkenness, but no, she was breaking, and he, Lucas North, Mr. Liar-Man trained-to-notice-the-small-details had failed to take note.
He feels like an idiot. He feels guilty. But then she does too, for so many things he does not know about. She was telling him, in her way; no, she was keeping it inside her like a message in a stopper-bottle that had to be smashed to be released.
He doesn't want to have to smash it, she'll do so of her own accord.
She's still in the window, but the lights are off; the picture has turned negative, her all white and frail bones against a black backdrop.
He sees her hands, her face, her shaking. He sees the honesty and the humanity in her stance. He knows no matter how broken she won't want comfort, so he turns on the engine in the silent street, his headlights flaring before him, and leaves her.
end.