Rachel didn't know what to do.
She had dumped her briefcase in the hall and kicked off her shoes, she slouched in pyjamas and looked carefully for the answer in the bottom of every bottle in the kitchen. She even fumbled about to see if it was hiding in the chocolate cake in the freezer; but it seemed to linger out of reach every time.
Eddie had proposed.
And some way, in some earthly way she had to live with it being paraded in front of her nose every damn day. She supposed it was coming full circle and she shouldn't have stealthily snuck Melissa into Waterloo Road in the first place; but she was a pro when it came to making mistakes, and the bigger they were the more she wished she could find that elusive answer.
After her emergency bottle of Sauvignon Blanc had refused to yield any clues, Rachel fumbled about with a dog eared photo from the end of last year: absentmindedly scratching at Eddie's face. Smiling, laughing and with an arm half draped around her waist he tormented her from his 2-d impression, now stowed away in the picture of domesticity with someone else's dreams.
And so it was, that her mind drifted back to the other. The other person, the other life, the other answer. Rachel had faced adversity enough and more often than not she simply ran straight through it, stamping on the fragments around her feet for good measure. Rachel had encountered a wall of her own building that she didn't seem to be able to climb, scale, break, smash or drink her way through. Amanda though, she didn't have problems; she just had the answer. It didn't matter what the problem was, or if you had one in the first place but she swore that there was nothing that no strings sex couldn't fix.
Sex was her world, it was her playfield, and she could give the other girls a run for their money when she had to. Pin down the swagger and flicking lustful hair over seedy innuendoes had secured her a living when she had nothing else to her name: addictions and breathless clients funding her education.
It was something else as well though, no matter how old, or fat, or balding her men; no matter how repugnant she found them, they all wanted her. Each and every one of them wanted her so much they'd pay for her, and well. Amanda was in sexual demand, and it managed to bolster her confidence where it was lacking.
Rachel, was not. People liked her, sure enough. She had the odd offer but none were particularly to her taste. Used to picking the cream of the crop and being adored by the hour, she found it difficult to adjust to normal relationships. She'd tried and tested it a few times but nothing had ever jumped out at her as being worth trying to undo years of emotional damage.
Until Eddie.
Eddie had [i]it[/i]. She didn't know what [i]it[/i] was, but it made her want to erase her past and rewrite her future just so that for one tiny chapter in between, their stories could collide and she should nestle into his narrative. But of course, Eddie had come in at the wrong chapter and ruining her story arc he made all the right moves in the worst places. She was terrified on that first day back, and trembling delicately in her car she knew she had to show a united front with the other staff; after the obligatory drinks and deafening platitudes she just wanted to sneak off into the dusk and pretend none of it had ever happened. No fire, no guns, no scarring.
But he had simply insisted on making his move then. He couldn't stop, couldn't think, and couldn't take his eyes off the streaks of scarlet lashed across her chest. And then Melissa had waltzed in, carefree, scar-free and very little emotional damage.
She knew he had been revolted by her.
She revolted herself.
Swirling the dregs of her wine she decided that she had no answer, only a vague memory of Amanda's feeble excuse all those years ago. And in the absence of sense, the absence of anyone to persuade her otherwise and the presence of more than one empty wine bottle, she decided to give it a go.
Flicking absentmindedly through the prim and proper wardrobe she had since amassed, she felt to the shelf at the back and pulled out a pile of dusty clothes she had kept as a reminder of where she had come from, and what she had achieved.
'Clearly not as much as I'd hoped' she muttered, pulling on the lycra skirt flaunting more than Eddie had ever seen together with a pleather jacket, zips and buckles adorning the cheap material that scratched at her arms. Teaming her makeshift outfit with the boots she wouldn't normally dream of wearing with a skirt shorter than them, she called a taxi and waited patiently on her stairs.
At the sound of tyres screeching outside, she locked up her tasteful house and her tasteful life and strutted up to the driver. He can't have been older than 25 but still he looked her up and down appreciatively and shared a grin.
"Well well love, looks like my lucky day. Where you off to?"
Muttering the name of a bar in Deansgate she had heard a friend harping on about, she allowed herself a tipsy smirk as she caught the drivers eye in his rear mirror.
Without emotion, without baggage and without her prim and proper self, people liked her. They always had, and when the driver introduced himself as Jon and asked her name, it spilled from her lips without thought.
"Nice to meet you Jon. I'm Amanda."