As usual, i loved reading your comments guys. Nice to now i'm hitting your 'spots' so to speak lol. Hope you guys enjoy this chapter too!

The very first time I saw the cracks, occurred the first time Naomi ever invited me around to her flat. I'd been on the phone to Katie when Naomi opened her front door to me, when she'd opened her door to me and just left me standing there as she disappeared off somewhere in her flat. No hello, no hug, no kiss, no eye contact.

Nothing.

"Erm, Kay, I've got to go." I frowned, gawping the dark hole which was doing a half-arsed job at passing for a lounge; skinny's flung over the back of the sofa, a shirt hanging from the lamp like a mannequins' wig, blank canvasses and unwashed paintbrushes thrown into a corner. It wasn't what I'd expected of someone like Naomi.

"Everything ok?" She asked, and if I'd had any sense I would've told Katie no, but back then I guess I'd been severely lacking in any kind of sense when it came to Naomi.

"Everything's fine. We'll be round in about fifteen minutes ok?" Not giving my sister the chance to respond, I hung up and frowned down the lengthy hallway I'd seen those long legs and flowing blonde hair vanish into. "Naomi?"

Nothing.

"Naomi?" I hollered into the darkness again, a non-existent voice advising me not to take myself into the flat any further than where I was already standing, because frankly the hairs on the back of my neck were awake, and I don't know what it was but something just didn't feel right…

The sudden noise of something crashing to the floor sent my palm straight into a collision with my chest; I was sure there would be a crimson handprint marring the porcelain skin over my heart in the following hours, and I was instantly taken back to the time Naomi had just appeared outside of my house to startle me with, 'It's Emily, isn't it?'

"Naom's, you ok back there?"

Nothing.

A cube of something sour started to form in my stomach then, every one of its corners an emotion from somewhere dark: Concern, fear, uncertainty, anxiety.

"Could you stop shouting, I'm not deaf ok?" Naomi suddenly emerged about two seconds behind her scolding voice, passing me to snatch the pair of skinny's lazing over the back of the sofa as though the sofa had stolen them from her.

My hand instantly took itself to the back of my neck, rubbing reassuringly at the skin there – at the hairs no longer sleeping there. I didn't dare ask Naomi why she hadn't responded to any of my cries if she'd heard me. I did, however, ask. "Babe what's the matter?"

Naomi stopped blurring around the room then, stood halt and trained her blue eyes on me. That was the moment I really took stock of her appearance; eyes full of sore-looking veins, bags as dark as secrets under those blue oceans.

It was the girl I'd met on the curb just outside of my house that night.

The girl I'd forgotten about.

The sight of her like that again, in so much fucking pain, had given my heart a little kick, but it was enough of a kick for me to close the distance between us and take my hand to the soft skin of her cheek. "Naom's, why've you been crying?"

Naomi shook her head so that my hand would fall. "Don't!"

The cold gesture and the harsh demand attacked me like a one-two combo, and I just stood there like a spare part whilst she whizzed around the little lounge collecting stuff indiscriminately.

We'd planned to go to Thorpe Park with Effy and Katie, but with Naomi in the mood that she'd been in, the joyous images of all four of us screaming whilst a rollercoaster took us around its unpredictable track began to disintegrate into the blackest of smokes, and I suddenly didn't want my sister and our best friend to meet the woman who'd more or less turned me into somewhat of a respectable twenty-four-year-old lesbian.

"I-I-I'll just, I'll go then." I muttered almost to myself, waiting around in hope for a moment or two, before eventually making for the front door.

Naomi waited 'til her front door was open and I only had another foot to unleash at the pavement, until she threw her fingers around my wrist, "Emily."

Like a stupid little puppy, I span around with eyes wide and hopeful.

"I'm sorry." She said, gently tugging me back into the warmth of her flat and into her arms.

"Then talk to me." I spoke into her chest, half of it coming out muffled.

When I sensed that Naomi wasn't going to offer any words, much less an explanation, I tried to pry it out of her. "Is it because you don't want to meet Katie and Effy?"

Naomi's arms fell from around me at that question, and she scoffed spitefully. "Oh please Emily. Not all of us creative types are social pariahs you know? I'm twenty-five. I'm a big girl. I think I can handle my girlfriend's friends and family, especially if they're as simple as you make them out to be."

I couldn't believe my ears. I felt ambushed by her words, totally unprepared and overwhelmed, and I was seething by the time I let them go around in my head a second time. "Fuck you Naomi! Not everybody can be Miss artsy-fartsy, and as far as you not being a social pariah, where the fuck are your friends? Because in the month that we've known each other I've never once heard you speak about anyone other than famous artists and characters from TV!"

"There's nothing wrong with being careful about whom you let into your life Emily!" She replied after a long pause.

"There is when I'm the only person in it." I hit back. "What did you do before you met me?"

"I have fucking friends." Naomi spat, getting out her fingers to tally off names, "There's JJ from the café, and Rachael and…"

At that moment, my phone had begun to vibrate, the cheery ringtone totally out of sync with the atmosphere, so I pressed the pick-up button to quickly shush it. "What?"

"Hear about the murder on Turbine Street? Just heard about it on the news; you've got no excuse not to pack up your shit and get the hell out of that shithole now Em. Police said It could've been anyone – by the way where are you guys? You better not be shagging. We're on a schedule and it's gonna take us long enough to get there as it is." Katie's voice rang out in my ear.

I'd heard nothing past, 'Murder on Turbine Street.'

Phone still to my ear, I slowly looked up at Naomi, who, despite her folded arms and scowl, looked as fragile as anything I've ever seen since or before. "That street has a café on its corner doesn't it?"

"Yeah!" Katie enthused like a teacher who'd finally gotten the correct answer from a student, "A café called The Room. Why?"

"Never mind Kay," I quickly said, hanging up. "There's been a murder on Turbine Street." I said, watching Naomi crumble into her palms. She was trembling, or at least her hands had been when she'd held her face in them, and despite our previous words and my thick confusion, instinct told me to cradle the gorgeous blonde in my embrace.

"It was a girl. She was strangled in the side alley just next to the café, and then dumped in the café's dumpsters." My shoulder had gotten most of that sentence.

"Your café?" I asked, feeling Naomi nod, and that was when everything fell into place. Naomi's mood, her snapping at me, her sudden breakdown.

She was shaken up.

I let my hand rotate in slow gentle circles on her back. "I'm sorry." I told her hair.

The thought of Naomi going back to work there shook me up almost beyond repair as my mind took me to a parallel universe, one where I'd have to put Naomi in the ground because some maniac had gotten to her on her way back home from one of her late shifts. "I don't want you working there anymore." I'd thought aloud, taking my fingers through the thick of her blonde mane in repeated strokes.

Naomi pulled back then, peering into my eyes for a long moment, and she was still fucking beautiful in spite of those bloodshot eyes, before nearing her lips to mine without actually granting any contact. Her hand reached up between us, thumb volunteering to softly run the course of my bottom lip. "Kiss me." She whispered.

Our tongues were warm and heated over one another from the birth of the kiss, Naomi's fingers climbing the length of my lower back only to fall gently down it again, her mouth soft and considerate yet demanding and hungry as she pressed firm into me until my back was hitting the wall belonging to the front door.

I'd thought I'd been comforting her because she was shaken up about some young girl having gotten strangled more or less on the counter of her fucking workplace.

The truth, however, would turn out to be far more sinister.