As I write SJ is very sick, so she needs all the thoughts you can send her. I decided to keep writing this story in the hope that she gets well enough to read it soon. Love you, girl.

A massive thanks must go out to Blueeyedfrog for being my French consultant here and helping me with the fact that Effy thinks in two languages. If you are not reading her story 'Some People Have Real Problems', then you should. That is all. For those of you who do not speak French, the original English references are at the bottom of the chapter.

.

.

4. A Girl Called Katie

Effy

My eyelids were sticky. It was a struggle to pry them open. No surprises there then. Just the product of another night of getting monumentally fucked up. But this time it was different. Yesterday had been a good, good day and I had cause for celebration. There was a reason to get high, rather than just the absence of a reason not to. Instead of the usual emptiness, I felt a warm glow of satisfaction inside. I had achieved something, and I knew that it was good. Amidst all of my uncertainties, that was the one thing I felt sure of. In my head I could see pictures in the sky, and in my heart I could feel the percussive beat of every explosion. The rest was merely mathematics. It had been my first large-scale event under my own name, and the roar that had surrounded me at the end of it had told me that the crowd had accepted us. They were not afraid of the new. We had the chance to be beautiful.

It had all been down to Maxxie really. It had been his idea to integrate pyro with his dance piece, and he'd asked me cause he knew my brother. After that it had been easy to expand the concept, and persuade the new arts woman at the council to give us the finale. She had taken over from some bloke who had been there forever, and she wanted to make her mark with something new and exciting. We were certainly new, and last night we had proved we were exciting. And that was what I wanted. I had left France because I wanted to prove something, and the way the show had gone had made me start to think it might be possible. The thought of it made me smile, immediately followed by the realisation that I was smiling against skin.

I was somewhere in space and time, and maybe I should have been attempting to identify where and when, but my still fuzzy consciousness decided to focus its limited resources on the fact that I was wrapped around a body. That was not so unusual. J'ai passé tellement de temps en noeuds autour de corps étranges en mon temps. But things were supposed to be different now. There was only supposed to be one body, and this was not it. My body, the one that was allowed, was large and angular and smelt of boy. This body was its polar opposite. This was not my body. This body was small, and wonderfully curvaceous. And the smell… The cocktail of her perfume, and just of her was dizzyingly intoxicating, and for several sweet moments I did nothing but breathe her in, not caring at all that this was not my body.

Once upon a time this wouldn't have mattered at all, but I had chosen to enter a world where there were consequences, and I had to now assess what these would be. I finally forced my eyes open fully and lifted my head to look around. Freed from the protective scent of her, the place stank of stale booze, weed and fag smoke. She and I were lying together half-on and half-off a fairly scuzzy looking beanbag, and some kind soul had thought to cover us up with a coat. With some relief I realised that despite the intimacy of our embrace, we were both still fully clothed, if you could actually deem her revealing dress as being 'fully' clothed. She shivered in her sleep and I wrapped myself tighter round her again, pulling the coat up over her bare shoulders as I went. My brain was starting to wake up and I tried to force it to recall the events that preceded this double-edged awakening.

There were drugs and alcohol. Lots of fucking drugs and alcohol, and most of them consumed in the company of the girl called Katie. I worked my way backwards through the night. House party. After the Old Library we had ended up at some guy's house party. I didn't have a clue who he was. We had just followed the crowd when the official party had kicked everyone out. I'd already lost my boy by then, and we were probably both too fucked up to try to find each other. Besides I had found Katie by then, and Katie was fun. She had matched me drink for drink and hit for hit, a feat I found impressive in itself. She didn't bother me with a load of asinine questions. She had danced with me, and just found a way to be with me. Through the fog of drugs, I remembered that she had made me laugh, and that life had seemed simple and good with her around. I stretched my memory back through the festival party. I hadn't fucked her. That was good, cause she was definitely fuckable. I traced our antics back through the night, smiling to myself and feeling safer about the fact I'd ended up lying in her arms. Probably just trying to keep warm was how I'd decided to justify it.

Except that I never really felt the cold. There was a reason I had curled myself so willingly around her, and my brain was trying to hide it from me. I took in a deep breath as I tried to force my mind to clear a path through the haze, but it was the scent of her I drew in at the same time that released the triggers to my memory. It reminded me of dancing with her. Not later, when we were almost too fucked up to stand. But at the beginning, when we were dancing close. Quand on dansait bien trop près. Maybe I shouldn't have touched her, but I never meant it to end up the way it did. From the first point of fragile contact, my body decided to sever all communication with the forces of logic, and thought it would do as it damn well pleased. At first it was enough just to savour the feel of her all the way down as she tumbled willingly back against me, but soon the familiar rumble of desire growled through me, and my body decided it wanted more. There were no decisions being made. I was coming up on a monster line of MDMA, and it seemed simpler just to go with the flow. It wasn't as if she was complaining as we crept stealthily closer, and then closer still. Instead she grew steadily bolder, starting to explore me with her hands, and with the drug amplifying everything she did, it felt irresponsibly, gorgeously hot.

If I am honest, I had fucking missed this. I missed the danger. The beauty of abandoning yourself into this reckless dance with a stranger, until it transformed itself seamlessly into reckless fucking. No strings, no expectations, no consequences. And it began to look increasingly likely that that was the way it was heading. By the time she decided to make a move and drag her hand across my tit, I was already wet for her. My eyes shot open at her touch, but I was way past caring. I had tried to be good, it just seemed like I wasn't very good at it. I remember grabbing her and thrusting my leg between hers, pushing into her on every other beat. The thought of it sent a pulse between my legs even now. And how she held me with her eyes. Nom de Dieu, ces yeux trop magnifiques. Asking me, accusing me, daring me, tempting me, provoking me, fucking me. She was the height of every hedonistic fury that had ever boiled within my blood. So why the hell didn't I fuck her? I know I'm not that strong.

Then I remembered. The kiss.

I shut my eyes and relived the moment, and the sensations that came with it were every bit as real as they had been last night. She woke me up, I mean really woke me up. Sometimes I feel like I walk through life in a dream. I just can't be bothered with most of the things that other people find exciting, and the only time I really feel alive is the moment just before I press the button. The moment when I am in control of the fire. But a girl called Katie kissed me and the energy of a thousand explosives splintered through my body and shocked me into consciousness. Not just an ordinary consciousness. This was an electrically charged consciousness that made me understand for the very first time, why people fought so very hard for the things that they believed in.

Like love.

I was supposed to be in love. Well that's what everyone called it. People looked at us together and that was what they saw. Love. With my man. The man who hadn't given up on me, even when I had given him repeated cause. Ironically it was the beauty of the kiss itself that woke me up and reminded me of what I was about to do. More sobering than a slap in the face or a bucket of ice-cold water, the feel of her beautiful lips on mine cut straight through all the chemicals in my bloodstream. There was a moment where even this superconscious mind wanted to continue the adultery, and I took her tongue into my mouth and drank more deeply. But in the end I couldn't do it. To him. To her. The girl behind that pure and hopeful kiss deserved much more than a sleazy fuck, and the subsequent betrayal. And he deserved more effort for all the love he had shown me. And so I pulled away, even though it felt like I was tearing my skin from my flesh to do so. I was mortified. I had come so close to failing. But the girl called Katie forgave me, and together we went on an odyssey to destroy the clarity she had brought me.

An odyssey that brought us here, lying together like lovers, half-on and half-off a beanbag on someone's dirty living room floor. I knew I should get up and go. Sneak away and disappear before things got stupidly complicated. This girl called Katie was dangerous, not least for the fact that she would happily break your nose if you pissed her off. But more for the fact that despite everything, I found it impossible to leave her. Pour la même raison qui m'avait empêché de la lacher hier was something in this contact that was just too precious, despite the fact that I belonged to someone else. I really was bloody shit at this charade of good behaviour, but I had to try. In an effort to be part of a couple. In an effort to be normal. I felt like Bart Simpson at the beginning of each episode, perpetually writing lines on the blackboard of the things he must not do. What was on Effy's blackboard today? I must not fuck about with strangers, no matter how beautiful they are. Just another one of my myriad of potential sins. There were so many of them I found it hard to keep track. Putain, c'est tellement plus facile d'être vilaine. Not so much stuff to remember.

I felt Katie stirring beside me, and wondered whether to try to disentangle myself from her, but again my body refused to give me the option and she awoke with my face still buried in her shoulder.

"Where the fuck are we?" she said, her voice husky from the night's excesses.

'Together, and that's all that matters,' was what I wanted to tell her, but instead I just shrugged.

"I'm not entirely sure," I replied.

She shifted her weight from under me so she could lay on her side and look me in the eye.

"Good night then?" she said with a cheekily beautiful smile.

Fuck I loved her smile. I hadn't seen it in Paris. All she had shown me there was her delicious badasssery. Back then I had been fascinated by the badassery alone, but now I had discovered that behind the badass lay a beautiful human being, and I was enchanted.

"You seem surprisingly perky," I told her. I was feeling rough as fuck myself.

"Oh I'm still high," she smiled dreamily. "That's the way it works for me. I don't get hangovers if I have MDMA. I metabolise it so slowly, I just drift down slowly the next day. It's kind of lovely."

I cursed my own speedy metabolism, that kept me rake thin and had the drugs speeding through my system, always leaving me bad tempered and wanting more. But the only thing I wanted more of right now was Katie. She was kind of lovely. I could have stayed there looking at her all morning. Or afternoon, or whatever the fuck kind of time it was. The seediness of our surroundings did not bother me. With our beanbag and our random coat we had carved ourselves a little slice of paradise and neither of us showed much inclination to leave. We lay there grinning stupidly at each other. Somehow our hands managed to find each other and our fingers threaded lazily together of their own accord. I rarely felt this comfortable around another human being. Any form of intimacy was an effort, which was why I'd developed my 'mysterious' persona to ward them off. But this was a girl called Katie. And she was special. Everything about her drew me closer.

"I totally can't be arsed getting up," she grinned at me.

"Then don't," I whispered in reply. "On n'a qu'à vivre ici dorénavant."

Her eyes lit up at the use of my other language.

"What did you say?" she asked breathily.

"I said let's just stay here forever."

"Good idea," she smiled, despite the ridiculousness of it all.

Suddenly the gentle contact of our fingers wasn't enough. I wanted more of her touching me. I wanted to get closer. I wanted to kiss her. Not a lustful kiss at all. Just a slow Sunday morning of a kiss. A gentle handshake of a kiss. A way of saying 'hello, I think you're fucking wonderful'. I think I would have done it, if she hadn't interrupted me.

"Say something else," she said.

"Something else what?" I frowned.

"Something else in French," she pleaded. "It sounds so gorgeous."

It always made me laugh how easily the English were amused by a foreign language, but in Katie I found it adorable. I still couldn't resist the temptation to have a little fun though.

"Tu as des fesses de la taille d'une montagne, mais tes seins ne sont pas plus gros que des raisins," I said, hamming up the accent.

Katie shrieked in delight.

"Oh my God that's sooo fucking sexy," she said. "What does it mean?"

I gave her a translation, and she shoved me on the shoulder, pushing me onto my back and climbing on top of me.

"Bitch," she said aggressively, holding me down, but the amusement was shining in her eyes.

We laughed together just like best friends do, but her weight was pushing me down into the floor and the beanbag, and she was still holding me down. I wanted this. I wanted her to hold me down and take me, and I felt a buzz start up between my legs. My laughter dried up in an instant. Katie must have sensed it, because she stopped laughing too. Our eyes locked and there was a moment's silence where we both knew what was going on, but neither of us knew what to do about it. I was this close to wrenching a hand free, grabbing the back of her hair and pulling her down into the kiss of the century, when my phone started buzzing furiously in my pocket.

"Woah," said Katie, her eyes rolling back slightly in her head.

She was still straddling me and the vibrations must have been going off perilously close to her pussy. She sprang away from me looking flushed and guilty, whilst I went to retrieve the offending object from my pocket.

"Fuck," I said, as soon as I saw the name flashing on the screen. The word slipped out before I could control it. I shot Katie a nervous glance, and she instantly knew it was my boyfriend. She rubbed her face in her hands, knowing how close we had just come to capitulation, and the smack of the guilt hit me like I'd been shot. Neither of them deserved for me to be fucking up like this. I touched the screen and put the phone to my ear.

"Hi," I said tentatively.

"Where are you, babes?" came his familiar friendly voice.

The voice of the man that loved me.

"Just woken up," I told him. "I ended up crashed at some house party."

"I'm sorry I zonked out on you," he said. "Thomas met some girl who had the most amazing spliff. Apparently her aunt grows it in her greenhouse. Next thing I knew, the boys were carrying me home."

"It's ok," I replied. "I had fun anyway. I made a new friend. We got wasted."

"Nice one."

I could hear the laughter in his voice, and it hurt to think how easily I could silence that laughter if I told him the whole truth.

"Listen sweetheart," he said. "Don't worry about the de-rig. Me and the boys will take care of that."

Fuck. I had been so wrapped up in Katie, that I'd completely forgotten that we had to go back and de-rig our equipment from the site.

"I should come and help out," I protested, but my man was having none of it."

"No love," he insisted. "You chill out. After what you did last night you deserve it. And I'll see you later, yeah?"

I knew he was talking about the show, but after what I did last night I deserved for him to dump me.

"I'm coming down," I said forcefully. "I'm not going to let you guys do all the work."

"You're the boss," he said genially. "Do you need a lift?"

"No I'm cool. I'll see you in a bit."

I swiped the call closed. I was so very far from cool. I was a fucking idiot. I turned back towards Katie. She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, barely moving a muscle. It was only the gentle rising and falling of her tits as she breathed that assured me she was alive. Jesus Effy, stop thinking about her tits for half a second. What are you? Une espèce d'animal en chaleur? Thing was, I already knew the answer to that question. I am. Or at least I used to be. Can a leopard really change its spots?

"I don't want to give you up," I admitted.

"Then don't," she said, rolling her head to look at me with nothing but affection in her eyes. "We just have to remember not to fuck each other. Can't be that hard, right?"

"You'd think," I laughed, easing myself a little further away from her.

At least one of the things I'd told my boyfriend was true. I had made a new friend.

"I have to go to work," I apologised.

"Yeah," said Katie, sitting up and fussing with the crumpled mess of her dress. I fought the urge to reach out and help her, and instead managed to drag myself to my feet. Katie made no move to join me. I'm guessing she had no desire to drag out our separation. Reluctantly, I turned away from her and started walking towards the door.

"Aren't you going to give me your phone number?" she asked me.

I stopped and looked back one last time, thinking it over before declining.

"We'll find each other," I said. "If it's meant to be."

Maybe it was better not to push our luck and to let the fates decide if we really could be friends.

"I think it's meant to be," she smiled.

I mulled over her words as I walked down the empty Sunday streets. J'y crois, moi. Me, and a girl called Katie.

.

.

.

WHAT EFFY SAYS

I asked for interpretations rather than literal translations, but the original English version follows the French here.

1. J'ai passé tellement de temps en noeuds autour de corps étranges en mon temps.(I have been wrapped around so many bodies in my time.)

2. Quand on dansait bien trop près.(When we were dancing way too close.)

3. Nom de Dieu, ces yeux trop magnifiques. (Oh God those fucking beautiful eyes.)

4. Pour la même raison qui m'avait empêché de la lacher hier soir.(Just as I had found it impossible to let her go last night.)

5. Putain, c'est tellement plus facile d'être vilaine. (Fuck me, it's so much easier to be bad.)

6. "On n'a qu'à vivre ici dorénavant." ("Let's just stay here forever.")

7. "Tu as des fesses de la taille d'une montagne, mais tes seins ne sont pas plus gros que des raisins,"("Your buttocks are the size of a mountain, but your tits are little more than apricots,")

8. Une espèce d'animal en chaleur?(Some kind of animal?)

9.J'y crois, moi. (I think it's meant to be.)

Thanks for reading. Hypes.