Hello! I won't keep you for long, but I want to make a quick point. I do not and never will endorse the kind of stuff that I talk about later on in this chapter. These are not my views. And I do not intend to offend anyone. It is all fiction intended to add to the drama of the story. I don't know if it's necessary to point that out, but I thought I would just in case.
As always I send you all many thanks for the comments and hearty encouragements to please keep them coming :) they really do brighten the rainy days.
Side notes:
To Baaramewe: I agree that Naomi is being stupid and selfish and Emily is unmotivated to get a job, preferring to remain very dependent on her girlfriend because it's easier. It is all part of my plan *plan laugh*. And Katie is distinctly shorter than Kate Moss. But in this story she is a glamour model ... not like a catwalk model. The kind of 'it' girl that poses for trashy magazines. Hopefully height is less of an issue in that particular branch of modelling, but I don't profess to be an expert. Hope to hear from you again :)
And on a final note, thanks and respect to Hyperfitched for writing and completing her story. It was fabulous and I'll miss it very much.
Have a nice day
Chapter Five
Emily hadn't even noticed that Sam was hours late.
It felt like the world was winding backwards. Back and back ... to a place and time where she almost didn't recognise herself.
When she had first known Naomi, all those years ago in school, she had been convinced that she looked like winter. Her neck and shoulders were like the untouched snow in the morning that could be lying as thin as paper or a thick as fur; her slender fingers and arms were like the naked the trees, unmasked and fragile; but her softness, her taste, it was as intense and unanticipated as the sudden heat of a patch of low-hanging sun: out of place, but thoroughly captivating.
But seeing her today, flustered and panicked and burning red, reminded her of something else entirely. She wasn't winter anymore. She wasn't the warm earth embedded under its blanket of ice, recuperating and regenerating into something new and beautiful. She was the earth after all the water had gone. Dried up and evaporated and the ground had been left cracked and brittle. A lonely little planet circling a cruel and unforgiving sun.
Emily wondered briefly if it was prison that had done it, if it had gradually wrung her dry. But she knew deep down that it wasn't. She knew Naomi too well. She knew what her devotion and her passion was capable of. It had finally burnt her out.
And for the first time in years, her thoughts fell to Freddie. And Sophia. Torched by their own.
The sound of the door made her jump. She had no idea how long she had been sitting at the kitchen table, staring into space. She glanced quickly at the clock on the wall. The first initial shivers of panic shuddered through her body.
'Baby where have you been?' Emily asked, standing up instantly, finally catching up with the world.
She saw Sam in the hall, looking tired and frustrated. Her fingers pushed and wrenched across her eyelids as she rubbed them. It creased and folded her skin like she was made of paper.
'I've got some bad news,' Sam said, shrugging off her coat and hanging it carefully on the hook near the door. 'It's Katie.'
Emily's heartbeat leaped instantly into her throat and her stomach knotted painfully. 'Oh god what?'
Sam quickly shook her head, rushing to her girlfriend and tugging her into an embrace. 'No not like that,' she said hurriedly, realising the implications of her words, 'She's okay.'
Emily tried to shrug from Sam's arms but she held her there as she continued to speak.
'There was a break in at Katie's studio. Really really unpleasant vandalism. Death threats and everything.'
Emily's slowly unfurling stomach knotted right back up again. Naomi. She finally sprang free from Sam, her shining eyes as wide and innocent as she could make them.
'You were there earlier today babe,' Sam continued, 'Did you see anything?'
Emily focused on Sam's left eye and then her right eye. Death threats? Could she really have done that?
'Emily?' Sam prompted. 'Anything at all?'
'No,' she said finally. She heard her own voice crack. 'Can't think of anything.' The words sounded hollow in her chest.
Sam nodded sadly but acceptingly.
Emily shrugged, as if she wished she could help, but her thoughts had already drifted somewhere else. That last burning stare Naomi had given Emily had seared its imprint onto her brain.
Emily then realised what it was that was troubling her so much: not that Naomi was no longer winter, but the fact that she had escaped before it had melted.
...
Naomi was so angry that she could feel it burning the backs of her eyes and throat. It surged and crashed around inside her like molten iron. It always seemed to be her body's first response to anything. Every heartbeat, every action, every sense, all internalised and scrunched into an infinite anger. The anger had seethed inside her all of last night after she had fled home, crying and shaking like an ill-tempered child, curled up on her bed and wished away the feeling that kept her from sleep.
She burst into Marie's pub, stamping up the stairs and forcing herself through the door at first floor.
'Ever heard of knocking?' Effy swung round on the swivel chair again, as if she had been sat there ever since Naomi had left, unmoving, and reactivated with her presence. The room was quiet and dark.
'Jesus, fuck,' Naomi jumped in shock, 'Will you quit doing that?'
Effy remained static.
'Where the fuck is Marie?' Naomi asked.
Effy shrugged, 'How should I know?' Her mouth twisted slightly into what Naomi suspected was a smirk. 'How did it go?' she asked.
Naomi got the distinct feeling that Effy knew exactly how it had gone. 'You knew she was going to be there didn't you?'
'I don't know what you mean.'
Naomi rolled her eyes in frustration. She folded her arms and glanced around the empty room. Eventually her gaze fell back to Effy, who continued to stare at her. 'What the fuck are you doing here anyway?' she asked irritably. 'You're like ... clever. Why are you wasting your time with idiots like Marie?'
'Why are you?' Effy shot back, without a moment's pause.
Naomi opened her mouth, but her answer was apparently absent from the conversation. 'I ... have my reasons,' she said eventually. Poor, she thought, even by her recent standards.
'If you say so.' Effy replied, 'If you're classing an obsolete egotistical vendetta against an inconsequential nobody as a reason.'
Naomi glared. '... no.'
'Was it worth it?' Effy asked. Her unflinching responses made Naomi shift uncomfortably.
'Yes,' she said awkwardly after a pause.
'Interesting,' Effy said, before reaching for a newspaper clipping from the desk behind her. 'Was it worth this?'
Naomi snatched the thin, greasy-feeling page irritably. The churning feeling of panic in her stomach had already started even before she looked at the article. She swallowed and dropped her gaze to the paper.
She felt instantly sick.
'DEPRAVED RADICALS DEFACE PIN-UP PHOTOS
The glamour model Katie Fitch was reported to be 'shaken and terrified' at the extremist attack on her workplace that occurred last night. The 'Fit Magazine' front-page star had taken part in a photo-shoot yesterday afternoon for this month's edition, due out Thursday. The radicals, now thought to be members of an unnamed feminist group, broke into the studio and proceeded to mutilate the images of the model by scratching out the eyes and mouth, and superimposing images of violent sexual acts upon the photos. The studio was then graffitied with several threatening messages, mostly directed at Fitch, some menacing enough to confine the model to her home under police protection. The motivation of these attacks is yet unknown, though police are investigating the legitimacy of a maintenance procedure carried out on the alarm system that failed to operate correctly at the time of the break in.'
Naomi let the piece of paper slip from her grasp. It floated to the floor like a dry, crisp leaf.
'Katie was there?' she let the question fall from her mouth. It dropped and shattered in the silence of the room.
The faintest frown broke Effy's porcelain expression. 'Yeah ... didn't you see her?'
Naomi's mouth felt dry. '...No,' she said hoarsely. Her answer scratched and clawed in her throat. 'I saw Emily.'
'Emily?' Effy repeated.
Naomi hated Effy at that moment. She hated her because she knew she was smiling. Not visibly. But somewhere inside. She was fucking smiling.
'Probably should've found out what they had in mind before you helped them, huh?' was Effy's unsympathetic overview.
Naomi's brain was whirring. Then she was shaking. She was shaking and sweating and everything had gone blurry. The walls, Effy's face, that un-fucking-moving face. Blurred.
Because Emily would think she'd done it.
...
Emily hadn't slept. She knew she wouldn't. Her mind had been ticking over everything all night. Sam's arm draped across her chest had felt so heavy and constricting it had felt like she couldn't breathe. When they had sat together in the kitchen at breakfast, Sam chattering about the procedures of the investigation they would have to go through to find out who was behind the break in, it was all Emily could do to nod occasionally whilst chewing calmly at her toast.
'Oh,' Sam added as she took her bowl over to the sink. 'I rearranged the appointment with the caterers by the way.'
Emily finally swallowed the disagreeable morsel of toast she had been chewing unenthusiastically for several minutes. 'What?'
Sam began scrubbing the bowl under running water. 'Yeah, someone's going to pop round this morning. About half nine?'
Emily rolled her eyes. 'This morning?'
Sam nodded. The sound of the gushing water hammered through Emily's mind. 'Will you stop fucking doing that for a second?' she snapped. 'You don't have to clean everything the second it's used.'
'What the fuck is your problem?' Sam asked, dropping the bowl into the sink. The sound made Emily flinch. 'You've been acting weird for days. Are you going to tell me what's wrong?'
Emily folded her arms. 'Nothing's wrong,' she muttered. 'I just didn't sleep well.'
Sam shook her head. 'Fine.' She dried her hands and walked across the room to the door. 'If you feel like actually talking to me, I'll be home at six.'
The front door banged shut. Emily tried to close her eyes briefly, but they burnt with a bright blue stare. She inhaled a deep breath. This feeling wasn't new: this feeling of falling with nothing to hold onto to stop from falling. It was everything her new safe life had been cultivated to protect her from: her strong, dependable, law-enforcing girlfriend, her stable marriage-bound relationship, her peculiar stale-mate with her mother. She thought she had grown and stretched and healed beyond her first, earth-shattering, unharnessed fall.
She shook her head, the way Sam always did when she was being tiresome or awkward. She wasn't going to let one brief and random encounter with Naomi spoil anything, even if it did involve her making the spectacularly poor decision of letting herself become an accessory to a crime.
The doorbell buzzed. It made the sound of a fly frying on a fluorescent light.
Emily stood up and went to the door, taking a moment to compose a smile on her face to welcome the friendly caterer that was going to help her plan her wedding day. The day where she would get married to the person she loved and had built a life with.
Her hand closed around the handle and she pulled the door open towards her.
In the low winter sun, casting a long shadow against the ground, stood Naomi. Her bottom lip was sucked tightly up under her teeth, her fingers gripping nervously at the sleeves of her jumper, tugging the material securely over her hands. Her eyes were bright pin-points, staring directly through Emily's eyes and into her soul.
'Hi,' she said.
Emily shut the door. She turned and leant back heavily against the solid wood, clasping a hand to her forehead. That was, most definitely, not the caterer.
The doorbell buzzed again, this time accompanied by a shout. 'Emily! Please? Talk to me?' It buzzed again. 'Please? ... I'm not going 'til you talk to me!'
Emily turned back to face the door. Slowly, she opened it once more.
Naomi was framed perfectly in the elegant rectangle of the door frame. She had a hand poised over the door buzzer, which dropped quickly to her side. The corners of her delicate mouth rose up into the ghost of a smile.
Emily leant against the open door. Whatever Naomi was now, whatever she had become, somehow she would always be an inescapable part of her. Now; then; always. Oh god, she thought helplessly, I am ruined.
...