Mini update I promised.

Things had felt much more real with Lawrence this time. Ste was sure that if Brendan hadn't appeared out of the light like some kind of misplaced angel, Ste would have had no control over what would have happened. But Brendan had been there, and Ste was now walking towards the Central Square with the other lads like nothing had ever happened.

Ste was excited to see Rae again. There was something nice and familiar about her visits. She was a certain kind of removed from The Estate. She was enough of a stranger than he felt he could tell her things. Maybe that was why he'd spent the last ten minutes talking about his mother's drinking problems.

'Nothing major,' he explained. He was led in the bed, sheets pulled up to cover his tattoo but Rae was cuddled up against him. She was doing that more and more. 'She weren't making herself ill, but she'd rather buy the wine than the food. She introduced me to this world. Had be on the nick when I was still in my pushchair. Used to stow away loads in me pram,' he sighed. He'd forgotten about this until Rae had mentioned that her mother had used her old pram to transport drugs about.

'We used to move around a lot,' Rae sighed, drawing nonsensical patterns on Ste's chest with her nail. 'Mum was a dealer, every new location, one less pair of shoes.'

Ste frowned. What did moving house have to do with shoes? Rae answered the unasked question: 'She'd get her current man to throw them over the telephone wire to let everyone know they could buy stuff in the area. I was practically barefoot for five years.'

'And now look at us,' he sighed, his fingers tangling gently in her long hair.

'Our mum's have a lot to answer for,' Rae agreed, pressing a cotton soft kiss to his chest. 'It's nice this, isn't it?' she said after a moment. 'I'm so lucky to be with you. You hear stories about what the other girls have to do but you're just,' she rested her chin on his chest so she could look at him, 'normal.' She smiled. 'Like, I could imagine this, me and you, in the real world. I could imagine us living together. I'd be an actress and have a side job as a sexy secretary you'd be…. What do you want to be?'

Ste shrugged. He'd never really told he had the option of being something. He'd always just been nothing to everybody.

'Well,' she continued. 'We could work that out.'

'I quite like cooking,' he blurted out, because he was an idiot and his brain had stopped working momentarily.

'So you could be a chef, a famous one, on TV.' She was a dreamer. 'The next Gordon Ramsey. You just need….' She reached up a hand and used her finger and thumb to pinch his forehead a bit. It clearly wasn't working the way she'd hoping and her tongue appeared at the corner of his mouth in concentration. 'Nope,' she sighed, giving up finally. 'I can't give you wrinkles. You're too handsome.'

'Yeah, right,' he squirmed. He strained his neck down to try and kiss her. The angle was awkward and the kiss was clumsy but that was okay. They were a little clumsy together.

'One day,' she smiled against his lips. 'We'll do it, me and you. We'll leave here and we'll be successful.'

'Course we will,' Ste agreed easily, but it didn't feel honest. He couldn't imagine leaving The Estate, not now. He was surrounded by people he could almost call friends and he was protected. Brendan protected him, protected all of them. He'd never been protected by anyone in his entire life and he wasn't quite ready to give that up.

He felt her fall heavy against him. She'd never allowed herself to fall asleep before, maybe she was feeling safe and protected too. And Ste liked to feel like he could provide that for someone else.

Mitzeee had been sitting in Brendan's chair at the Central Square when he'd found her again late that night.

'What are you doing down here?' he asked.

'I'm playing god,' she smirked, grooming a fake handle-bar moustache.

'I'm no God,' he sighed, falling into the seat Macca usually occupied. 'The devil, maybe.'

'No,' Mitzeee shook her head, wicked grin on her face. 'The devil's specifically described as being powerful and handsome. You're neither, sorry kid,' she patted his face. It was soft and well-maintained by years of moisturiser and Mitzeee kicked herself internally for not realising he was gay when they'd first met. No one who was this well turned out was straight, not unless they were under twenty and had fancy words like "metrosexual" to describe themselves. Speaking of which:

'Goodnight Mitzeee, with three "e"s,' Riley called to her as he wandered past. She could almost feel Brendan's smug, questioning gaze burning a hole in her cheek.

'What!' she demanded, when she felt like she'd been left squirming for long enough.

'Friend of yours?' he asked, failing badly to keep the smirk from his face.

'He's a nice lad,' she shook her head. 'Naïve, but nice. He hits on me every single time I'm here.'

'I'm surprised you're not demanding I give you a raise.' His eyes flickered just slightly to Warren's chair. He needn't have bothered, she'd understood.

'Well, now you mention it….'

'No.' It was a firm and definite "no", and Mitzeee, honestly wouldn't have expected any less. Besides, if she was honest:

'I'd probably only break him. I'm not really a good person, I'm not good for people.' And, as was their friendship, when it got too emotional at the wrong time, it was time to turn the tables on him. Quid pro quo; that was how they opened up to each other.

'So, young Ste…. Is he the new Macca, or the new, new Vinnie?'

'I don't think so,' Brendan shook his head. 'He's a bit … meh.'

'Meh?' Mitzeee demanded. Brendan was an idiot when it came to men. 'No,' she insisted, shaking a finger at him. 'Macca is "meh", that boy is….' She wracked her brain for the right word to describe the little council rat drop-out she'd seen earlier. 'Scrawny,' she settled on eventually. And as he opened his mouth to protest, she put her finger over his lip and moustache and said: 'You like scrawny. They're always scrawny.'

She felt the curve of his smile against her finger and when she removed her hand her own words from earlier echoed in an Irish accent.

'He's a nice lad. Naïve, but nice. And I would break him.'

Mitzeee wanted to nudge him in the ribs with her elbow. She wanted to grin and practically sing: "You like him" until he squirmed but she knew that if she did, he'd flip it around and start asking uncomfortable question about Riley and she wasn't quite ready to face that particular set of feelings yet.

::

It was always late when they got ready to go back to the brothels. The girls gathered in front of Brendan's house, Mitzeee organising them all into one of the fleet busses, travelling all across Dublin to return the girls to their rightful places. Brendan was watching from the balcony sipping a scotch and Mitzeee would glance up occasionally. She wondered whether or not buying Brendan a better Sky package for his TV would stop him spending so much time on the balcony overlooking The Estate but she'd just wave patronisingly and he'd raise his glass in a similar manner.

It was a difficult task, putting people onto the right busses. She didn't even know most of them, only about 30 came from her own brothel, most came from other brothels across the capital but some were what she liked to call "freelance"; college girls hoping to earn a few bob, most of them had huge aspirations. One of them, she knew, had some far-fetched dream of being a lawyer. Mitzeee always felt a little sorry for those girls, they were clueless, and they usually felt like the guy they kept seeing in The Estate actually might think of them as more than a cheap screw. Fools, the lot of them and there were two particularly foolish, fools stood in front of her now as the last bus pulled away.

'We missed our bus,' one practically sobbed. She was dark-haired and Mitzeee didn't recognise her at all.

'Calm down,' Mitzeee sighed. If there was one thing she hated more than disorganisation, it was crying. 'Where do you live?'

'Seafort Gardens.'

'What about you?' she turned to the blonde girl, she at least wasn't crying. 'I'm on the next street over from Lauren.'

Mitzeee thought about her options for a moment. There were only two, squish them both into her passenger seat and take them home or drive away leaving them for Brendan to deal with. Okay, there was one option and she sighed heavily and muttered:

'Get in the car.'

She ignored their questions about where they were supposed to sit. They were hookers, they'd have to have a certain level of flexibility and creativity. They'd figure it out eventually. Mitzeee spent the time she had to wait for them to crap into the seat pretending to be majorly inconvenienced but in reality, the two girls lived almost on the way to her own house.

They were quiet for the first part of the trip, but by the time they were into Dublin, the girls had begun chatting too loudly for Mitzeee to ignore. The blonde girl in particular seemed very excitable.

'It's going to happen,' she kept saying. 'We were talking about it tonight.'

'That's so great,' the brunette was grinning. They were beaming with excitement. Well, that was the typical scene before someone's dreams were smashed to bits.

'What are you talking about?' Mitzeee asked.

'Rae and her man.'

'Her man?' Mitzeee could already see the blonde had fallen into the horrible and difficult-to-get-of trap of "love" on The Estate. 'Her man from The Estate?'

'Uh-huh,' Rae beamed. 'I've only got one man. I'm not a slut.'

Mitzeee almost choked on the irony, but she managed to stop every insult and smart comment that was begging to be spoken. She wanted to hear more about Rae's man, maybe she'd recognise the name and then she could have a real laugh later.

'Course you're not,' she managed. 'But you should probably be careful. Men from that place aren't always saints when it comes to promises.'

'Oh, he hasn't really promised me anything yet,' Rae said. She was glowing like a pregnant woman and Mitzeee really hoped that wasn't going to be the girl's announcement. She couldn't have been much more than eighteen. 'But we've talked about our future. He's going to be a chef, I'm going to be an actress.'

'Aren't we all,' Mitzeee found herself mumbling but Rae either didn't hear or didn't care because she just gushed away:

'We both agreed it felt right, just us living together, a normal life with jobs and an income and things.'

'Rae and Ste,' Lauren sighed. 'It has a ring to it.'

'I know.' Rae reached over and squeezed her friend's hand but Mitzeee wasn't really taking in the giddy excitement. She just thought about the name "Ste" and how that was short for "Steven".

'Steven from Blue Zone?' she found herself asking.

'That's him,' Rae beamed. 'Do you know him?'

'Know of him, but you take some advice from me, sweetheart,' and she felt horribly old departing advice on the younger girls. 'You don't want to get involved with a boy like that.'

'A boy like what?'

'Just….' She halted, it wasn't really her place to pass on to Rae that the boss had his sights set on her "man" and the boss always got what he wanted. So instead, she told her own story: 'Look, when I was starting out, I found a boy … just like Ste. I was head over heels and we were making all these plans together. Travel the world … hell, take over the world; the dream team. But things went south … quickly.'

'What happened?'

'He wasn't the man I thought he was,' she shrugged. 'Wasn't the man he thought he was either,' she smirked at her little joke. 'And eventually he found the boy who showed him just what kind of man he is.' But Rae was blindly protesting her love and didn't hear the wisdom.

Mitzeee was bored with the illogical dreamy optimism, she just thought about how much she didn't miss "straight Brendan". He'd been so damn miserable and self-hating all the time. This Brendan was only miserable most of the time, and was too busy hating his poorly-chosen partners to hate himself. This was definitely a better version of Brendan Brady and she was a better version of Anne; she was Mitzeee, with three "e"s.

Apologies for the "slowness" of this chapter, but there's a few things "hidden" within it that will be important in chapters to come. ;)

Love and cwtches,

InconspicuousBunneee (with three "e"s).