After the Party by Lisa Jewell

glass shelf above the sink. He ran the tap, reached for his toothbrush and then glanced at himself. What was it Smith had said yesterday? London boy . That’s right. And yes, in this light, that’s exactly what he looked like. He looked like tube stations and pavements and pigeons and slush and grubby smudged pages of The Times . Gray, lifeless, not far off dead, really.
    He heard another delicious chime of laughter coming from the living room and decided that before he could possibly face the hearty source of this mellifluous sound, he would have to do something dramatic about his appearance. He found something inside Smith’s shower cubicle called Super Strong De-Scaling Scrub, which sounded like exactly the thing for fish, kettles and grimy-looking Englishmen. He applied it generously to his face and neck and then soaped his entire body with a shower wash scented with limes and mandarins and then stepped into the soft embrace of one of Smith’s luxurious and freshly laundered bath sheets. By the time he had rehydrated his sour London skin with something green and slightly herbal in a white pot and then put on an outfit consisting solely of unworn clothes (pants and socks included) he felt almost human. He sauntered toward the living room and prepared himself for his first look at Smith’s girlfriend.
    Except he could never have quite prepared himself for his first look at Smith’s girlfriend because she was, quite simply, one of the most exquisite women he had ever seen in his life.
    â€œRalphy!” Smith got up and patted Ralph matily on the back. “Good morning. Or should I say, good afternoon?”
    Ralph failed to register the fact that he’d slept through lunch and smiled blankly at him. “Morning,” he said.
    Rosey stood up too. She was wearing a loose cream sundress with straps that tied up in bows on her honeyed, angular shoulders. On her feet were plain white flip-flops. Her hair was thick and blond and, as Smith had described last night, cut off into a chin-length bob, with thick bangs that swept sideways across her forehead. Her jaw was on the square side of things, but very fine-boned, and her nose was dead straight with a slight upward slant to it. But it was the eyes that skewered him, a deep greeny-blue, which, if he were to equate it to a shade in the set of Schmincke Mussini oil paints in his studio at home, would be called Chromium Oxide, framed with fans of thick lash and appraising him confidently, intelligently from beneath the heavy bangs.
    â€œThis is Rosey,” said Smith. “And this is Ralph, the only person I’m not related to who’s known me since I was a child.”
    â€œWow,” said Rosey, her smile steady and strong. “So I can get all the dirt off you, then?”
    â€œOh, yes, definitely,” said Ralph. “And if Smith had let me know that he actually had a girlfriend, before I got here, I would have been able to bring along some pretty embarrassing photos too.”
    â€œWhy d’you think I didn’t tell you?” interrupted Smith.
    â€œOh, shame,” said Rosey, fiddling with a heavy silver chain on her left wrist. “I would love to see photos of little Smith.”
    â€œLess of the little,” said Smith, and Rosey and Ralph laughed politely. “Coffee?” he asked Ralph.
    â€œOh, yeah. A coffee would be great.” Smith left them there and headed for the kitchen. Ralph glanced at Rosey. He felt strangely shy, almost as though he’d found himself alone at a bus stop with the hottest girl at school.
    As well as the heavy silver bracelet, Rosey had a row of small silver studs in her left ear, a tattooed laurel wreath around her ankle and a small silver cross around her neck, set quite high on the chain so that the cross rested in the dip of her throat. The cross itself did not register in Ralph’s subconscious in quite the same way that the curve of her throat did. It was