One Night Stand by Julie Cohen

I put it on when I needed extra comfort.
     
    He wasn’t my father any more.
     
    ‘He was your grandfather,’ Hugh said. ‘He belongs to you that way.’
     
    ‘Yeah.’
     
    Hugh passed me his serviette and I wiped my eyes.
     
    ‘Anyway, I thought that was worth a Mr Tasty’s lunch.’
     
    ‘It’s worth a whole month of them. So what are you going to do now?’
     
    I wasn’t going to eat this omelette, anyway; it was even more disgusting than usual. I pushed it away.
     
    ‘I don’t know.’
     
    ‘Who are you angriest with?’
     
    Bingo. The man read my mind. He knew exactly what was making my guts roll around and my hands shake and my head feel too small for my brain.
     
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘June. Or maybe my mother, I mean Sheila. Or maybe the kid who knocked up some thirteen-year-old girl.’ I shrugged and laughed shakily. ‘Everyone, I guess.’
     
    ‘Including me. Eleanor, about last night—’
     
    ‘Don’t.’ I held up my hands. ‘I don’t want to talk about it at all, Hugh.’
     
    He looked at me as if he were assessing me and then he nodded. ‘All right.’
     
    He twirled noodles around his fork and put them in his mouth. The end of one of them didn’t quite make it past his lips and I watched, fascinated despite myself, as he caught it with his tongue. When he chewed, his jaw became even more defined, and swallowing set the muscles in his neck working in a way I had never noticed before in the million-and-one times that Hugh and I had eaten together.
     
    Or, at least, I’d never consciously noticed.
     
    He licked a trace of chilli sauce from his lips and I wondered what words I would use to describe them. Manly? Sensual? It was always so difficult to describe a man’s mouth without resorting to cliché and yet Hugh’s mouth was unique, so expressive and so Hugh.
     
    And I was thinking about this because I was planning how to describe the Chancellor in my book. Obviously. I straightened in my chair and looked away from Hugh.
     
    ‘Where’s June now?’ he asked me.
     
    ‘I left her at home, sleeping off her hangover.’
     
    He nodded, then checked his watch. ‘I’m sorry, El, I’ve got an assessment in half an hour.’
     
    ‘No problem, you go.’
     
    ‘Are you all right to be alone?’
     
    ‘It’s probably best. I’ll go for a walk, clear my head a little.’
     
    We stood and he hugged me tightly. He smelled of soap, and of his woolly jumper. I let myself relax against his chest and thought, Friendship, Eleanor.
     
    I kissed him goodbye as I always did, on his cheek, and turned to pay at the till instead of watching him leave.
     
     
    Reading is not, as a rule, very scenic, but it does have its places. One of my favourites was the walk along the bank of the River Kennet. It started under a damp bridge, and the path eventually wended its way along a dual carriageway and past the site of the former Whitley sewage treatment plant, but in between there was a stretch of beauty, in a peculiarly Reading way.
     
    On one side of the river was the path, muddy in places, and on the other was the back of a row of terraced houses. From the front, these looked like normal Victorian terraces, brick and two-storey, like the ones Hugh and I lived in. But when you walked along the Kennet, you could see that in the back the ground sloped away from these houses to the water. An extra storey was revealed below the road line.
     
    Every garden was different: some cluttered, some landscaped, some overgrown, some overdecorated. In good weather you often saw people sitting in the sun. Most days you saw at least one man huddled at the end of his garden fishing. It was as if from the front, these houses were ordinary but when you looked behind, they were revealed in all their richness.
     
    For whatever the reason, this stretch of scenery helped me think, especially when I was trying to be creative. I hoped it would help me think now.
     
    The greasy rain had slipped