The Way Back Home by Freya North

again. He thought‚ sleep! He thought, damn her for coming back. She had no right – however chance the encounter had been. Oh God, I really, really need to sleep. He told himself not to look at the clock. Ten to five in the bloody morning. Memories mingled with shadows, sounds with silence. It was all too bloody busy to permit sleep. He thought masturbating might help. He thought, think of some generic sex bomb. Pneumatic and faceless who you don’t know, you’ll never meet, you have no history with, no emotion for. Tits and ass and lips.
    But ultimately it was Oriana who filled his mind. He could taste her, hear her, feel her skin, her breath on his neck, her fingers around his cock, her body melding with his. The stretch and dip of her figure. He came. Exhausted, sleep finally crept over him. And his last thought was, how could something be so vividly real – when actually it had never happened? Not beyond those desperately grasped kisses that they’d harvested over a period of just a few months when he was eighteen and she was fifteen.
    And Malachy knew he wouldn’t dream of Oriana that night; he was doomed to have the rabbit dream again. Resigned, he became sleep’s quarry.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    As Oriana made her way downstairs on Sunday morning after a fitful night’s sleep, she could hear her mother’s hissing whisper.
    ‘It’s just not right! She has no business here – she
literally
has no business here. We’re not doing right by her – we’re
facilitating
her languor.’
    Oriana thought, when has my mother ever used the word
languor
? Suddenly a memory of her mother at Windward assaulted her and she thought, my mother put the definition of languor into the dictionary. And then Oriana heard Bernard, dear Bernard, try gently to butt his way in with conjunctions that stood entirely on their own and therefore were bluntly denied all meaning. But. However. Well. If.
    ‘She oughtn’t to be here, it’s not right.’
    ‘But—’
    ‘Not at her age – not at
my
age.’
    ‘Well—’
    ‘She’s got to get a job! move on! move
out
!’
    ‘However—’
    ‘She’s an
adult
. It’s making me unwell, it really is. I can’t have her squawking about hairdressers at whatever o’clock.’
    ‘Mind you—’
    ‘Mind you
what
, Bernard?
Mind you
what?’
    ‘She’s your daughter, love – and where else can she go?’
    ‘She can find her own hairdresser!’
    ‘I wasn’t talking about hairdressers, Rachel.’
    Hovering just out of sight of the kitchen door, Oriana wondered which way to go. Just then, the conundrum of whether to go back upstairs or continue to the kitchen was taxing enough, never mind where she’d go now her mother was kicking her out. She didn’t want to stay – but she certainly didn’t want to be told to leave. She pressed her back against the wall and thought again of Windward. Not the Windward of yesterday, but the Windward of yesteryear, where she’d grown up. A house, a place, a crazy world in its own orbit. No matter how bonkers, how unruly, how frightening, there had always,
always
, been somewhere to go. To the Bedwell boys and their beautiful serene Danish mother Jette who’d take her to school with rye-bread sandwiches and hair braided to perfection. Or to Louis for a sanctuary of stories and toast and shiny coins appearing from behind her ear. Or Lilac’s where she’d be seated in the wing-back chair like royalty, presented with a plate which had a biscuit on top of a doily, and told tales of the music halls of Montmartre. And the summer when Rod Stewart kindly feigned not to notice that she spent day after day curled in the corner deep down in the beanbag while his music
filled the room over and over and over. She’d received a package months later – with a seven-inch single and a message written on the cover.
    You’re more than the girl in the corner.
    Rod xx
    He’d sent it care of Louis so that she’d be sure to get it. Because Rod knew. He knew.
    And Oriana