Resplendent: Chapter Two: The Music Next Door
As she passed through her living room, she turned on her iPod dock, and smiled as a familiar bass line began to vibrate against and inside her skull. She loved feeling music. It was something that could just crawl inside her blood and make her feel alive, even if she couldn’t technically hear it. She liked to think that somehow she was closer to the emotion of the song then most, even if she never knew what the song was actually about before reading the lyrics.
Elle made her way to the shower to rid herself of the garden’s grime with a smile, anticipating the hot water. Her friend Katherine was coming by later this afternoon for supper; it would be nice to catch up. Not to mention, unlike Elle, Katherine had grown up in Hayden Wick, just two streets over. She would probably have the dirt on the Dahl house’s current occupant.
Turning on the water to full blast and as hot as she could stand, Elle stepped under the spray, finger combing the tangles out of her shoulder-length hair and groaning softly in pleasure. Lasagne, she decided. She would make lasagne for supper, followed by that chocolate cake Katherine liked so well. The water pounded on her back, and outside the shower door, she could feel the music pulse. It was like being close to God, she thought with happy breath. Steam clouded her vision, and her soapy hands slid over her skin.
Picturing the leather-clad Viking from next door, Elle imagined it was his hands instead, slipping over her skin, pinching at her nipples and massaging the shampoo into her scalp. Best way for him to wash her hair was…no…wait, yes, on her knees. Her eyes slid closed as she imagined his thick, muscled torso, imagined sliding her tongue along the ridges of it and around the head of his erect cock. He would taste of hot water and salt and man, those long fingers would press into her scalp and ohhhhhh.
Elle felt herself groan out loud again along with her mental voice, her fingers pressing quick circles around her clitoris. She came easily, her body primed from her imagination and two long years of practice doing it this way. Her body buzzing pleasantly, Elle smiled happily as she finished rinsing herself. Blinking water out of her eyes, Elle shut off the shower, and fumbled through the curtain to find her towel. That had apparently been needed fairly badly.
The pulse of the bass greeted her in full force when she opened the door, and she grinned at it. Much louder and it could dry her hair, she thought, pleased. She had only just finished putting the lasagne into the oven when Cocoa suddenly scrambled towards the door. Someone had ringed the doorbell.
Popping the oven door closed and setting the timer on her phone to vibrate in her pocket when it was finished, Elle made her way to the front door and opened it with a wide smile to greet Katherine. The gorgeous, mocha skinned woman smiled back and waved, brandishing a bottle of cabernet-sauvignon.
“Perfect!” Elle signed. “We’re having Italian tonight.”
“Delicious,” Katherine signed back, rolling her eyes in exaggerated anticipation. “You know I love it loud, but can we turn the music down just a bit?”
Elle laughed and nodded, stepping back. She took the bottle of wine from her friend as Katherine passed by her to the dock to turn the volume down, and carried it into the kitchen to uncork. The two of them had met almost five years ago, when Katherine’s sign language class had joined a Deaf Event in London that Elle had also been attending. The two ladies had hit it off fairly quickly, and when they had realised how close they lived together, had kept in touch.
Katherine had been taking Sign as a hobby, of all things, citing that her husband worked and travelled a lot. Apparently it had been too much, because she had finally had enough of him and left a year later. The bastard had cheated on her, she said, something Elle could entirely understand the pain of when Niall had done the same to her two years after that.
The two had become nearly inseparable friends in the intervening time. Elle poured the other woman a glass of wine, and dropped onto the opposite end of the couch as her friend.
“So. What’s new with you?” Katherine asked aloud, swirling her wine around in her glass instead of signing.
Elle wraggled her eye-brows at her friend. “Well, I’m hoping you can solve a mystery for me,” she responded.
“A mystery? Oh, my. Do tell.”
Cocoa sidled up to her again, trying to nose at her arm and Elle set down her wine, reverting to sign now that both of her hands were free. “Well, as long as I’ve lived here, the house next to me has just had this sweet older couple living there; they died about eight months ago. Suddenly, out of nowhere, their long-lost son who hasn’t spoken to them in years shows up today. Any idea what the scoop is on him?” She smiled conspiratorially, but her friend’s features seemed to have frozen in shock. Blinking in surprise, Elle frowned. “What? Is something wrong? He’s not an axe-murderer or something is he?”
“Michael Dahl is home?” Her friend asked aloud, eyes still wide. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, no? Why?” Elle responded aloud as well, concerned.
Katherine took a healthy swallow of her own wine, and set it next to Elle’s on the coffee table. “Well, you remember my ex? You met him briefly when he came home unexpectedly that one time, a few years back?”
“Yes,” Elle responded cautiously.
“Well, he and Michael grew up together. They’ve been best friends since they were in primary school. When they graduated, they wanted to create a band together-make it big, you know. Michael’s parents…did not approve. They were very conservative, and Michael and Jeremy played rock music. The sort that they thought was a bit too loud and indecent. They wanted him to go to University, get a ‘real job.’ That sort of thing. The boys wanted to be a rock stars. Anyway, they had a terrible row over it, and Michael left with Jeremy anyway.”
Elle clicked her tongue in sympathy. “That’s so sad. What happened to them? You never said what Jeremy actually did. Are they still in touch?”
Katherine laughed, her expression humourless. “Oddly enough, they actually became rock stars. You like them, even. Boline and Steel?” She spelled out the band name quickly, and appeared to smother a laugh when Elle raised her brows.
“Really? I’m living next door to one of the band members from Boline and Steel? That’s…that’s kind of ludicrous. So he just…never saw his parents again?”
Katherine nodded wryly. “Over the years it just kept getting worse. The tabloids kept showing articles of them getting into all kinds of things, most of them true, each worse than the last. Neither was willing to reach out to the other first. Michael had a pretty serious drinking and cocaine problem. He might still; I’m honestly not sure. Things between Jeremy and I fell apart right about the same time that Michael got rushed to the hospital from an overdose-I found out about a week or so later that Jer had cheated on me with the ginger slut.”
“I’m so sorry, Katherine.”
Her friend picked up and brandished her wine in a dismissive gesture. “It was over a long time ago, and anyway, we were talking about Michael.”
Following suit, Elle reclaimed her own wine and switched back to spoken words. “What’s he like?”
“Well…” Her friend looked reluctant. “it’s been a long time since I have seen him; almost four years now. He was always a good guy…just, kind of a hot mess, you know?”
Elle felt herself grin. “Very hot.”
Katherine laughed in answer, and took another sip of her wine.
Michael awoke several hours after he had fallen asleep to the sound of a deep, rolling base line thrumming the air. Smiling to himself, he began to hum along-it was Devil Inside, from Hell’s Light’s first album. It had never gained the popularity of many of their other songs, but the bass was slamming, so it had always been one of his personal favourites. Man, he used to have one of their debut posters as a teenager-he had waited in line to get it signed for almost two hours when he was seventeen.
Bobbing his head a little in time, Michael opened his window to see where it might be coming from. His jaw dropped when he realised it was from the house adjacent. Daisy Denims was listening to Hell’s Light? He’d really had her pegged more as a Norah Jones sort. Or maybe even that awful stuff that he sometimes got mailed by the church set trying to “save” him.
Speaking of which, he was pretty sure he’d left his phone and all it’s loaded music in the car. Damned if he was going to listen to what his parents had tried to force on him growing up while he was boxing up their things. He automatically opened his t-shirt dresser drawer from when he was a teenager, and rolled his eyes in disgust when he found that it, of course, was empty.
Of course, he had napped through when his clothes needed to be switched over to the dryer, so he currently didn’t have a shirt to wear. Swearing under his breath, Michael attended to the chore, and then took the stairs back up to his bedroom two at a time. Running about without his shirt felt uncharacteristically odd here-what was common for him on stage felt wrong somehow. It was like the house’s chill was carrying his father’s disapproval. Shivering slightly, Michael flung the closet door of his room open, praying there would be something within and he wouldn’t have to look for one of his father’s old shirts. He wasn’t ready yet to open that room up yet.
To his surprise, the closet was filled with neatly stacked boxes, all labeled Michael’s Things. Feeling oddly hesitant, Michael slid the top-most box out, and carried it to the bed. His heart squeezed when he flipped the lid off, and found his old CDs books, filled with hundreds of CDs, both bought and burned. She had kept them. She had hated them-his music-his tastes so much, but she had kept them.
Tears unexpectedly stinging his eyes, Michael returned to the closet, and slowly began to unpack his old life. An hour and a half later found him in a too-tight Volcano tee-shirt from one of his first concerts, grinning like an idiot as he dug through dug through ratty old mementos he had never expected to see again. He hadn’t taken a whole lot with him when he had left-just the things he had considered most precious to him at the time. Finding his old things now was like a treasure trove from his past.
A ding from the dryer below announced that his clothes were finally done, and still singing along to the pulsing music from next door, Michael half-danced his way down the stairs, playing the air-bass as he went along with the current song-After the Apocalypse. He had tried to get Jer to name their own band after this song-the drum solo was like a primal, musical sentence from the gods themselves. Daisy Denims had excellent taste in music.
When the gods have finished waging war
And are counting up their human score
When all they’ve left is smoldering stone
Maybe they’ll finally leave us alone
And finally…finally!!
Oh after the apocalypse
WE ARE FREEEEEEEE!
His voice was muffled as he pulled a plain black tee shirt over his head, discarding the Volcano shirt of his youth on the dryer top, and suddenly remembering his phone, gamboled toward the front door, still singing.
He was so busy shaking his hair out of the back of his shirt and paying attention to the beat from the house a few metres away that he nearly tripped over the package. Surprised, and cursing under his breath, he looked down at the innocent white box that some delivery company had left on his stoop during his nap. Who in the world would be sending his parents packages eight months after their deaths?
A glance at the return address had his brows lifting in surprised amusement. It was from a specialty lingerie shop. Clearly they had the wrong address. He checked, and then rolled his eyes. It was addressed to an Elle Morgan, and clearly marked for next door. Bloody postal service was useless. Tucking the package under one arm like Markus did with his football, Michael snagged his car keys from the peg next to the door and went out to accomplish both errands at once, not bothering to stop for his socks and boots.
The pavement was cold under his feet, the rocks of the patio pricking his soles uncomfortably. Grimacing a little, Michael unlocked the car and juggled his keys with the package so he could root about the passenger side for his phone. Stuffing it and the accompanying ear buds into his back pocket haphazardly, Michael minced his way over to the house next door, still not quite able to help bobbing his head a little as Marcus Blackthorn extolled the virtues of living in a world “after the apocalypse.”
The first time he knocked, no one answered. The second time, he thought he might have heard a noise on the other side of the door, but it was hard to tell over the sound of the music. He heartily approved of anyone who liked their music as loud as he did, but it was damned cold out, and his leather jacket was still tossed on the chair of the living room. He wished Daisy Denims-or Elle Morgan, he supposed her name was-would answer the door. Irritably, he rang the bell.
There was a definite sound this time, barking, and half-drowned out laughter. The music was turned down and the door swung open to reveal a couple of giggling women, both holding wine glasses, and the retriever he had seen earlier. He handed the package out, and offered his most charming smile. “Hi, this got left next door; it’s yours I think?”
“Michael.” There was a definite edge to the greeting.
He knew that voice. He’d known it since he was a teenager, when she had first started dating Jer. He gaped as he suddenly realised who stood in front of him.
“Kate. Uh…hi. You don’t live here do you?”
“Christ, you’re rude. No. I’m a friend of Elle’s,” she tilted her head at the woman next to him, subtly reminding him he hadn’t bothered to actually introduce himself to the house’s primary occupant. “And actually, I go by Katherine, now.”
Daisy Denims-Elle-made a soft sound of confusion, and Katherine turned to her and said, apparently for further edification. “Michael. He’s just being an ass. He also never enunciates worth shit.”
Great. That was just perfect. Daisy Denims was friends with the former Mrs. Jeremy Saunders. Small wonder she had ignored him earlier when she had been in the garden. Kate had probably been poisoning her for years with stories about her evil ex and his addict friends. She was certainly not being friendly now.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Michael. Stop looking at me like that. She couldn’t understand your mumbling. She’s deaf, dumbass. Michael, meet Elle. Elle, this is Michael Dahl.”
“Hi!” Elle half-waved, then pointed at the package, looking slightly embarrassed. “Is that for me?” Her speech was heavily slurred, the consonants rounded and undefined. “The Post can’t seem to get the houses right, for some reason.”
It took him a second to understand, but after a moment he nodded, smiling, and handed her the package. She glanced down at it, then her cheeks lit with fiery colour as she realised what it contained. Hoping to tease her a little, he made the effort to enunciate a little more than usual and offered, “Let me know if you would like a male opinion of the fit or colour, okay?”
Kate cut off his roguish wink with an exasperated snort. “Like that’ll happen. And on that note, goodbye, Michael. Have a nice life. Tell Jer he’s still a dick.” Smiling sweetly, she pulled her friend back in the house and shut the door in his face. Knowing she could still hear, and that Elle wouldn’t, he called after her, “Now who’s being rude, Kate?”
His only answer was a sudden increase in the music’s volume again.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Hopefully I'll be finished with chapter three this weekend! :-)
Previous Chapter Table of Contents Next Chapter
Elle made her way to the shower to rid herself of the garden’s grime with a smile, anticipating the hot water. Her friend Katherine was coming by later this afternoon for supper; it would be nice to catch up. Not to mention, unlike Elle, Katherine had grown up in Hayden Wick, just two streets over. She would probably have the dirt on the Dahl house’s current occupant.
Turning on the water to full blast and as hot as she could stand, Elle stepped under the spray, finger combing the tangles out of her shoulder-length hair and groaning softly in pleasure. Lasagne, she decided. She would make lasagne for supper, followed by that chocolate cake Katherine liked so well. The water pounded on her back, and outside the shower door, she could feel the music pulse. It was like being close to God, she thought with happy breath. Steam clouded her vision, and her soapy hands slid over her skin.
Picturing the leather-clad Viking from next door, Elle imagined it was his hands instead, slipping over her skin, pinching at her nipples and massaging the shampoo into her scalp. Best way for him to wash her hair was…no…wait, yes, on her knees. Her eyes slid closed as she imagined his thick, muscled torso, imagined sliding her tongue along the ridges of it and around the head of his erect cock. He would taste of hot water and salt and man, those long fingers would press into her scalp and ohhhhhh.
Elle felt herself groan out loud again along with her mental voice, her fingers pressing quick circles around her clitoris. She came easily, her body primed from her imagination and two long years of practice doing it this way. Her body buzzing pleasantly, Elle smiled happily as she finished rinsing herself. Blinking water out of her eyes, Elle shut off the shower, and fumbled through the curtain to find her towel. That had apparently been needed fairly badly.
The pulse of the bass greeted her in full force when she opened the door, and she grinned at it. Much louder and it could dry her hair, she thought, pleased. She had only just finished putting the lasagne into the oven when Cocoa suddenly scrambled towards the door. Someone had ringed the doorbell.
Popping the oven door closed and setting the timer on her phone to vibrate in her pocket when it was finished, Elle made her way to the front door and opened it with a wide smile to greet Katherine. The gorgeous, mocha skinned woman smiled back and waved, brandishing a bottle of cabernet-sauvignon.
“Perfect!” Elle signed. “We’re having Italian tonight.”
“Delicious,” Katherine signed back, rolling her eyes in exaggerated anticipation. “You know I love it loud, but can we turn the music down just a bit?”
Elle laughed and nodded, stepping back. She took the bottle of wine from her friend as Katherine passed by her to the dock to turn the volume down, and carried it into the kitchen to uncork. The two of them had met almost five years ago, when Katherine’s sign language class had joined a Deaf Event in London that Elle had also been attending. The two ladies had hit it off fairly quickly, and when they had realised how close they lived together, had kept in touch.
Katherine had been taking Sign as a hobby, of all things, citing that her husband worked and travelled a lot. Apparently it had been too much, because she had finally had enough of him and left a year later. The bastard had cheated on her, she said, something Elle could entirely understand the pain of when Niall had done the same to her two years after that.
The two had become nearly inseparable friends in the intervening time. Elle poured the other woman a glass of wine, and dropped onto the opposite end of the couch as her friend.
“So. What’s new with you?” Katherine asked aloud, swirling her wine around in her glass instead of signing.
Elle wraggled her eye-brows at her friend. “Well, I’m hoping you can solve a mystery for me,” she responded.
“A mystery? Oh, my. Do tell.”
Cocoa sidled up to her again, trying to nose at her arm and Elle set down her wine, reverting to sign now that both of her hands were free. “Well, as long as I’ve lived here, the house next to me has just had this sweet older couple living there; they died about eight months ago. Suddenly, out of nowhere, their long-lost son who hasn’t spoken to them in years shows up today. Any idea what the scoop is on him?” She smiled conspiratorially, but her friend’s features seemed to have frozen in shock. Blinking in surprise, Elle frowned. “What? Is something wrong? He’s not an axe-murderer or something is he?”
“Michael Dahl is home?” Her friend asked aloud, eyes still wide. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, no? Why?” Elle responded aloud as well, concerned.
Katherine took a healthy swallow of her own wine, and set it next to Elle’s on the coffee table. “Well, you remember my ex? You met him briefly when he came home unexpectedly that one time, a few years back?”
“Yes,” Elle responded cautiously.
“Well, he and Michael grew up together. They’ve been best friends since they were in primary school. When they graduated, they wanted to create a band together-make it big, you know. Michael’s parents…did not approve. They were very conservative, and Michael and Jeremy played rock music. The sort that they thought was a bit too loud and indecent. They wanted him to go to University, get a ‘real job.’ That sort of thing. The boys wanted to be a rock stars. Anyway, they had a terrible row over it, and Michael left with Jeremy anyway.”
Elle clicked her tongue in sympathy. “That’s so sad. What happened to them? You never said what Jeremy actually did. Are they still in touch?”
Katherine laughed, her expression humourless. “Oddly enough, they actually became rock stars. You like them, even. Boline and Steel?” She spelled out the band name quickly, and appeared to smother a laugh when Elle raised her brows.
“Really? I’m living next door to one of the band members from Boline and Steel? That’s…that’s kind of ludicrous. So he just…never saw his parents again?”
Katherine nodded wryly. “Over the years it just kept getting worse. The tabloids kept showing articles of them getting into all kinds of things, most of them true, each worse than the last. Neither was willing to reach out to the other first. Michael had a pretty serious drinking and cocaine problem. He might still; I’m honestly not sure. Things between Jeremy and I fell apart right about the same time that Michael got rushed to the hospital from an overdose-I found out about a week or so later that Jer had cheated on me with the ginger slut.”
“I’m so sorry, Katherine.”
Her friend picked up and brandished her wine in a dismissive gesture. “It was over a long time ago, and anyway, we were talking about Michael.”
Following suit, Elle reclaimed her own wine and switched back to spoken words. “What’s he like?”
“Well…” Her friend looked reluctant. “it’s been a long time since I have seen him; almost four years now. He was always a good guy…just, kind of a hot mess, you know?”
Elle felt herself grin. “Very hot.”
Katherine laughed in answer, and took another sip of her wine.
Michael awoke several hours after he had fallen asleep to the sound of a deep, rolling base line thrumming the air. Smiling to himself, he began to hum along-it was Devil Inside, from Hell’s Light’s first album. It had never gained the popularity of many of their other songs, but the bass was slamming, so it had always been one of his personal favourites. Man, he used to have one of their debut posters as a teenager-he had waited in line to get it signed for almost two hours when he was seventeen.
Bobbing his head a little in time, Michael opened his window to see where it might be coming from. His jaw dropped when he realised it was from the house adjacent. Daisy Denims was listening to Hell’s Light? He’d really had her pegged more as a Norah Jones sort. Or maybe even that awful stuff that he sometimes got mailed by the church set trying to “save” him.
Speaking of which, he was pretty sure he’d left his phone and all it’s loaded music in the car. Damned if he was going to listen to what his parents had tried to force on him growing up while he was boxing up their things. He automatically opened his t-shirt dresser drawer from when he was a teenager, and rolled his eyes in disgust when he found that it, of course, was empty.
Of course, he had napped through when his clothes needed to be switched over to the dryer, so he currently didn’t have a shirt to wear. Swearing under his breath, Michael attended to the chore, and then took the stairs back up to his bedroom two at a time. Running about without his shirt felt uncharacteristically odd here-what was common for him on stage felt wrong somehow. It was like the house’s chill was carrying his father’s disapproval. Shivering slightly, Michael flung the closet door of his room open, praying there would be something within and he wouldn’t have to look for one of his father’s old shirts. He wasn’t ready yet to open that room up yet.
To his surprise, the closet was filled with neatly stacked boxes, all labeled Michael’s Things. Feeling oddly hesitant, Michael slid the top-most box out, and carried it to the bed. His heart squeezed when he flipped the lid off, and found his old CDs books, filled with hundreds of CDs, both bought and burned. She had kept them. She had hated them-his music-his tastes so much, but she had kept them.
Tears unexpectedly stinging his eyes, Michael returned to the closet, and slowly began to unpack his old life. An hour and a half later found him in a too-tight Volcano tee-shirt from one of his first concerts, grinning like an idiot as he dug through dug through ratty old mementos he had never expected to see again. He hadn’t taken a whole lot with him when he had left-just the things he had considered most precious to him at the time. Finding his old things now was like a treasure trove from his past.
A ding from the dryer below announced that his clothes were finally done, and still singing along to the pulsing music from next door, Michael half-danced his way down the stairs, playing the air-bass as he went along with the current song-After the Apocalypse. He had tried to get Jer to name their own band after this song-the drum solo was like a primal, musical sentence from the gods themselves. Daisy Denims had excellent taste in music.
When the gods have finished waging war
And are counting up their human score
When all they’ve left is smoldering stone
Maybe they’ll finally leave us alone
And finally…finally!!
Oh after the apocalypse
WE ARE FREEEEEEEE!
His voice was muffled as he pulled a plain black tee shirt over his head, discarding the Volcano shirt of his youth on the dryer top, and suddenly remembering his phone, gamboled toward the front door, still singing.
He was so busy shaking his hair out of the back of his shirt and paying attention to the beat from the house a few metres away that he nearly tripped over the package. Surprised, and cursing under his breath, he looked down at the innocent white box that some delivery company had left on his stoop during his nap. Who in the world would be sending his parents packages eight months after their deaths?
A glance at the return address had his brows lifting in surprised amusement. It was from a specialty lingerie shop. Clearly they had the wrong address. He checked, and then rolled his eyes. It was addressed to an Elle Morgan, and clearly marked for next door. Bloody postal service was useless. Tucking the package under one arm like Markus did with his football, Michael snagged his car keys from the peg next to the door and went out to accomplish both errands at once, not bothering to stop for his socks and boots.
The pavement was cold under his feet, the rocks of the patio pricking his soles uncomfortably. Grimacing a little, Michael unlocked the car and juggled his keys with the package so he could root about the passenger side for his phone. Stuffing it and the accompanying ear buds into his back pocket haphazardly, Michael minced his way over to the house next door, still not quite able to help bobbing his head a little as Marcus Blackthorn extolled the virtues of living in a world “after the apocalypse.”
The first time he knocked, no one answered. The second time, he thought he might have heard a noise on the other side of the door, but it was hard to tell over the sound of the music. He heartily approved of anyone who liked their music as loud as he did, but it was damned cold out, and his leather jacket was still tossed on the chair of the living room. He wished Daisy Denims-or Elle Morgan, he supposed her name was-would answer the door. Irritably, he rang the bell.
There was a definite sound this time, barking, and half-drowned out laughter. The music was turned down and the door swung open to reveal a couple of giggling women, both holding wine glasses, and the retriever he had seen earlier. He handed the package out, and offered his most charming smile. “Hi, this got left next door; it’s yours I think?”
“Michael.” There was a definite edge to the greeting.
He knew that voice. He’d known it since he was a teenager, when she had first started dating Jer. He gaped as he suddenly realised who stood in front of him.
“Kate. Uh…hi. You don’t live here do you?”
“Christ, you’re rude. No. I’m a friend of Elle’s,” she tilted her head at the woman next to him, subtly reminding him he hadn’t bothered to actually introduce himself to the house’s primary occupant. “And actually, I go by Katherine, now.”
Daisy Denims-Elle-made a soft sound of confusion, and Katherine turned to her and said, apparently for further edification. “Michael. He’s just being an ass. He also never enunciates worth shit.”
Great. That was just perfect. Daisy Denims was friends with the former Mrs. Jeremy Saunders. Small wonder she had ignored him earlier when she had been in the garden. Kate had probably been poisoning her for years with stories about her evil ex and his addict friends. She was certainly not being friendly now.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Michael. Stop looking at me like that. She couldn’t understand your mumbling. She’s deaf, dumbass. Michael, meet Elle. Elle, this is Michael Dahl.”
“Hi!” Elle half-waved, then pointed at the package, looking slightly embarrassed. “Is that for me?” Her speech was heavily slurred, the consonants rounded and undefined. “The Post can’t seem to get the houses right, for some reason.”
It took him a second to understand, but after a moment he nodded, smiling, and handed her the package. She glanced down at it, then her cheeks lit with fiery colour as she realised what it contained. Hoping to tease her a little, he made the effort to enunciate a little more than usual and offered, “Let me know if you would like a male opinion of the fit or colour, okay?”
Kate cut off his roguish wink with an exasperated snort. “Like that’ll happen. And on that note, goodbye, Michael. Have a nice life. Tell Jer he’s still a dick.” Smiling sweetly, she pulled her friend back in the house and shut the door in his face. Knowing she could still hear, and that Elle wouldn’t, he called after her, “Now who’s being rude, Kate?”
His only answer was a sudden increase in the music’s volume again.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Hopefully I'll be finished with chapter three this weekend! :-)
Previous Chapter Table of Contents Next Chapter