another little excerpt from something i've been working on for quite a while now. it gets steadily closer to completion and, yes, i do intend on finishing it. on my own time.
*
For a second, Adela can see a flash of the customary liveliness in Louise’s dark eyes.
“Chris. One of the tattooed guys. I went home with him last night, remember?”
Adela can see Louise flouncing out of Moebius, her young catch in tow behind her. “I forgot to ask you how that went.”
“Better than today,” Louise grins. “Sweet guy, really. Didn’t mind the fact that I insisted on walking home. I took off my shoes and threw them at a car at one point and I guess he gathered them up for me, because they were here this morning. Ripped the shit out of my nylons, though.”
“Hopefully no one else saw you doing that, because I think you’d have to use all your PR skills to explain what you were doing wandering around the city streets blind drunk in the middle of the night throwing your shoes at people.”
A cloud passes over Louise, making her look even smaller and more frail than usual. She has the expression of a dog catching the scent of imminent danger.
“That’s the weird thing. They were following us.”
“Who was?”
“The people in the car. I saw them three or four times behind us, or at corners when we were crossing. I didn’t want them to follow us all the way back to my place. I didn’t want them to see where I lived.”
“You were pretty out of it. Are you sure you didn’t just think it was the same car every time?”
“Chris was joking about it. I can’t remember which of us saw it first.”
“He might have been having you on because he saw you were getting paranoid.”
Louise shakes her head insistently. “No, they were following us. They took off after the shoes hit their car. I couldn’t even see how many of them there were. After that, I remember Chris came and put his jacket around me and he seemed really worried.”
“Maybe he was worried you were going to get arrested.”
“Adela, you of all people know about trusting your gut. They were following us. Not like a bunch of college yahoos trying to bug us, either.” Louise looks pained, quietly imploring Adela for some understanding. “I was scared.”
There it is, likely the worst thing that Louise can bring herself to admit. She was scared. Trotting around with her confidence sailing, a young man wanting to take her to bed and feeling the decadent rush of being drunk on a weeknight, the crucial thing that she remembers, the thing that she needs Adela to get from what she is telling her, is that she was very, very scared and cannot quite figure out why. Who is Adela to deny her some understanding in these circumstances? Adela, whose whole life is made up of sensing things about the people and places around her, of indistinct realities that form her life.