Jess

Jess

I’ve gone cold. What the—

I reach out to the cat to try to get a closer look, but it slinks out from under my hand. Maybe it’s just caught a mouse or something? One of the families I fostered with had a cat, Suki. Even though she was small she could take down a whole pigeon: she came back once covered in blood like something out of a horror film and my foster parent Karen found the headless body later that morning. I’m sure there’s some small dead creature lying around the apartment, just waiting for me to step on it. Or maybe it killed something out there in the courtyard—the windows are open a crack, which must be how it gets in and out of this place, walking along the guttering or something.

Still. It gave me a bit of a jolt. When I saw it for a moment I thought—

No. I’m just tired. I should try and get some sleep.

Ben will turn up in the morning, explain where he’s been, I’ll tell him he’s a dick for leaving me to basically break in and it’ll be like old times, the old old times, before he went to live with his shiny rich new family and got a whole new way of speaking and perspective on the world and I got bounced around the care system until I was old enough to fend for myself. I’m sure he’s fine. Bad stuff doesn’t happen to Ben. He’s the lucky one.

I shrug off my jacket, throw it onto the sofa. I should probably take a shower—I’m pretty sure I stink. A bit of B.O. but mainly of vinegar: you can’t work at the Copacabana and not reek of the stuff, it’s what we use to sluice the bar down after every shift. But I’m too tired to wash. I think Ben might have mentioned something about a camp bed, but I don’t see any sign of one. So I take a throw from the sofa and lie down in the bedroom on top of the covers in all my clothes. I give the pillows some thumps to try and rearrange them. As I do something slithers out of the bed onto the floor.

A pair of women’s knickers: black silk, lacy, expensive-looking. Ew. Christ, Ben. I don’t want to think about how those got here. I don’t even know if Ben has a girlfriend. I feel a little pang of sadness, in spite of myself. He’s all I’ve got and I don’t even know this much about him.

I’m too tired to do much more than kick the knickers away, out of sight. Tomorrow I’ll sleep on the sofa.