DAYLIGHT FADING

ten | for the tiniest moment it's all not true

                       | ten: for the tiniest moment it's all not true |

                                                        or

                              | you could be happy: snow patrol |

I stare at the screen, blankly, as my thoughts devolve into chaos. He just had to quote the Foo Fighters, didn’t he? Goddamn, I know he knows that Still was my favourite.

I was so sure he hated me. Maybe the interview had convinced me he might be moving on a little, but now I’m just confused again. He was always a little hot-cold at seventeen but never this bipolar. One minute he’s swearing that he hates me on television, and then the next he’s saying my name in his sleep. What the hell am I meant to make of that?

I sigh – it’s hypocritical of me. I’ve been maintaining a strictly silent stance on the matter, which people have interpreted as me not caring and then he gets shown footage of me, smoking and screaming and crying.

I begin to itch for another tattoo, it’s right there in my head and it’s perfect. Bloody famous last words. I’ll trawl the internet for tattoo studios in Norwich in the morning and then I’ll drive in and ink myself up again.

God, if my mother could see me now.

Jez’s hand on my arms snaps me back to reality. “You’re going to quote at me now, aren’t you?” my voice is thick and choked with tears I haven’t realised have been running down my face. She stoically nods, her eyes haunted and clouded over with pain. Whatever it is she’s been through, it’s enough to break most people.

“Without pain, tell me what’s the point in glory?” she unconsciously traces the inside of her left arm and my only thought is that the law deserves to be fucked.

“Tattoo?” I ask, and Jez nods, “you free this weekend?”

“Yeah,” she sounds confused.

“Cool,” I grin, “here at eleven, Saturday morning?”

“Are we learning guitar?” her eyebrows are pulled in.

“No, we’re fighting the law and winning,” Jez grins at the Clash reference before pulling me up off the sofa. We walk in a companionable silence for the short walk down my corridor where she sits herself down on the floor again, tightly lacing her DMs onto her feet.

It’s only after I open the door that I notice how dark it is outside. Perhaps it’s a little maternal of me, given that Eastfields has the lowest crime rate known to man, but I worry a little as I see Jez walking off down my driveway. I’m about to yell out to her, ask if she’d like a lift, when she merely rounds into the driveway next to mine.

She grins back at me and obviously takes a moment to drink in my bewildered expression before laughing. “It’s a friend’s,” I eye the door warily.

“Are you sure they’ll let you in at ten o’clock at night?” if I’m honest, I’d be a little annoyed if someone knocked on my door this late.

“I’ve got a key,” Jez smiles, fishing a key chain out of her pocket at jangling it at me. How close is she to this friend? I never got a key to Adam’s house. I feel a bit like the kid who didn’t get candy on Christmas.

I wait and make sure she gets in the house safely, waving goodbye to her before shutting my door and putting the bolt on. I quickly go into the kitchen and lock up using the keys – my mother was so paranoid about getting robbed in bloody Eastfields that she had a deadbolt put on as well as the regular lock and Yale.