I shambled half-awake toward the kitchen, blinking around for the moka and the coffee grounds. The ancient L.K. clock-radio perched on the kitchen windowsill said that it was ten a.m..
Cereal, apples, and a hundred dollars were on the table, with a note from Will written in a spidery scrawl. "Gave Gloria's number to K Embassy and Teresa Ortiz. Clothes in my room. $ just in case. Back from work 6. W."
Bravissimo, Will.
My detailed plan for the day: buy more ganja, and then bake up while waiting around for Gloria to come over with her phone, preferably with a kindly Embassy official talking down it. Pushing the increasing amount of money that I owed Will onto the shelves at the back of my brain, I made my way to his bedroom to find something to wear that wasn't Maria P.D.-gray.
Will's room was large but had little in there apart from the bed, his closet, and overstuffed bookshelves. The closet creaked open to shelves laden with T-shirts, baseball caps, jeans, in faded shades of blue and green. The topmost T-shirt and jeans from the folded piles would do. I stalked around the room until I spotted a canvas belt snaking around the foot of Will's bed.
Click-clack. The belt buckle rattled.
Click-clack. My intestines twisted, my heart racing from zero to prestissimo. The auditory memory toppled from my brain-shelves with a sickening click-clack, and suddenly I was back there, on my knees in Will's dour little bedroom in Maria. Click-clack. The buckle clattered, the canvas slithering through belt-loops around slender hips. Click-clack. Terror was etched into every crease on Will's face.
The belt slipped from sweaty palms, and I sucked in trembling breaths. Why had Will taken me in? What other disgusting parts of me would he have to endure?
Let it go, Zeph.
After sticking a note to Gloria on the front door, telling her to come to the back porch, I sat fidgeting in my baking-up spot on the porch bench.
The windy and overcast day had practically emptied the beach; only a few lone dog-walkers braved the gusts compared to Sunday's activity. I sat watching the distant waves while the coffee warmed me, burning the last of my THC and waiting for it to dull my mind enough to stop me from stressing. It didn't. Somehow I spent hours sitting watching the sea, my brain tracing repeating circular pathways around my various predicaments.
Four p.m., and still no Gloria bustling into the house with a phonecall from the Embassy. I trudged next door, where Gloria was sat typing manically on her laptop at the kitchen table, her phone lying next to her.
"Hi mi amor. I'm sorry but nobody's called yet."
"Thanks, Gloria." Her kitchen was pretty, with earthenware pots on the windowsills and plates hung on the walls. I'd expected her to work in a busy office somewhere in Arenosa, talking to people, rather than hiding away hunched at her kitchen table all day. "What do you do?"
"I teach mathematics online," she said. "I'm just writing notes for my evening class tonight."
"I'm so jealous!" I dropped into a chair next to her. "I loved math at school. It's a shame that it's not needed for medical studies."
"Will was brilliant at math when he was at school." Gloria gazed into the distance as if recalling a lovely memory. "I couldn't get Julia interested. But I guess she's got accountants for all that now," she chuckled as she continued to type.
"Why did Will become an electrician if he loved math?"
"Well he was going to study physics, but then they moved to María when he was sixteen." Her face dropped a little, as if it hurt to remember. She managed a stiff smile, perhaps a silent request that she didn't wanna talk about it, or that she didn't quite know what had happened.
YOU ARE READING
The Sigma Asset 🏳️🌈 (bxb)║AMBYS WINNER 2022
Mystery / Thriller**AMBYS 2022 WINNER** He'll never play piano again. That's what virtuoso pianist Zephyr has vowed to himself after escaping Sigma, the sprawling criminal organisation that once held him--and still holds his friends--captive in California's mega-city...
