Read Online The House at Midnight by Lucie Whitehouse - Free Book Online Page B

I ask you something?' I said.
    'What is it?'
    'Do you promise not to be insulted?'
    'Within reason.'
    'Is all this because ...'
    'Patrick's dead and I'm grieving?'
    'Yes.'
    'I wondered whether you would think that. I thought about it myself. I've tested myself - that sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? - to see if I think about this more when I feel really low. And I don't.' He took a sip of wine. 'I did think about you when it was bad and it helped. But I felt better just knowing you were around. I know some people might think that a romantic thing is a stronger tie than friendship but I don't, not with you. You're my best friend.'
    'Why didn't you ring me?'
    'I needed to do it on my own. Everyone's grief is different, I think. Mine felt private.'
    I nodded that I understood. It was consistent. Lucas would talk about the things that bothered him until they reached crisis point and then he would disappear. At college, towards the end, worried that he hadn't worked hard enough for finals and was going to let his mother and Patrick down, he vanished for four days without telling anyone, even me, where he was going. I hadn't been too concerned, knowing there would be a simple explanation, as in the end there was: he had booked into a guest house in Torquay to calm down and read Vergil's Georgics.
    'Your cheeks are rosy,' said Lucas, reaching over and pressing the back of his finger on my face. I felt the blush deepen in response.
    'It's the wine.'
    'Not the company?' He smiled.
    'Are you like this with all your girlfriends?' Once I had started the word rolling, there was no reclaiming it. It fell off my tongue like a stone. I had gone too far, too fast in my destabilised, confused frame of mind.
    He didn't blink. 'No, just you.'
    We left without having any green tea. Lucas wouldn't let me go Dutch on the bill; after a discussion, he let me put my card with his in the silk folder and then, after the waiter had gone off to swipe them, he handed mine back to me. 'You can get the cab if you feel so strongly about it,' he said.
    Upstairs on the pavement, he took my face between his hands and kissed me. I didn't care that the street was still busy and people were walking past us: I wanted all those strangers to see. In the taxi, I pressed into his side, enjoying the feel of his arm around me. The idea of going to bed with Lucas was unreal, in the way that something imagined over and over again can become. But I wanted to, I knew that. The rain had just stopped. Everything was slick and noirish and the wheels of the taxi fizzed in the water on the road as we wove quickly through Soho and into Bloomsbury. We pulled up outside Lucas's building and I paid the driver.
    'I'll make some coffee,' he said, walking ahead of me to turn on the table lamp in the sitting room then doubling back to the kitchen. 'Put some music on.'
    I skimmed along the rows of his CD collection, noticing the recent purchases. There were new records by a couple of bands he'd told me about, but now wasn't the time. I chose the Cowboy Junkies' The Trinity Session, which we'd listened to together over and over again.
    Lucas's flat had been expensively furnished about thirty years previously and as a result reminded me of a beautiful woman for whom the impact of ageing was made bearable by good underlying bone structure. The leather on the arms of the sofa was worn through almost to the horsehair underneath but it was still the burnished brown of autumn leaves. He'd had the flat since we graduated and it had acquired a feel of home that my flats never did. Like Patrick, he had books everywhere, on shelves, in piles on the floor, open face-down on the armchair and by the phone, hardbacks, paperbacks, books I'd lent him, books he'd bought or borrowed from the library. Unlike Patrick, he only read fiction. We had a theory that serious non-fiction was something one grew into.
    The walls were covered with old movie posters, originals that he bought and framed. Outside the bathroom