She Lies in Wait (DCI Jonah Sheens #1) - Gytha Lodge Page 0,4
drifting on the hot wind, away from here, to somewhere the light was golden-orange all day.
“Where were you last night? I tried calling your house a few times.” It was Topaz, sunglasses pushed up into her dark hair as she leaned forward from the backseat. She wasn’t talking to Aurora, of course.
Aurora wished Brett hadn’t been kind to her and let her ride shotgun. She could tell that Topaz wanted to be there. Her sister was angry that she’d been relegated—angry with Aurora. Connor had been angry, too. He didn’t like that Brett had offered to drive the three of them while he’d been left to cycle with the others.
“Huh? Oh. I went to a film.” Brett shifted gears as he spoke. His hand brushed Aurora’s flimsy skirt. “Sorry,” he muttered.
Aurora moved a little, shrugging. “My fault. I’m in the way.”
“What film? Something scary?” Topaz asked, almost over the top of her.
“Blue Thunder.”
“Again?” Topaz laughed, and pushed his shoulder lightly. “You must have seen that twenty times.”
“Just three,” Brett replied. “It’s a great film. It knocks a lot of the stuff this year out of the water.” A brief pause to overtake a caravan. “What kind of films do you like, Aurora?”
“Huh?”
It was a knee-jerk response. The pretense of being elsewhere. It happened so often that even though she’d been listening, she couldn’t help it. She heard Topaz mutter, “Airhead.”
She looked at Brett, who was smiling warmly enough.
“What kind of films do you like watching?”
“I don’t know. Anything…where I get to see another world, I suppose. Things set in strange countries, or space, or fantastical places. I like romance, too.”
She heard Coralie snort, and wondered if she should have lied and told him she liked action movies. Topaz always pretended to be into them, and rolled her eyes at “girly girls” who only liked soppy films. Aurora had always let her do it, even though she knew Topaz’s favorite films were all period dramas or romantic comedies.
“So you must like Star Wars, then?” Brett asked. “That’s got all of that. Have you seen Return of the Jedi yet?”
Aurora shook her head. “I was going to wait till it was out on video. My parents didn’t like the last one….”
“Ah, you have to see it in the cinema,” he said, shaking his head. “All the effects, the Star Destroyers, the rumbling that comes from the speakers—and it’s going to be ages till the video. We should sort that out, Topaz.” He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Go as a group.”
“Sounds good,” Topaz said, and Aurora could tell from the set of her mouth that she wasn’t happy.
I shouldn’t have mentioned our parents. She told me not to talk about them.
Aurora felt a knot of tension in her stomach. She never knew what to say in front of Topaz’s friends. Whatever she came out with was always the wrong thing. And getting it wrong in front of Brett was worse. He was the older one everyone had a crush on. The star sportsman who could draw a dozen girls as an audience just by turning up to train in the school pool.
Her feelings about being here were such a mixture of gratitude and anxiety. Everyone in her year—everyone in the school really—would have killed to be sitting here. Brett Parker was right next to her, close enough to touch. And more than that, she was with the group. With Benners’s gang of strange, anarchic, brilliant, and beautiful friends.
It was a group she didn’t fit into at all; one she had only been invited into because of her sister. And, in one of those ironies, Topaz didn’t want her there at all.
She looked back at the trees and the sunshine, imagining that she could be lifted by that breeze and placed gently in a pair of strong arms. She gave the arms an owner and a head of dark hair.
She imagined him speaking to her. I’ve never met anyone like you before. You’re all the world to me.
“Hey.” Coralie was leaning forward to point. “That’s where you pull in.”
She added a strange little laugh onto the end of it. It was a habit of hers. It made her seem even more childlike. Another thing to add to the pink clothes and the wide eyes and the cultivated confusion at the world.
The car slowed and Aurora watched, regretfully, as the flickering subsided into a slower rhythm and then became just the shadow of overhanging trees. She tried to hold on to that