After supper, all I had been able to do was flop on my bed and stare at the ceiling. Little memories would occasionally come back to me, things that I hadn’t perhaps caught the first time round. The way that my guts had been so tangled in knots that I couldn’t swallow a mouthful of shortbread. The trace of her tongue along my neck, her saliva growing cold on my skin. The warmth of her lips on my ear before she nipped my lobe. And the caress of my cheek as we said goodbye, her fingers rasping as they went against the grain of my short stubble. Those were the things that I was savouring. And as for my incipient jealousy, what of that? It had, for the moment, been tucked back into its box. I hadn’t even begun to come down from the high of my afternoon with India at her home. Then, a knock at the door and Frankie walked in, still wearing stick-ups and a white bowtie. “Evening Kim,” he said. “Can I take a seat?”
