Free The House at Midnight by Lucie Whitehouse

door, the closest he could get it to the shower without steam damage, was a genuine Psycho, the most expensive of the collection.
    Lucas brought the coffee and settled next to me on the lumpy sofa. He stretched out his arm and I slid along so that I was inside it. I heard the clock from the church two streets away gently chime midnight and thought to myself that I knew the room as though it were a person in its own right, from the draught under the door to the way the radiators ticked as they cooled. I slid down and lay along the sofa, putting my head on his lap. He stroked my hair, smoothing it back from my forehead. We listened to the album all the way through. I'm not sure but I suspected that as we listened Lucas was doing the same as me, remembering all the other times we'd heard it. When it ended, he bent down and kissed me. 'I'll get you a cab,' he said.
    I hope I managed to control my face sufficiently to mask the storm of emotion that broke out in me. Even though a small part of me breathed a sigh of relief that the nerve wracking event wasn't going to happen now, I still felt cheated, as if the promised end of the evening had been suddenly snatched away.
    The next few minutes were a blur. He made the telephone call, helped me on with my coat and held my hand as we walked downstairs. Now I was anxious. Though Lucas didn't set great store by his own powers of attraction, I knew several pretty girls who would love to go out with him. Perhaps he'd had second thoughts about me. Perhaps now, when it started to become a reality, he didn't actually find me sexually attractive. Misery swept over me.
    We were on the pavement before the cab arrived. I stamped my feet both to warm them and to create a distraction. Lucas was looking at me. Maybe he had been waiting for me to make the first move, to show that I wanted him. After all, he was the one who had kissed me first at Stoneborough. Perhaps he needed me to show him that I wanted him, too. Again I wondered about the protocol for getting together with your closest friend. Did all the years of friendship that went before cancel out the point of delaying sleeping together? After all, we hardly needed to get to know each other, did we? I pulled him close to me and kissed him but it was too late: the cab pulled up beside us. Lucas opened the door for me and kissed me again, another proper, passionate kiss. He stood and waved until we turned the corner.
    The driver was listening to some pop music with lyrics in what sounded like Greek. He had a crude glass evil eye hanging from the rearview mirror on a piece of cord and I watched it swing as we made our way quickly back to West London. He didn't try to engage me in conversation, for which I was grateful.
    Perhaps I was out of practice. After all, it had been almost a year since I had slept with anyone, my previous boyfriend, Rob. We'd met at a barbecue at Rachel's house. He was one of her sister's friends and we'd started talking and got on like a house on fire. Lucas had left early, I now remembered, though I hadn't thought anything of it at the time. Rob taught media studies and at first we'd had a lot to talk about, including music and films. After about six months, though, the conversation began to run dry. One evening when I was putting on my make-up before going out to supper with him, I realised that I was rehearsing things to talk about. I decided to give it a week or two to see if it improved but the same evening he told me that he had fallen in love with his flatmate, Sarah. Even though I'd known it wasn't right, I had been surprisingly shaken. I'd done what I always did, retreated into the group and waited for the pain to go away.
    Lucas wouldn't hurt me, I knew. He would do everything in his power to make sure he didn't, even if things didn't work out between us. I told myself that that must have been why he hadn't asked me to stay. He didn't want to rush me or create pressure. It was typical of him. And it was a big