Lydia stares up at the faded, off-white ceiling, her head both buzzing and pounding, every painful throb loaded with regret. Every rattling breath feels like an effort. The room is roasting hot. She feels like her skin is about to catch fire, steaming, soaking the sheets with sweat that cools and makes her shiver. When she moves, her bones feel like they might snap. Everything at the periphery of her vision is out of focus, shimmering in the dusty sunlight that sneaks in through ill-fitting curtains.
Nausea churns violently in her stomach and she panics, rolling to the edge of the bed and letting her legs fall out. Her feet hit the thick carpet with a soft thump. This isn’t her hotel room with its thin, worn-out floor. Where is she? She scans the room, heart pumping so fiercely it makes her vision swim in pulses, the rhythm of her pain.
A clock radio on the bedside table shows ten twenty-one. There’s somewhere she needs to be. Lydia tries to remember. Mortem. Jason. Two o’clock. She needs to get back to the hotel and straighten herself out. Sober and clear-headed, Jason Devere had got the better of her. In this state…
Lydia swivels her sore neck around and sees a foot protruding from the sheets at the far corner of the bed. With a soft groan, she shifts her body and turns the other way to find the back of Alex’s head half-buried in a pillow, fast asleep. He looks so at peace, the opposite of how she feels. Next to him on his bedside table, a tatty piece of paper bearing what is unmistakably her handwriting. As her eyes slowly focus, Lydia recognises it as a list of songs. She remembers. She wrote down her favourite songs in the cab on the way home. She cringes at the adolescence of it even as she deciphers the drunken scrawl.
‘Under My Skin’, Frank Sinatra
‘Mr Sandman’, Nan Vernon version
‘If I Can Dream’, Elvis
‘Come Get Your Love’, Redbone
‘Only You’, Elvis
‘Hooked on a Feeling’, Blue Swede
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, Queen
‘I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire’, Ink Spots
If she heard any of those songs at this moment, Lydia thinks, she would hate them for the rest of her days. How could she have been so stupid? This isn’t her.
Focus, she tells herself, closing her eyes. First things first. Get the hell out of here.
As gently as she can manage in her unbalanced state, Lydia eases herself up off the bed, snatches what clothes she recognises, including her heels, and creeps to the bedroom door. Before she leaves, she takes one last look at the man in the bed, still dead to the world. Was he her conquest, or she his? Some small part of her knows that this is a ridiculous distinction to care about in a moment like this. But to Lydia, it matters. To Lydia, it always matters.