Cherry Coloured - Alex Turner

19. Desire for Poison

  Against all admissions, Alex had been the only name on Maeve's lips.

  It had already passed over a week since she last spoke to him and yet she was tossing and turning every hour of the day and night over him. Once the issues surrounding Kurtis had proved hopeless and dead ended, Maeve found tall hedges rising up around her to form a maze with no exit. She'd like to say she hadn't touched the books Alex delivered her but doing so would be an outright lie. She'd been devouring them ever since. Chuck had even teased her about it. "I don't know how you only just realised you're into him when he managed to get you into reading by choice," he would say to her.

Maeve and Alex hadn't been in contact since he stopped by to apologise. They didn't need to be to ensure they were constantly on each other's minds. Those books were conversation enough. Maeve felt like she was talking to him solely through the pages before her and the haphazardly pencilled annotations along the once empty margins. On the occasion, Maeve would slide in a thin piece of paper where she would scribble a response to something Alex had written. She did this more so to propel that sense of conversation rather than to leave notelets for him to find later, if at all.

  As if Maeve didn't have enough vices already, Alex swiftly became another.

She had tried to keep her feelings towards him a secret from her work friends, she knew they would scold her for it and scold her they did when she eventually confessed to them that she'd forgiven him after the settee incident.

"C, you are too good for a wanker like him," Aria said to her as the girls got ready for the night in their 'dressing room'.

  "I know but he's not all bad," Maeve said. She hated every response she was giving. Maeve knew that if she was on the outside looking in, she wouldn't give a single one of her excuses about Alex the time of day. Knowing him made her judgement impaired.

  "I know I sound like a fucking halfwit," she quickly added before her friends could. "He's a fucking prick but he has his good moments too."

  "Yeah but his bad moments are a tad bigger than his good ones," Aria pointed out. "Babes, he literally fucked another woman while you were sleeping in his bed."

  Maeve groaned and cut up a line of coke on the table before her. "Don't remind me," she said and began carefully rolling up a bill in her newly manicured hands.

  "Someone has to before you start letting him off easy — which I'm worrying you're already doing," Aria said and pulled off her coat.

  "This about that Alex?" River asked, joining in on the conversation. Maeve's work friends were the only ones she'd kept properly updated on the situation between her and Alex. Even Chuck still didn't know how he'd been screwing her over and Maeve told Chuck everything.

  "You said he's in an open relationship right?" River asked Maeve who was busy cleaning that long white line off the table with a strong inhale.

  "Mhm," Maeve hummed, pinching her nostrils as she stood up straight.

  "So technically he's not cheating on anybody with you when he kissed you," River pointed out. "I know we're supposed to hate him but Cherry, if you really want to be with him, why don't you? There's nowt really stopping you?"

"River please," Kristy groaned from in front of a vanity mirror, her hands busy gluing thick faux lashes on top of her own.

"What?" River asked, putting her hands on her hips. "I know he's a twat but Cherry's a big girl she can make her own mind up."

"I don't want to be the other woman," Maeve said, feeling the cocaine run down the back of her throat. "He's not happy in his relationship anyway."