𝐚𝐥𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐠𝐨𝐧𝐞; eugene roe ✔

PART TWO

A little shorter than I'd like it to be but I wanted to publish a chapter before I go away for a week. Can't wait to continue this afterwards xoxo

Word count; 1,886

Valentina

For the entire time I had this job, Herr Weinder was as timid and simple as they'd come. His house would always be a ghost town; a desolate place of which only he lived and a few maids ventured in. Things were kept clean - I'd heard somewhere he was allergic to dust - and his clothes sat in structured piles within closets and drawers. Smoke always smothered the air, ashy and engulfing. Even at night, as I laid on his bed, I found more to note down, despite the darkness: his shoes had no laces, the fans didn't buzz as they did in every other house in that town, and he had jars of lavender dotted around the place, perhaps to ward off the scent of cigarettes.

He mumbled in his sleep too, but I already knew that. After the ball, we walked to his house together, shared a few glasses of gin. I didn't even like gin but to him I did. The winter previous I had told him it was my favourite drink.

"For the lady." He said, holding up a glass.

"Thank you." I retorted, finding myself hesitant in response.

Whenever he'd get drunk, the more English he would speak. It was the main reason for my development in the language; sometimes he'd forget to think and utter some secret and I'd have to sit there, taking an extra five minutes to translate what he had said.

I rolled over, the clock across from the bed having struck one thirty. Herr Weinder stirred, and my instincts persuaded me to glance at his wheelchair. Like usual, I picked up a notepad from the bedside drawer and scribbled down a few words - English, of course. Then, after pressing my lips against his temple swiftly, I retreated from his house and to the streets.

"Valentina?"

I faced the voice, a raspy and cold concotion. Sascha hurried a few paces to meet with me and for a while we stood outside Herr Weinder's door.

"Was the walk warm or cold?" I proposed, the phrase a code for another deeper question.

"Warm - I even saw some ducks on the shore."

We would discuss it more in the morning. Meanwhile, I held open my arm and she hooked hers around it.

I leant over the stone parapet of Sascha's tearoom balcony, searching the lake's surface and the way the sun glimmered off of it. Unlike the morning before, the room behind me remained vacant, Emilia only having returned at the latest hour and Sascha sleeping the day away. I had finished with delivering my reminders - I needed the reports by twelve - and so stood idly on the veranda, bored as I could be.

At some point I found a distant idea, which I can't remember for the life of me what it was, and journeyed back to my chambers, only to stop in a stairwell two floors away. I pressed my ear to a door, a collection of sniffing and clattering coming from inside. I knocked two times, paused, then knocked again, making it clear who I was. Teo called for enter.

"Teo?"

"Good morning."

The boy sat under layers of duvet, sheets pulled to his chin. He thought he had destroyed any evidence, but the glare of light from his bedroom window revealed streaks of water crawling down his cheekbones. I closed the door behind me gently.

"I am well, Valentina."

"That is not what I see." I edged around his bed, placing myself gently at the end of it.