𝐋𝐀𝐁𝐘𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐇 𖤓 - 𝐒𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐧.

OKTÓ.

JUNE THIRTEENTH,
TWO THOUSAND AND SIX.

"I'm off to Saltburn again - I'll let you know if I'm saying the night or not." Lyssa deadpanned to her mother who was preoccupied reading a VOGUE magazine issue at the kitchen island.

"Lovely." Her mother had replied shortly, bitterly. Laced with unneeded hostility and sarcasm - something they definitely had enough of in their sophisticated relationship.

Lyssa was a handful of steps away from their front door, stopping in doing so to to administer her estranged mother a dosage of her noxious words - her only defence mechanism, the only way Lyssa knew how to push her mother's buttons.

To make her mother feel something towards her. To yank at her mother's patience, her vain front.

To capture her attention.

"You never know, maybe I'll go and pay Esther a visit." She hummed, "Go drown myself in the lake - put us out of our misery."

The sudden slam of the front door closing had been the mediator that prevented another hellish bickering dispute between Lyssa and the woman who was meant to treat her with tenderness, but whom had only treated her with callousness.

Lyssa may as well just have the same sparse quantity of respect and deprivation of decorum from her mother as a smear of dog shit would have on the underside of her Louboutins.

┉ˏ͛ ༝̩̩̥͙ ⑅͚˚　　 ҉　　⑅͚˚ ͛༝̩̩̥͙ ˎ┉

"Lyss, my lover!"

Farleigh had greeted her accordingly with outstretched arms, ushering her inside the foyer of Saltburn for the second time in less than a week.

"Farleigh, baby." Lyssa sighed, relieved that she was now surrounded by liveliness, people on her wavelength - people that weren't her mother.

"You look knackered," He pointed out, gently pressing his thumbs underneath her eyes, in an attempt to conceal her developing eye bags.

"You just need a mimosa and a couple of hours in the sunlight - a tan will do you good."

Lyssa hummed agreeably, a mimosa would be her ultimate nirvana at this moment.

"Look what the cat has dragged in..."

Venetia whistled, peering over her sun bed behind her to where Lyssa and Farleigh emerged through the french doors - her sunglasses perched on the lower bridge of her nose.

"Do can it, Venetia."

Felix flatly demolished his sisters' arising efforts to belittle his old friend, finding this petty side of her thoroughly uncharitable and unlikable.

Felix, who had been sat restful upon the freshly-mown turf three feet away from the lip of the lake heaved himself up to a standing position -
advancing to an unhurried walk as he approached her.

"Lyss, darling - welcome back." He enchanted her into a benign embrace, which felt as though Lyssa was being engulfed by a furnace - but in a pleasant way.

His skin, she'd noticed, had bronzed into a deeper shade of tawny than when she had seen him a couple of days ago.

His hair remained unkempt as he had grown it out longer since last year - particular strands long enough to fall in-front of his face at brow-level - where his eyebrow piercing caught the rays of the sun, the silver jewellery glistening.

Shirtless, as he was fifty percent of the time, his fresh tan further defining the ripples of muscle upon his biceps and abdomen, that flexed as he moved.