Sever - A Wattpad Featured Story

Jade - Chapter 2 - Now

Adrian's hand presses on my back in a gesture that reminds me to keep walking, that we have no choice.

'Do you trust me?' Adrian whispers as we approach the counter.

The connotation bursts like a rain cloud. I'd trusted him enough to marry him, hadn't I?

'Name?'

Behind the glass screen, a middle-aged lady perches on a stool, her bouffant hair blocking the 'per' in 'Prosper' from the sign on the wall. I've fixated on those letters for half an hour. Until now they were the only things keeping me sane.

'Name?' she repeats, taking my queue slip from the tray.

'Jade Rose,' I say.

'Jade Lively-Rose,' Adrian adds, swiping his iD tag through the reader by the glass.

I throw an apologetic glance; it's been only a few days since our wedding. How could I be so stupid? Perhaps it's the guards' presence setting me on edge, though the word 'Prosper' is enough to infuse fear into my veins.

Three months ago, around the time I'd let Adrian take me to dinner at Chinos, I'd only just learnt about Prosper. I hadn't noticed The Clinic sitting on the edge of Camden Lock with seaweed-green moss rising from the giant stone arches. Plenty can change in three months. I am testament to that.

With her vision centred on the keyboard, bouffant-hair lady has not noticed the way my fingers tremble against the counter's metal skirt. Like most items in the room, her computer is aluminium grey, embossed with the City of London logo: three chrome lines tied together into a triangle. When I squint at it, it resembles an eye. Perhaps there's a camera sunk into the small ampersand in the seal's centre, measuring my shallow breaths.

'Age?' she says.

What? They aren't supposed to ask this.

'Twenty-one,' I say. A lie.

'We shouldn't need to do this,' Adrian says, his palms flat on the counter so his wedding band glints off the artificial strip lighting. 'The paperwork is done.'

'I'm sorry, Mr... Lively.' She peels off her glasses.

Despite wearing his best blazer, at five-foot-nine with only a hint of stubble, Adrian doesn't look a day older than his twenty years. His unconventional appeal is undeniable. He cocks his head, raises his eyebrow and wraps one arm behind my back in a motion that reinforces everything he's ever done. Protect and love. More than I could ever ask.

'I don't know what you were expecting, but as I explained to you when you walked in, you must queue. Now you're at the front of the line, you both need to give me your details so we can set you up a file and get your application started.'

'But that's what I've been trying to say, if you'd listened in the first place,' Adrian says, brushing his auburn hair off his face.

When she raises her eyebrows, I nudge his foot. He knows as well as the other applicants seated around the room the haste in which the security guards react. They crawl about this building like ants.

Everything, from the etched glass screen, the batons in the guards' hands, the camera domes in the corners of the room, the logoed carpet, reminds me of Mandy. Prosper's visit to our school had unhinged her to the point of standing in the middle of Marylebone Road shouting incoherently. Hell, the way Captain Maylord had spoken on the RV projector screen in the Banyard Building, before a hundred and eighty pupils, had unhinged us all. But not to the same degree. For when she stood in the rain facing oncoming traffic, her ebony hair whipped by the wind into erratic blades, I knew what she would do.