Talking at Night by Claire Daverley EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Claire Daverley
- Language: English
- Genre: Sisters Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2.3 MB
- Price: Free
Will realizes there is something about Rosie Winters the night he
meets her at the bonfire.
When he tells her that his mother left.
They are sitting beside each other with the blaze lifting into the
November darkness, part of a broken circle of sixth formers. Fingerless
gloves, beer cans. Distant waves beyond the pines. He doesn’t know Rosie,
really, despite sharing a school and some friends, but tonight, they are
talking. A little.
Small talk, at first. Insignificant. Until his friend Josh—her twin brother
—makes a comment about their parents, and Rosie laughs, barely audible
above the bonfire, and before he can think what he’s doing he’s told her he
doesn’t know his own mother. It is something he’s never said out loud
before. Navigated, usually, with a dip of the head, a passing of the moment.
But he finds himself telling her, this girl, with her split ends and untamed
eyebrows, and her pale, slender hands. That his mother walked out, years
back, while he was watching cartoons before school.
She looks at him when he says it, the flames held in her eyes. There isn’t
sympathy or curiosity in her face; no frown or twitching mouth, reactions
he might have expected, if he’d had time to think about it.
Where do you think she is, she asks him, after a moment.
He pauses. Looks at the sky, patched through the gaps in the trees. The
smoke from the fire curls upward, and there are stars, with one larger,
whiter, than the others. A planet perhaps, or a moon.
I don’t know, he says to her. Anywhere.
And Rosie Winters repeats the word back at him, like she’s really
thinking about it. Like she’s wondering what anywhere might look like.
*
It is early winter and the wind slices through the forest, but still they remain
outside. It is better than being at home, warm yet uninterested in the
television.
This, their skin turned blood orange in the firelight, is new.
It sets something burning.
They spend the night talking, their knees almost touching. Saying very
little, though he has never known himself to be so attentive, so desperate for
another sentence, so surprised by the words she chooses. People drift away
in pairs, to touch one another behind the trees and fumble in the sand, or to
seek out late-night noodles, chips in oil-stained paper. Only he, Rosie, Josh
and two others remain. One of them gets out a guitar and strums, alongside
the dying fire. Will watches the bark glowing red, the salt-and-pepper peel
of the ash.
It is down to its embers when Rosie begins to sing.
Her brother asks her to, at first. Has to encourage her, then plead, until
she concedes with a small tilt of the head.
The wind has dropped. The air, without the fire, is like glass, cold and
still. And when she sings, it is a sound unlike anything Will has ever
known. Choral, and pure.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB