The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby by Ellery Lloyd EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Ellery Lloyd
- Language: English
- Genre: Thriller / Suspense
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 6.2 MB
- Price: Free
PATRICK, CAMBRIDGE, 1991
Oh bloody hell. That was my first thought as I plowed through an axle-deep
puddle and turned onto Elm Lane, making out through my windshield a
bedraggled figure, her blond hair hanging in dripping ringlets down her
back. This was going to be awkward.
It was Caroline Cooper.
There seemed little doubt we were headed for the same place—why else
would she be wandering up a windswept street on the outskirts of
Cambridge on a weekday morning? My director of studies had mentioned
that these final-year dissertation supervisions would be taking place à deux.
He said he hoped that would not be a problem and I reassured him it would
not be, vaguely hoping my supervision partner would be attractive, female.
I should also have hoped for someone with whom I had not already slept.
She was standing at the end of a driveway, peering up it, presumably
looking for a house number. I slowed the MG to a crawl. Even rain-soaked,
she was stunning. I checked my own appearance in the rearview mirror.
Caroline Cooper. What were the chances of that?
She and I had slept together twice, back at the very beginning of our
first year. Once after a party, then again a few weeks later, having tipsily
bumped into each other at a college dance. The first time was in her room,
with its fairy lights around the mirror and Frida Kahlo poster on the wall. I
recalled the narrowness of her bed, waking up in the night desperate for a
pee but not wanting to disturb her or break the moment’s spell, our legs
entangled, her head on my chest.
The second time, we had meandered back to my room holding hands,
stopping now and then to kiss in a doorway. Half that night we stayed up
talking, drinking cheap white wine from chipped mugs and smoking out the
window, surveying the moonlit quad below. Talking about Cambridge, her
first impressions of it. Discussing art and artists. I told her stories about my
father, about boarding school. It was obvious we were attracted to each
other. It also felt like we were really connecting, as if this was the start of
something very exciting indeed.
What happened next was . . . nothing. I left a note in her college
cubbyhole. No reply. I kept an eye out for her in lectures. She began
arriving just before they started and sitting on the opposite side of the
lecture hall, then slipping off quickly at the end.
I turned that second night over and over in my mind, trying to pinpoint
what I’d done wrong. Was it something I had said? I probably was a bit of a
show-off in those days, keen to make an impression, establish myself as a
bit of a Cambridge character. Driving around town in my silly sports car.
Playing up to the public schoolboy thing, the floppy hair, the posh
accent . . .
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