I Need a Sure Thing
"Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal...avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable." – C.S Lewis
Part 1: Tony
---
When Effy arrives home the first thing she does is call her brother.
'I'm in love' she tells him when he answers.
He can't think of a reply, settles for coming home instead.
---
The club's dark and crowded, the way Tony likes it.
For months after the accident (when he'd been fresh out of the hospital and finally able to talk, walk, eat, act like a relatively normal person again) this club would have terrified him. The noise, the crowds, it would have felt like a reminder of everything he'd lost. Everything he'd never be again.
He isn't afraid anymore.
The music is loud and Tony stands there for a minute, vibrations echoing in his chest like a heartbeat, like blood pumping in his veins screaming alive, alive, alive with each fresh beat.
It's hot inside; sweat condenses and drips from the roof. The floor's sticky where he stands.
He hasn't been here before but it doesn't matter. He is himself again and he is certain.
---
It doesn't take him long to spot her. Tony's always been good at spotting Effy in a crowd and tonight there's the deep blue of her dress to help him. The abused satin catches the light of the strobes, beckons him like a flare.
Tony came here alone and he lets his eyes linger on his sister for a minute. On the long line of her legs. On the artful rips of her dress and the pale skin that shows through in sudden flashes as she moves.
There's a bottle of something in her right hand, fingers curled loosely around the neck and Tony wonders if she's drunk yet. Wonders if later, when they're alone, he'll be able to taste the alcohol on her breath.
The boy standing next to her is tall and good looking in his grimy grey tee-shirt and cardigan. Arm looped casually around her shoulder he threads long fingers threading through her hair.
This boy must be Freddie. Tony dislike's him already.
He briefly imagines walking forward, fist raised, imagines the slickness of blood spatter on his face and the wet heat of Effy's tongue when later, in some darker place, she licked him clean.
---
After a long time he's eyes slide to the girl standing opposite Freddie and Effy. With them yet detached, as if she's waiting for someone else, someone better.
The girl leans knowingly against the bar, haughtily aware of herself as pretty girls often are, short pink dress only getting shorter as it rides up against the wood.
'Karen' Tony thinks and puts a face to the name.
Karen, the generic picture of a hot girl, the reason Tony's here tonight, standing sober in this shitty Bristol club while some generic idiot gropes his sister like he owns her, instead of London for the weekend, getting fucked with Anwar and Maxxie liked he'd planned.
Plans that were made before the phone call.
Before Effy told him something he'd been so utterly, stupidly confident he'd never hear her say and now he can't go back, can't get those words out of his head (I'm in love, I'm in love, I'm in love) and surely that's not something he can just be expected to sit back and take.
He doesn't share his sister's love, he won't. Not with some jumped up emo skaterboy with more hair than brains. No matter how good looking Effy thinks he is, how funny, how interesting.
So instead of going to London, he came home, came here, head full of plans to make Effy see sense. And the girl standing opposite her is the key to them all.
A guy stands close, eyes Karen hopefully as he waits to order his drink but Tony can see the disdain in the downward slope of her eyebrows, the critical lines between her eyes.
Karen: the sister, the mark. Tony heads towards her.