Marissa

“Michael comes to the door with Frederick. ‘Lucky I was here playing Scrabble,’ Frederick says, as they take Henry off my hands. I follow with the wallet and keys that have fallen from his pocket.

‘My father,’ Henry says as they tumble through the door.

‘My son,’ his dad replies, helping him towards the fiction couch.

‘Amy’s going out with Greg Smith,’ I say to explain why Henry’s drunk. ‘I found him in the girls’ toilets.’

‘In my defence, I was too drunk to know it was the girls’ toilets,’ Henry says.

‘Go to sleep,’ his dad tells him. ‘It’ll seem better in the morning.’

‘No offence, Dad,’ Henry says, ‘but unrequited love is just as shit in the morning as it is at night. Possibly worse, because you have a whole day ahead of you.’

‘No offence taken,’ Michael says. ‘You’ve got a point there.’

‘They should just kill the victims of unrequited love,’ Henry says. ‘They should just take us out the second it happens.’

‘That would certainly thin the population,’ Michael says, as he tucks a blanket around him.”
― Cath Crowley, Words in Deep Blue