Page 38 of Spearcrest Knight

“It’s just coffee,” I say. “I know you need it.”

“Because you’re such hard work?” she asks with a pointed look.

I shake my head. “No. Because you look fucking exhausted all the time.”

She looks at me, blinking slowly. I can’t tell what she’s thinking, but she reaches for the cup and curls her fingers against the grey ceramic.

“Thanks,” she says eventually.

I nod and without ceremony, she resumes talking me through the key themes of Hamlet. Even though Shakespeare bores me to tears, there’s something mesmerising about listening to her talk about it.

Part of it is Sophie’s voice.

She has this very dry, kind of deep voice, like she has a sore throat all the time. It scratches against me as if there’s an itch so deep inside me I don’t even notice until her voice reaches it.

And another part of it is the way Sophie speaks about this shit. Normally, Sophie is curt and non-committal when she speaks, as if she wants to contribute to conversations as little as possible. But when she’s talking about stuff like the morality of revenge, the deaths of women and metafiction, she speaks long and eloquently.

She’s so interested in what she’s saying I can’t help but be interested too. When she reads aloud chunks of monologues like they are as beautiful as music to her, I want to hear what she’s hearing, feel what she’s feeling.

Shakespeare’s words, in her mouth, take on a whole new meaning. They sound heavy with implications, hot with desire, full of hidden emotions.

“And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,” she reads, her long eyelashes fanning on her cheeks as she looks down at her book, “that sucked the honey of his music vows—”

A sudden rush of blood straight to my cock startles me. This isn’t the first time her voice has made me hard—but it’s the first time Shakespeare’s words have. I sit up, the trance of her words now broken.

“Wait, what?” I interrupt, leaning forward. “That sounds dirty.”

She stops and raises a stony look to my face. “It’s not dirty. She’s saying that she’s miserable for having listened to all his sweet words and promises. She’s literally calling herself a sucker for falling for his bullshit.”

“Bit harsh,” I say. “Maybe it wasn’t bullshit. Maybe he meant what he said at the time.”

“How could he?” Sophie says. “You can’t take something back if you truly mean it.”

I tilt my head and watch her closely. She doesn’t give anything away, just watches me back with the same mild irritation as always. But this is interesting insight into the way Sophie thinks, the way she feels.

“You can say or feel something true, and then itstopsbeing true,” I try to explain. “Doesn’t make it a lie, because it was true at the time.”

She scoffs. “Things are either true, or they’re not. If something was true and stops being true, then it’s no longer true.”

“I’m starting to understand why you have so few friends.”

For once, I don’t speak out of the urge to hurt or irritate her. It’s a genuine observation, a sudden realisation. If she’s offended by it, she doesn’t show it.

“Nothing wrong with putting value in sincerity,” she says icily.

“No, but the bar you set for sincerity sounds like it’s pretty damn high.”

“It didn’t use to be so high,” she says, “but all sorts of shit managed to get through.”

She’s smiling, something she rarely does, but this isn't a true smile. It’s a curling at the corner of her lips that makes her look both sad and cruel all at once.

She’s talking about me.

This is interesting. I thought she had all but forgotten our fleeting friendship in Year 9, that she had left it in the past with her spotty cheeks and awkward feet. But it seems like that’s not quite the case.

I see this for what it is: the little loose thread I’ve been looking for.

Something I can pull on to make the tight knot that is Sophie come undone. Sophie is the kind of knot you couldn’t even cut through with the knife, she is wound that tightly, completely closed in on herself. But this is something to hold on to, something to pull on.

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