an eighth new story...'steel'

She came into the living room in a close-fitting, red party dress, unsteady on her heels.  He was working at his drawings, head down, lost in a world of colonnades, balustrades, steel and glass.

She steadied herself on the back of their brown leather couch, wiped the liquor away from her mouth with the back of her hand.

He looked up from his drawings, the lamp light showing his dry, white, expressionless features.  ‘What do you want?’ he said as she observed him woozily, washed-out gaze somewhere above his eye-line.  ‘Yes?’

Her nose twitched a little, but she didn’t speak, instead raised her wine glass to her lips, held it there.

‘It isn’t poisonous’, he said flatly, ‘I haven’t poisoned the wine’, and he returned to his drawings.

‘You’re a bastard’, she said, her voice thick and throaty from drink and cigarettes, then, more forcefully, ‘why didn’t you come tonight?’

He put his pencil down, and rubbed his wrist, not looking up at her.  Behind the drawing table there was a picture of a magnificent Doric skyscraper, an architect’s heaven, a latter-day cathedral, a monument to the self-realisation of an ideal made real, made to touch, feel, to explore, to live. 

‘I hate that picture’, she said, and she let her wine glass slip from her fingers – it broke in two at the stem on the hard, carpeted floor.  Her gaze continued to hover over him. 

‘See’, she said, ‘look what you’ve done’.  A dark red wine stain several inches in circumference spread around where she stood.

He sighed deeply, sat back in his chair, and looked past her, to the tall wooden door that stood ajar and lead into the soft-yellow glow of the hallway. 

‘It’s late’, he said, blinking.  ‘I’m tired’. 

Her nose twitched again, her body all drunkenness and bantam defiance.

‘Fuck you’, she said.

He didn’t answer, continued to look past her.

‘Fucking bastard,’ she said.

‘You metal-faced bastard!’

He winced, and his big, proud head slumped forward onto his chest.

She stepped over the broken wine glass.

‘Give me the steel’, she said through her teeth.

It was midnight, but it would happen anyhow, sharp and quick.