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I drove home with the window down, partly for the fresh air and partly for reasons I’d rather not explain.
At home I stripped in the kitchen, stuffed my jeans and boxers into the washing machine and stood there naked in the light of the fridge, eating cold beans out of the tin and feeling, honestly, not bad. Two hundred quid and twenty more. One song. Totally worth it.
The machine started its spin. Something clattered round the drum.
I stopped it, fished around in the wet denim and pulled out a small folded square of card, pulped at the edges. The Velvet Room’s logo was on one side. On the other, in what had once been neat eyeliner handwriting, was a name and a phone number.
Most of it had dissolved.
I could make out a capital B. A y, maybe. The first four digits of a mobile number and then a grey smear where the rest had been. She must have slipped it into my pocket when she climbed off me. When she kissed my cheek. While I was busy being a man who’d just come in his jeans.
I laid it on the radiator to dry, as if that might bring the ink back. It didn’t.
I went back the next Friday. Scarlett wasn’t working. Nor the Friday after. The girl on the bar said she’d finished her nursing degree and quit, and no, she couldn’t give out numbers, obviously.
I kept the card. It’s still on my fridge, under a magnet: a capital B and four digits. A reminder to check my pockets.
Ending 4 of 25: Laundry Day. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.