Ellie's Return by Bronagh Pierce Page B

no-one, and while she wondered how to shield Ellie from Lola’s,
she wittered something about staying busy and never having enough time to do
anything, which even as she said it made no sense to her but was what other
people seemed to say all the time.
      Ellie pulled herself up higher so that
she could reach for her coffee. She had bed hair and bits of mascara that she
had not managed to clean off her eyes the night before. As she pulled up on her
hands, Claudia watched as her erect nipples pushed through her clingy top. As
she looked up Ellie was smiling as she watched her.
    “You haven’t seen my nipple ring have
you?” she smiled, pulling down the left side of her strappy top to reveal a
proud, pink, adorned nipple. “Do you like it?”   Claudia liked it. She wanted to run her
lips and her tongue over the silky breast and pull gently at it with her teeth,
but she didn’t think that was quite the level of approval that Ellie was going
for, and she reminded her that she had seen it last night in the bath, whilst
she again leant forward again to put the rattling cup and saucer back down on
the coffee table. She sat up, hugging herself so that her own arousal would be
less conspicuous.
    Ellie asked if she was free for lunch, and
maybe the three of them could meet in town, have an afternoon together. Claudia
could not see anyway to avoid telling her the little she knew. She started to
say that she did not see Lola very much these days and mumbling about different
circles and not having much in common but she could not batter her way through
Ellie's enthusiasm about them all being old friends and picking up where they
had left off like it was yesterday, so she would have to tell her something.
    “Lola has been seeing someone for a while.
She’s very busy these days, with him, with the business, I don’t see her any
more, there are a few people she doesn’t really see.”
    Ellie looked disappointed, as though she
was relying on some things to never change and this was a hint that they could
and did. She wondered if it was just Claudia, being a bit cerebral, a bit of a
snob and not coping with Lola’s more pragmatic nature. Maybe she needed to be a
bit more accepting.
    “Well if she has a business to run she’s
bound to be busy, I saw the shop yesterday it looks great, and if she has a man
who is taking up a lot of her time, well that’s a first, we should check him
out.”
    “You have checked him out.”
    “I don’t know him, I told you I haven’t
spoken...”
    “It’s Tom.”
    There was a pause now. Ellie was contorted
into a kind of panic, an unmoving, unspeaking panic, and Claudia immediately
berated herself for not finding a better way to break the news. She started to
fill in.
    “It was after you left, but not long
after. Lola was telling everyone how awful you had treated Tom, and that he was
so hurt. She said you had gone off to Venice with this man and you had not even
told Tom you were going, you refused to see him and it was probably out of
guilt. When they got together after a few weeks everyone was happy for them at
first because they wanted Tom to be alright, and Lola was with someone properly
for the first time ever. “
    Ellie was mystified.
    “What man?” she asked.
    “I don’t know, it didn’t make sense to me
because I thought you had gone because you split up with him, and for that
reason. But then it just seemed to be that you had gone because of this man,
and I didn’t want to judge.”
    “But why didn’t you tell me, if that’s was
what people thought? If that was what he thought?”
    “I emailed you lots of times. Are you sure
you read all my emails? This is nothing new.”
    Ellie had been rumbled for not reading all
those emails. She had found Claudia a bit much at the time. She liked her but
she tended to send long rambling emails about people and things she did not
know and sometimes Ellie found her attention wandering halfway through and not
wandering back.   So she