I still like Reset, but maybe some play on driving or driven, to go with the car theme and the driving Lilah away theme.

All this talk about driving has earwormed me with Radar Love, which leads me to a title of 'Wet on the Wheel' which, ewwwwwwwwwww.

All this talk about driving has earwormed me with Radar Love, which leads me to a title of 'Wet on the Wheel' which, ewwwwwwwwwww

but a funny ewwwwwwwww.

For a while, I was trying to come up with some clever pun (it's up at my archive, which means I'm unlikely to change the name), but I gave up.

And elena! EWWWWWWWWWW.

Ew ew ew ew bad puns!

I haven't even had coffee yet, and there are puns on the floor.

Plei. Gah.

Hot in here? Not just me, then?

(fanning)

Bev - have I sent you any of Chapter 5?

Gimme a sec to check--Nope. Just through, um, the thing. You know. Where she wakes up and they're there?

I'll send what I've got on 5.

More. I haven't edited this at all, so forgibe errors except to correct the spelling of "forgive"):

"Rude Rupert, that's what you are." The reference to KORWIGH - "knickers off ready when I get home" - had me reluctantly grinning. But something was setting off my internal alarm system. What in hell was wrong? Every nerve ending I had was suddenly beating a war drum, and I couldn't imagine why. "Slap and tickle sounds lovely, ta."

The feeling of something off somewhere, something holding its breath and waiting to happen, stayed with me through the night. We had indeed gone back to the new shop in the Woodstock Road, me with all senses sparked and sensitive. Rupert was right, there was no sign of Richard Giles; still, I couldn't relax. Rupert showed me his guitar - he'd been saving for a Martin for three solid years and finally got the money to buy one. We played records, louder than he could have had Richard been there: Jimi Hendrix, Dave Edmunds, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd.

Rupert also pulled out a pipe and a small bit of hash - procured, he told me, by his friend Ethan. We opened the back door and stood in the doorway, half indoors and half out, passing the pipe back and forth, holding the acrid smoke in our lungs, trying not to cough, getting more relaxed with every moment and vaguely hoping the telltale smell might not linger indoors and give Rupert away. Behind us, tinny and light, Pink Floyd's UmmaGumma spun on, freezing itself as this moment in time imprinted indelibly on my memory like a distant dancing scent or a vagrant warmth.

I took a pull at the last of the hash. Words, a perfect acoustic guitar, and was that birdsong I was hearing?

Icy wind of night, be gone, this is not your domain
In the sky a bird was heard to cry
Misty morning whisperings and gentle stirring sounds
Belied a deathly silence that lay all around

Something moved in me, a kind of pain. Perhaps it was regret, that rarely-tasted indulgence, something I never allowed myself, regret for something I couldn't identify beyoind my own awareness that I'd had none of whatever it was. It might have been sorrow, the genuine article in all its brutal simplicity, for all the youth and the normalcy I'd been denied? Maybe it was no more than the hashish opening a few barred windows for me to climb into or out of, or the knowledge that, come Sunday, I would officially leave whatever pitiful bit of childhood I'd ever had behind me?

Hear the lark and harken to the barking of the dog fox gone to ground
See the splashing of the kingfisher flashing to the water
And a river of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees
Laughing as it passes through the endless summer making for the sea

Warmth, and love, and simple being - surely, it was far better to rejoice, to revel, in what I'd been given, than to regret the lack of that which I had not? These unshed tears, clotting at the base of my throat and pressing against my cheekbones from behind like a small insistent hand knocking on the wall - they were false, they were nonsense, I was not going to cry, and certainly not in front of Rupert....

In the lazy water meadow I lay me down
All around me, golden sunflakes settle on the ground
Basking in the sunshine of a bygone afternoon
Bringing sounds of yesterday into this city room

Hear the lark and....

I looked down at my feet, frantically wrestling back the need to look at my life instead. Starlight touched them, the new shoes; I remembered trying on pair after pair, unsatisfied with everything, until these, off the back shelf in a tiny store at World's End, where Chelsea becomes Fulham, had slid onto my tired feet like Cinderella's slipper.

Dappled with starlight, and vomit, and partially digested blood. Not fixable. Not recoverable. They were fit for nothing better than the dustbin.

Hear the lark and....

I began to weep. Rupert had his arms around me, my tears splashing and pooling like salt water in the well of his collarbones. I was incoherent, and therefore silent; there were no words in me, not for this huge looming sense of loss. Rupert, it seemed, needed none.

"You've missed nothing." He spoke softly, with complete certainty, into my throat. The pulse of my jugular took his words, his certainty, and carried these things through my body, warming me. "I've had all that and I'm telling you, beloved, you've missed nothing. You only think you have. You can have it, some of it, anytime you like. And I'm here. Remember that. I'm always here."

We made love in the doorway, half under lamplight, half under starlight. For a while, at least, the foreboding that had settled on me in the Wolvercote churchyard sank to an intensity level no greater than that of a flickering candle. But although it sank, that candle, dark and disturbing, never entirely went out.