In his hands

In his hands was a book. His chin was on his chest, seemingly gazing downwards towards at his shoes. They were a tan colour, the same as his suede jacket.
She wondered how he came to be there. It had only been yesterday when they had been sitting in the cafe off Moulton Street nursing hangovers from Saturday night at Benny’s and hanging on to mugs of hot chocolate with marshmallows on top as if the warmth coming through those mugs would restore some sort of equilibrium to their bodies and minds. Much hot air had circulated around the party at Benny’s and there was a residual frostiness. Their silence was only masked by the clinking of lorry drivers’ cutlery on plates of breakfast. Each of them tried to piece together fragments of an evening spent circulating amongst a mixture of old uni friends and Will’s work colleagues who had little in common other than their presence at the party and their consumption of wine, beer and Benny’s weird collection of foreign spirits from his wanderings around the globe had been an equally abhorrent cocktail and abuse of common sense.
Why Will had insisted on taking his friends from work along to the party she didn’t know; it would have been better for Benny to only have had a handful of people turn up than those louts from the garage. When Benny had said ‘Bring who you like, the more the merrier, old chap’ she hadn’t even considered what might happen. She was still getting over the shock of him taking a job as a sweeper-upper in a garage. What a waste of a PhD.
And now there he was lying under the arches, clutching a book and tyre marks all down his suede jacket. Some things just don’t mix.