“You’re married, and you’re going through a divorce, and you didn’t think that might be something you should share with me?” Anger ousted the disbelief from his face.
“It’s a part of a life I’d left behind. When I left him, I started over Ash.”
“You didn’t trust me.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t want to burden you. You’ve had issues enough of your own to deal with these last six months.”
“The way partnerships work is that you support one another. You trust each other, and you don’t keep secrets.”
He stood, and brushed his hands through the longer strands of his hair, pushing them backward so that the undercut sections were revealed. “Fuck!” He waded away from her. “FUCK!”
Ginny rose to her feet too.
Ash faced her again. “I thought I knew you. I thought it was real.”
“Ash it is. It’s so fucking real.”
“No. You belong to somebody else.”
“I don’t. There’s nothing between him and me. Didn’t you hear me? I’m trying to end it. He’s making it difficult.”
“You said yes, but you can’t say yes when you’ve already made that promise to someone else. So, either that makes you a liar, or what you’re actually saying now is ‘No, you don’t accept.’”
“I do accept.”
“Liar! I fucking don’t believe this. It’s exactly like before. I’m still every bit as blind and trusting and fucking stupid as before. You’re just like her. You’re like Connie. Has any of it been real?” A thought clearly entered his head, for his expression froze, then his eyes narrowed and a nasty sneer spread across his lips. “Did Iain really spike you, or was that a convenient excuse to explain away why he had his hand up your skirt. Did I just come back from the khazi a little too soon for you to enjoy the quickie you really had planned?”
“Ash don’t.” Ginny shook her head. Everything was broken between them if he was prepared to entertain the notion that she’d willingly have thrown herself at that evil, conniving, monster. “Please don’t doubt us. It’s all been real, right from day one.”
Her plea fell on deaf ears.
“Everything since day one has been a lie. You’re a lie. Is Ginny Walters even who you really are?”
Her goldfish gawp immediately gave her away.
“The trench keeps on getting deeper. You’re right, we don’t know one another. You apparently don’t even exist.”
“Ginny is my birth name, or rather a shortening of it. I legally changed my surname. I needed something Miles wouldn’t associate with me. I didn’t want him to find me.”
“What was your married name?”
She bit down on her lip, as a sob threatened to erupt and tears banked in her eyes. “Ginny…that is, it’s Geneva. Geneva Winters.”
-22-
“You’re leaving? But you’ve only just got here.”
Ash hated the disappointment in his mam’s voice. He hated to let her down in any way, especial at Christmas, but staying put simply wasn’t an option. He couldn’t be here and give her what she wanted. She’d taught him how to fake a smile in the face of adversity, but there were some situations where a smile couldn’t carry you through. You could smile through the repercussions of a blown valve on a water pipe, but not the damage of having your heart torn out. It amazed him that when he looked down, there wasn’t a gaping hole in his chest and blood stains on the floor around the lump of meat that he wished he didn’t possess.
Everyone left. Everyone betrayed him. That was his lot in life, to be cast off and left behind. To be a constant sucker.
And to think that for about an hour he thought he had it made. That ought to have been warning enough to realise something major was on the horizon.
He needed solitude to process this.
“Let the lad go, Sarah. He can’t help it if something’s cropped up, and we’re not exactly best prepared for guests.”
“But the water’s turned off now. It’ll not take us long to clear up.”
“Aye, we have, but the problem’s not fixed, and it’s not going to be until the shops are open again so that we can get the part, and we probably ought to leave the electric off until we have everything dried out. It’s going to be a damp and soggy Christmas, and it’s way too late to be thinking about alternative arrangements.”
Dad had overheard, Ash was pretty certain about that, and now he was doing his best to be supportive without explicitly letting on that he’d eavesdropped on the last few minutes of conversation between his son and his girlfriend.
“But,” his mam clung to him. “We’ve not even had a chance to sit down with a cuppa yet, and I’ve not seen you in forever. Aw, let me take a look at you properly. Will they need you for long? What in heaven’s name is so essential on Christmas Eve?”
“I’m not sure.” There was no you, he’d been called away by, but he’d made sure not to lie to her either. He was merely allowing her to make assumptions about the band and failing to correct them.
“You’ll be in touch soon, so we can arrange another day?”
He nodded. “The tour starts on the 29th, but I’ll try to pop in before I have to fly to Norway.”
“Do your best, but we’ll be fine if you can’t manage it. All right, son?” His dad patted him on the back, while giving him a one-armed hug. His mam nearly squeezed him in two, she clung onto him so zealously.
“Nice meeting you, dear.” She hugged Ginny too.
Ash dug a groove into his lip and bit back the nausea welling up from his stomach.
As his parents were both watching their exodus, Ash had no choice but to get into the taxi he’d summoned along with Ginny. He stayed in the vehicle, only long enough for them to leave the cul-de-sac and be out of sight of his parent’s place before he asked the driver to pull over so he could get out. He threw a couple of twenties down on the front passenger seat. “Take her wherever she wants to go.”
“Ash,” Ginny attempted to speak to him, but they didn’t have anything else to say to one another. Everything he’d believed existed between them had turned out to be fake. He slammed the car door and turned away. The taxi cruised past him a few seconds later.
Ash made the five minute walk into the town centre, where he stopped at the petrol station—the only place still open—then called another cab to ride out into the sticks. He knew where he was going. The one place he was sure he wouldn’t be disturbed.
The taxi driver asked him thrice if he was sure this was where he wanted dropping when they pulled up in the lane by Xane’s infamous bolt hole. From the road, it didn’t look much like a house. An artist might kindly describe it as a hermitage, but what it really resembled was a dilapidated shed. Thankfully, the outward façade wasn’t reflected in the interior.
Ash searched for the key where he knew it was kept but couldn’t lay his hands on it. Suspicions raised, and his mood so far into his boots that it felt like he was wading through shit, he tried the actual door, and found it unlocked.
Shitting slimeballs! Some fucking bastard had obviously been using it as a cheap Airbnb alternative. He knew it wasn’t Xane here, as he, Dani and Luthor had headed south to spend Christmas with the bit of Xane’s family he actually got along with. Spook, was on a plane to Sweden by now, Paul would be unrolling his bed mat in some tent, and Liam had headed to Hartlepool to visit his gran.
Ash searched around outside and found himself a stout stick, which he used to push open the door. There were no lights on, so whoever was squatting had either heard him coming, or was out at the moment.
Ash slid into the corridor, and traversed its length with his back to the wall. It wasn’t a very big building, just a combined kitchen-lounge area, and a bedroom with an en suite down below.
He could hear someone breathing, chuffing away like an asthmatic steam train.
He neared the corner, caught a glimpse of movement in the glass of the photo-frames on the opposite wall, and launched himself into the roo
m.
“Paul!”
“Ash!”
“What the fuck!”
Ash dropped the stick, at the same time Rock Giant lowered the carving knife, and reinserted it back into the knife block.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
His friend gave him a sheepish grin. “Didn’t much care for the plans for the Pagan piss-up my folks are hosting, so I thought I’d hang here and enjoy some long overdue solitude instead.” Curiously, he didn’t seem overly surprised by Ash’s presence now the initial alarm over him being a potential intruder was dissipated. “Ginny’s not with you?”
Ash shook his head, while sucking hard on his tongue.
“Yeah, gawd, I’m really sorry man.”
Ash reared on to his heels, somewhat taken aback. “You know?”
Rock Giant grabbed a swatch of paper off the sofa, and waved it at him. “It got left behind in the car. I took a look as it seemed important given the formal address on the envelope.”
Ash looked over the papers. It was documentation for a divorce filing, to end the marriage between Miles James Winters, esquire, and Geneva Christina Winters, on the grounds of adultery, naming him as the scummy bastard responsible.
Pain rammed through Ash’s head and threatened to make him hurl as he read that part. Paul caught him and shoved him onto the sofa.
“Do you want to clue me in on what happened?”
“Don’t wanna talk,” Ash muttered, and he didn’t. He’d left the bag of booze he’d purchased by the door. When he waved vaguely for it, Paul supplied him with his poison of choice. The weird thing was, though he claimed he didn’t want to talk, a great deal of words started slipping from his mouth: how she’d lied; how they’d broken up; his parent’s problems with the water pipes, and how his jeans had come to be soaking wet and chafing his calves. “No, I don’t know where she is now.” Was he supposed to care about that? He barely knew where he was.
The booze more or less went untouched, except when he needed to lubricate his vocal chords. The best part though, was that Paul let him ramble without once interrupting to tell him what to think, or to make a single judgemental or lame arse remark. In fact, he barely said a thing until Ash was thoroughly talked out, and had lapsed into a lethargic stupor.
“Can’t tell you how to fix it, or even say whether you should. It’s a lot to chew on, that’s for certain.”
“Yeah,” he said, sagging deeper into the sofa. “’tis.”
He lifted his head off the cushions a few minutes later. “I can’t believe you’re not going to offer me advice, or sympathetic words about how I’m better off without her.”
Rock Giant leaned over and rubbed the back of Ash’s neck, easing the strain Ash hadn’t even realised existed there. “I don’t make a habit of lying to my mates, not even when that’s what they’d like to here. Fact is, the last six months you’ve spent with her, you’ve been the happiest I’ve ever seen you and that’s despite all the crap you’ve endured. On some fundamental level she makes you whole, so while I can’t defend what she’s done, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that you’re better off without her as that’s blatantly not true.”
“You think I should forgive her.”
“I didn’t say that either. It’s a pretty hefty slice of her life real-estate that she’s withheld from you.”
“I thought I knew her.”
Paul ceased his rubbing, and rested his elbow on the sofa back. “I’m sure she had a reason for keeping it quiet, even if it’s one that only makes sense to her and not to the rest of us. People do dumb things for crazy reasons sometimes, even when they know they’re being stupid. I doubt the primary intention was to deceive you. Maybe she just didn’t know how to tell you, or she thought it would be instant game over if she did.”
“No,” he began, but then clamped his lips together. He couldn’t claim that wouldn’t have been his reaction. Fuck, in the end it had been his reaction.
“I thought we were set.”
Paul nodded. “I’m not sure any of us are ever as secure as we think we are.”
“Maybe Spook has the right idea in that relationships are best avoided.”
“I’m not sure Spook’s adhering to his own guidelines right now. And no, I don’t have concrete proof of that, only circumstantial evidence and suspicions. Also, look at Elspeth. She got what she wanted and still ended up screwed.”
She had a screw or two loose more like, but he had no intention of getting into a spat over Elspeth right now. Fact was, the band was far more cohesive since her exit than it had been since their very early days. He knew Paul saw that too, but he and Elspeth had been besties since before puberty. The big guy clearly still struggled with the decision to let her go. Although, really in the end it had been Elspeth’s decision as much as the rest of Black Halo’s.
Ash rubbed at his tired eyes. Somehow, all the talking had damped the anger that had been raging inside him when Ginny had first dropped her bombshell. He no longer felt as if he were going to turn green and burst his pants. Instead, his outrage had simmered down, leaving lethargy and nausea behind. If he wanted anything right now, it was to be able to close his eyes and drift into oblivion. Only when his eyelids slumped, he saw Ginny on the insides of them.
How had everything gone down the pan so rapidly?
Married.
All this time she’d been bound to some other guy and had never let slip even a whisper of it.
Apparently, he’d spoken that last part aloud based on Paul’s reaction.
“I think I’d be more freaked over the fact her husband had someone hand deliver you those papers to make sure you got them. ’Cause, you know what that means?”
Nope. “That the regular post didn’t deliver.”
He still didn’t get whatever point his friend was attempting to make.
“None of us are all that hard to track down, and he could reasonably assume that you were wherever Ginny was. She’ll have had copies of these forms and papers too.”
She’d presumably intercepted them to make sure her secret didn’t get out, thus compounding the extent of her duplicity. Ash shook his head. “I don’t want to think about it. Don’t want to think about any of it.”
“Then it’s not beer you need to be pouring down your throat.” He pointed at the half drunk can Ash had clutched within his hand. “If you want to silence the real world voices, then you’d best start communing with the spirits.”
“Vodka,” Ash said, thinking of Xane’s favourite tipple for combating soul-destroying angst.
“Vodka’s for pussies. What you need—” Paul crossed to where his duffle bag rested against the kitchen island, and drew a bottle from it. “—is Te-qui-la.” He grinned. “You’re going to join me, right? I have sangrita, or we can make Bloody Maria’s.”
“Salt and lime?”
“Tourist.”
***
Several hours later, Ash didn’t quite recall how tequila time had turned into a conversation about biting hub caps, or how he and Paul had somehow ended up outside, chasing each other around the field and in and out of the trees and shrubs, duelling with a cricket bat and a rusty garden hoe. What did make a weird kind of synchronous sense was the sharp jab to the centre of his chest that finally took him out. There he’d been, right on the offensive, thinking he had Paul cornered, and then out of the blue, wham! He took a good one. His defences were down, and there was no come back.
He dropped his own weapon so that he could cling to the end of the pole that had speared him through the heart, and staggered theatrically, finally crashing to earth where he gave a few beached fish like jolts before succumbing to the welcome oblivion of death.
Leastways, he flopped on his back with his eyes closed and held his breath for twenty seconds.
Paul applauded, before crashing to the ground beside him, and resting his head on Ash’s middle. “Fucker, you know you’ve drawn actual blood.” He held up his index finger to display a pinpric
k of red beaded around a protruding thorn.
“Wuss.”
“It could go septic. I could die. You’d be responsible.”
Ash caught hold of his hand and took a few seconds to focus enough to pull the offending splinter of cricket bat free of the wound. Then he sucked Paul’s finger into his mouth.
“Euew, no! Ger-off! Hell knows where your dirty chops have been.” He popped his finger free of Ash’s mouth.
“Locked around Ginny’s cunt,” Ash boasted wistfully.
“Yeah, kind of figured on it being something like that.”
“Why’d she have to have such a fucking awesome cunt, but turn out to be a cunting cunt?”
Paul shook his head. The motion rubbed his hair against Ash’s belly. It tickled, making him curl up his legs.
“Have you any idea what you’re saying?”
Ash wobbled his head from side to side. “Not a fucking clue. I love sucking her ring.”
“I know, mate. It fucking sucks what’s happened.”
“I was gonna ask her if we could have a themed wedding.”
“DM?”
“Yeah. I’d have made you all dress up as villains and such, and we’d have had a red pillar box wedding cake, and one of you would have to be the Baron so you could storm in halfway through and announce how you’ve enacted some sort of diabolical world ending nightmare. I’d fix it with a fan, a cheese sandwich, and an afro comb, and then we’d all carry on with the reception.”
“You’re such a dork.”
Ash’s eyes were so full of tears he couldn’t see the sky anymore. He blinked and they tracked sideways, and rolled down past his ears. Yeah, he owned that, he was often a dork, but what he truly was, at this moment, was heart-broken. The woman he loved had smashed open his chest, and everywhere was all out of super glue.
***
All Right Now Page 25