by Katie Porter
“We’re not looking for headlines.” Alec’s voice is heavy.
“You didn’t even ask me.”
“Dad,” I say. It’s a squeak. “Your health...”
I let the words fall off, because how do I point out that he can’t even pick up a guitar, let alone play? It seems too cruel to remind him of. I can’t believe his ego would demand a reminder that stark.
He glares at Alec in a way that’s designed to pointedly ignore me. “You could have asked.”
“I’m sorry to have hurt you. It’s the last thing we’d have wanted.” In the dark coat, Alec’s shoulders have an unusual downslope. The turn of his jaw at his ear is as sharp as an arrow.
“We. The royal we, I suppose.” Dad’s sneer doesn’t have the same effect on Alec that it has on me. “Because I know you’re not talking for the rest of the band. Nicholas would carve my heart out if he had a chance.”
“No. He wouldn’t.” He shakes his head sadly. “Mostly because he doesn’t spend the energy thinking ill of you, Silas. He’s moved on. You should as well. You’re counting your time by hours. Don’t let them be poisoned hours.”
“Aren’t you pious. I’m the one dying. I’ll do it how I like.” He pulls at the hem of the blanket, tugging it higher up his narrow chest. “Get out. Take her with you.”
I flinch. Alec’s gaze cuts toward me. He even reaches his hand toward me—just an inch or two. I give him the tiniest shake of my head. I deserve this. The scrutiny. The danger of becoming a pawn in a decades-long war. But I brought it on myself, that night in Alec’s dressing room. The way my heart thuds with pain is how it should be happening.
“Silas, don’t dismiss Harlow like that.” There’s judgment in his voice.
“It’s okay,” I say.
Dad pulls in a wheezy breath. His toes poke up at the foot of the bed. He’s vulnerable. I pull my arms in tighter around myself, holding onto my elbows.
“Take her with you,” Dad repeats. He sounds exhausted.
“Dad, I’m going to stay. You can’t be here alone.”
“Sure I can.” At least he’s finally talking directly to me, for the first time since our argument at the pub. But I don’t like what he’s saying. “It’s their job to take care of people. I’m sure you’ll spend enough nights in hospitals when I’m almost dead and can’t say anything to contradict you. Tonight, I say you go home.”
Tears burn in my sinuses. I blink hard. “Dad.”
“Go.”
I can’t tell if he wants space from me or if he wants this for me. To protect me. I fucked up so badly this afternoon that I can’t ask. Alec puts a hand on my back, a heavy weight that holds me steady on the ground. I give Dad a kiss on his forehead because I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t and then he died in the middle of the night. His skin is papery and cold.
The entire hallway slips by. I’m punching the button to the elevator before I realize that Alec stayed behind briefly. He catches up to me, with a swirl of that long black coat around his knees. He’s looking at me with so much concern that it’s going to break me in pieces. I press my fingertips to the bridge of my nose.
The elevator is full when its doors open. Alec guides me in, and then off again at the parking garage. I’m getting too familiar with the weight of his hand at my lower back. I give into it though. I need the comfort.
His car is dark and sleek, a midnight blue Audi with two doors. It stops just shy of being an out-and-out sports car. The windows are tinted black. The door lock chirps quietly as we approach. He doesn’t even need to pull out a fob.
He opens a door and I double take because I expect it to be the driver’s side. It’s not. Passenger’s side. Britain. I’m in Britain. I’m so far from home. He’s opening the door for me and he’s patient as I settle in.
Instead of closing the door, he crouches down so his eyes are level with mine. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Embarrassingly, terrifyingly, I instantly burst into tears. They’re great big ugly sobs. Not the pretty kind of crying that can be dabbed away. My nose snots. My face contorts and my teeth are bared, like I’m grimacing.
He pulls me into his arms and I bury my face in his neck. The coat is in my way at first. Then he pulls it free of his shoulder, so I have a crisp cotton of a dress shirt beneath my sobbing mouth. I fist my fingers in his collar.
I hate this. I hate how this feels. I can’t stop it.
His soothes his hands up and down my back, over my coat. It’s not good enough. I need to get closer to him. I would get out of my skin and inside his if I could. Feeling absolutely anything else would be better.
I suck my feelings back. I breathe as normally as I can and surreptitiously wipe my nose with my fingers. I let his fine, expensive shirt dry my eyes.
“I’m all right,” I say.
“It’s okay. Tell me what happened.”
“Nothing happened. Nothing important. We had a little argument and Dad got worked up.” I struggle to keep my voice light. “He started coughing and his oxygen wasn’t great. I overreacted and had an ambulance called.”
“What was the fight about?”
“Nothing important.” It was family business. Not Alec’s business. “It’s fine.”
He puts a hand on the side of my face. His fingertips rest at the divot of my temple. A shiver works from there, over my head and down my spine. I let my eyes close because they’re so heavy, and now I won’t have to see him watching me. He knows I’m lying.
“Harlow,” he says softly.
I kiss him instead of tolerating his pity. I don’t like the shape of it. The easiest way to make it go away is to replace it with lust. His lips are firm at first. The sore spot on my lip—the one I’d worried into existence—stings with the pressure. But he’s still and calm and so fucking frustrating.
Maybe I’ve lost my touch. The temptation of the younger woman is gone. I’m nothing special after all.
Until he breaks open. The hand at my face pivots and curls behind my head. His fingers spearing into my hair. He locks his thumbs into the soft, tender skin in front of my ear. I’m delicate there. He probes. He could damage me but no more than I already am.
I dive under his coat. His shirt is thin. The heat of his body radiates through it. I need to get closer to him. I wrap around his back and tug him closer. He tips into the car toward me, propping himself on the far edge of the seat.
He pulls away and I despise the sad little noise I make. He’s searching me for answers that I don’t have. “Harlow, what is this?”
“Make me...” I swallow hard. I glide my hand over his side, with his coat hanging heavy around us. “Make me not hate myself.”
Chapter Seventeen
Alec
“WHERE ARE WE?”
They are the first words Harlow speaks in close to three hours. I squeeze her knee. She lifts her head from the seat, where she’s been blankly staring out the side window. Her hands lay limp in her lap. Palms up and still, she’s never seemed quite so vulnerable before.
“Brixton. In London, but south of the Thames.” I pull down a side street and snag a rare parking space.
“I thought we were going home.”
Home. An interesting word to call my townhouse. I should retreat from that claim and recoil in fear. I have this damaged, impossible girl and her father, my complicated ex-friend, calling my territory their home. I don’t know if keeping the third floor to myself will be enough distance.
Harlow’s gravity keeps me returning to her. She has a pull that keeps me in her orbit and complication I want to unravel.
I let myself out of the car and round it to open her door. “I want to show you some places.”
Her face clouds with confusion. She puts her hand in mine, her fingers cold as ice, as she stands. Once we’re on the pavement, she tries to pull away but I don’t let her. I hold her hand and tuck it into the crook of my arm, so her body comes nearer to mine. The weight of my wool coat and her thick cable swe
ater means I can’t feel her heat, but I want her close by. I want to feel her every flinch or strum of tension. Sometimes it’s all that gives away her truth. I want every one of her truths.
“Show me what?” She casts a look about us. “Doesn’t look very touristy.”
“That’s because it’s not.” I pull us to a halt beside a shop that has a window filled with trainers. Hard to believe what people will pay for shoes lately. “It’s a neighborhood that people actually live in. Mixed use, much of it. Stores and flats and warehouses as well. It’s become more expensive over the years though, same as the rest of London. Gentrified, some people would say.”
She looks up at me, wary. “Would you say?”
“I would call it boring. And unfortunately I was part of it.” I point across the road, at a fourth-floor window. “I lived up there. I shared the flat with Ian and three other blokes, and that was an improvement on the place before.”
Her breath catches. She squeezes my arm. Underneath it all, she’s pretty fucking easy to please. She only wants to know what came before. Why does Silas do this to her? Why does he break her like this?
I tap on the glass behind us. “This was a thrift shop. A lot of them were about. If I had a quid or two left at the end of the week, after I’d spent my dole check, I’d pick up a new shirt. That’s how your father and I ended up dressing alike at first. Shared clothes. When he showed up to audition with us, he had only his guitar and the clothes on his back.”
Her jaw drops just enough to show the inside of her bottom lip. The exposed skin is pink as sin. “What do you mean?”
“I think your grandfather kicked him out.” I start walking us slowly north, following paths I’ve often trod before. It’s been a long, long time, however. That distance makes it easier to talk about those years, and to remember how young and innocent we all were. “I think he’d got a beating, too. He wouldn’t sit down. Played standing up the whole time. We went to a pub afterward and he nudged us toward the bar. Still didn’t take a seat.”
She makes a little noise that I don’t know how to identify. Something heartbroken. Dismal. The light is gone from her expression.
“He slept on the floor between my bed and Ian’s for... five weeks? Maybe more.” I can hear my accent getting thicker—more of my childhood in council flats, less of the polish I’ve cultivated ever since. “He’d got a job out in Cheltenham instead of doing his A Levels, but his father’d worked out some way to rob him blind. Silas had to quit to stay with us anyhow, but I think your grandfather may have kicked him out for daring to audition with a band.”
“It was just a band,” she says. “Doesn’t every seventeen-year-old kid want to be in a band?”
“Not when your grandfather needed Silas’s money to keep funding his habits. Drinking, wasn’t it?”
“Gambling,” she says.
I nod, reminded. “Ah, yes. Sorry. Young Englishmen are pretty shit at communication. A lot of this I gathered by inference simply by being nearby, when your dad rung up his mum and whatnot. He didn’t talk to his father, not directly.”
She walks with her eyes cast down toward the dark, grimy pavement. I don’t think she’s watching the wads of gum go by. She’s lost in a picture that has never been painted for her before. “Yeah. I’ve gotten the idea that Arnold wasn’t a nice guy.”
“No. He wasn’t. My parents were... complicated. Difficult. Once my sister and I left the house, Mother would have been allowed to keep writing. Try to publish. It was an anti-diluvian agreement, but one they’d learned to live with. Instead she died before my sister left for university. But at least they weren’t cruel, not the way your grandfather was.” I point out a Trinidadian restaurant across the way, where I’d eaten my dinner on at least a weekly basis. “I’m glad to see they’re still there. Wonderful chickpea curry and roti.”
She flashes a quick grin. “Vegetarians are cute. Will you refuse to kiss me if I order the jerk chicken?”
“Never.” I sweep in and take her mouth in a fast kiss, staking my territory. It becomes incendiary faster than I intended, and I find myself holding her tight as people stream by us on their impatient way home after work. Her mouth is sweet.
“Off the track,” grumbles a bloke in canvas trousers and a big puffy jacket. He brushes into us in an accidentally-on-purpose way.
I break away from Harlow to give him a look. “Keep your beak out of it.”
“Come on,” Harlow says, hooking her arm through mine. “He’s kind of got a point.”
Streetlights flicker on, and the glow from storefronts becomes more pronounced as the darkness gets deeper. Early winter means that darkness creeps in on us. The neighborhood seems more oppressive. Or maybe those are my memories as I slip deeper inside. I turn us down a back road or two, then come to a stop at the end of a tiny green space. To call it a garden would be quite generous.
“This one has nothing to do with your father.” I let go of Harlow and shove my hands in the pockets of my coat. My fingers are cold. All of me is cold, all the way down to my soul. “He’d left us by the time I used to come here.”
“Is this where...?”
“Indeed.” She doesn’t want to say it, and to be truthful neither do I. I take a deep breath and push the words out. “Where I used to buy heroin. This was after our industry contacts thought I’d had more than enough to be ‘creative.’ And after the band tried to cut me off.”
“When it was a problem.”
“Isn’t heroin always a problem?” I sigh and shove a hand through my hair. “I was lucky, all things considered. Having money helps, even when you’re an addict. I had a steady stream of clean needles and a dealer who gave me access to the good stuff.”
Even though I can’t bring myself to look at her, I can feel her near me. Her weight. That pull that she has for me. “Why did you stop? What finally did it?”
“An overdose.”
“Yours?”
I shake my head. The words stick in my throat, so that my mouth works without any sound. I have to stop. Swallow. Start over again. “I had a close friend. We’d been up for days, partying. By then it was two in the morning. It was horrible. Kind of a... seizure. He was convulsing.”
“What happened?”
A bird chirps far off and takes wing. Safety is a long way away. I could fly away from all this. There was no reason I had to come back. But instead I brought Harlow here and now it’s hard to remember why. “I did chest compressions. Panicked a lot. Called an ambulance.”
“You saved his life,” Harlow says, far too generously.
“After I nearly killed him.” I finally look at her. Her arms are crossed over her chest. “This is what you’ve wanted. This is the walk down memory lane you keep asking for. ‘Tell me. Tell me.’ You always want a story. Life stories aren’t fiction.”
“But can you blame me?” She steps to the edge of the garden and puts a hand on the wall. With her fingertips she finds a ridge in the brickwork. She rubs.
The building to the left is a once-grand Victorian house that had been cut into flats once I lived here. After signing with our record company, I bought the top floor. I’ve always enjoyed the tops of buildings. When I look out, I feel like I can own the entire view. The whole city, if I want. Everything. To our right is a set of row houses, and in between a hectare of grass and two wrought iron benches inside a low brick fence.
“Blame you? No. I understand wanting to know more.” My heart is racing. It’s hard to concentrate on any one thing. Harlow’s hair seems more golden than usual, strands of it catching yellow light from a fixture above someone’s back door. “But there are consequences.”
The brick has been spray-painted with a mash of graffiti words. Simple, clear words without flourishes. Sighs. Hips. Thighs. Hurry back. Lips. Slips. Force. Won. Won. When laced together, they create a brutal street poem.
“I know there’ll be consequences.” Her mouth twists. Not a smile and not a frown, something so conflicted that it’s withou
t description. Like so much of her. “But shouldn’t it be up to me to face those consequences? To get to choose?”
“Shouldn’t it be up to me, telling you these things? Or your father? He was the one whose face was regularly smashed in. It’s his goddamn story, Harlow. You can’t steal it from him.”
Chapter Eighteen
Harlow
WHEN THERE’S A KNOCK on my door in the middle of the night, my first response is panic. I fly out of my chair. My heartbeat races hard enough to make my ears throb. I grab my robe from the foot of the bed, but I only manage to get one arm into it by the time I open the door.
Except Alec is standing there, not one of Dad’s nurses.
My pulse should calm down, but my stomach makes a weird swoosh. Then my heart is off to the races again. I pull my bottom lip in to wet it. Give it a bite.
“Oh,” I manage to say. “It’s you.”
He looks too good. Faded grey jeans show off his lean hips. His button-down is white, which makes his dark hair seem to gleam. He’s jazzed and excited, with his eyes alight and full of teasing. “That’s a friendly greeting.”
“It’s pretty late.”
“Did I wake you?” He’s only halfway apologetic. It’s obvious he’s too excited about something to be polite.
I shake my head. “I was drawing.”
“I saw the light.”
I curl my hand around the doorknob. It’s cold. The last couple weeks have been strange. Alec and I have come to a comfortable detente. No more contentious bouts where I lose my mind, but no more frenzied sex either.
I’ve spent my time with my dad instead. The good days have outweighed the bad. It helps that he sets our itineraries and determines our agendas. We never go far from Alec’s house. Maybe down the street for dinner. I swallow pain, but I think he does too. His is physical and mine is emotional.
“You’ve come home late,” I say, even though it means admitting how attuned I am to his comings and goings.
He hums an agreement. “Practice with the band.”