by Lee, Corri
Cole frowned for a moment and stared down at the bar top. "I don't have it, Cecelia. I didn't even realise you'd taken it off." It seemed as though he'd had an epiphany over just how stringently I'd committed myself to him before I'd known that he'd lied about going to Cherry Vine. I could see the regret, and I could see the contrition. For the second time, we had both realised that we had made so many mistakes and failed to communicate. We had both been wrong, and now that I had no fireworks in my life, there was nothing holding my attention. I would forgive him, and we would carry on like it had never happened, because that was 'how we rolled'.
"Why are you defending him?" Bethany's outburst was ear splitting and drove the whole bar to silence. "After all that you have lost because of him, how can you say that he did nothing wrong?"
"Because it's all my fault, Bethy. You have to see that as much as everyone else."
She stared at me vacantly for a second before shaking her enraged fists at me and growling. "I swear to god, Cici, if I didn't love you so much, I would finish off what he started. I won't let you take the blame for this basket case." I raised a finger to my lips and frowned in Adam's direction. I could only imagine how it must feel to be shut out, to have something going on around me that I was oblivious to. I would hate to think that all of my friends were speaking in whispers behind my back, but I thought that I might be furious.
He frowned back at me and glanced sideways towards Bethany. I could see in his eyes the hurt at her keeping more secrets from him- the trust he had put back into her being abused. "It wasn't an accident."
"No." I mouthed, sidling away to serve the growing line of customers, Bethany immediately hopping around to help me.
Many inquiring eyes passed over my face that night, some riddled with genuine concern and others eager for gossip. Nobody asked me for the truth and everyone drew their own conclusions- conclusions I heard as their hushed whispers returned to their seats. Some people thought that it was Cole who did it, others thought that it was Nathaniel. That was a rumour I couldn't bear to hear. Some even thought that it was Bethany, and when I heard that notion, I couldn't help but laugh out loud. To think that people could have been gossiping about my engagement or my dash to paradise in the dead of night. Life had gone so wrong from my ignoring the little voice in the back of my mind.
Adam and Cole sat in the furthest corner, seemingly in some sort of conversational deadlock, and Adam seemed to be the overriding force. He wore a look of rage that I presumed that he saved only for his most rebellious of students, but Cole appeared to be giving it his all in return. I longed to be closer to the conversation, to hear the words that Adam spoke as the only person who seemed to have any sort of bearing over the man driven to insanity.
Eventually, they seemed to reach a stalemate- Adam threw up his hands and stood up, the remark "this is going to come back to bite you in the ass, man" resounding through the loud chatter of the crowd. I don't know if I just zeroed in on it because I thought that it was personal to me or if he really had just spoken that loudly, but it marked the end of their terse conversation and left Cole looking as lost as an orphan. Whatever point he had been arguing didn't have his best friend's support, which meant that he was alone. I could relate to his solitude.
He sat there for a while, childlike and feeble, staring into the bottom of a glass looking for answers as I had done so many times before in my life. I saw our one and only similarity in that broken shell- our inability to release our grasp on our control until we'd lost everything. We didn't know how to give up on anything, we were too damn stubborn, and somewhere along the way, we lost sight of our motives. It didn't make sense- why we'd both acted as we had, but the consequences of doing so were firmly etched on my skin.
The world seemed to speed up around him as he sat there, isolated inside his own bubble of thought. It was awful to see a man who had always been so debonair look so small and insignificant. All I could do was give him a vaguely reassuring smile that he would find no comfort in, and serve the rubber-neckers and loud mouths who shouted their demands over the loud club anthems that the old men loathed so deeply.
"I still don't understand why you've forgiven him." I rolled my eyes at Bethany and shook my head in Cole's direction.
"He's not forgiven, not by a long shot. But look at him- he feels bad enough without me joining the line of people waiting to tell him that he's an awful person. What good would possibly come from trying to make him worse?" She couldn't answer, because there wasn't any benefit to berating him. Nothing would undo his actions or reverse time, keeping it in the focus would just prolong the duration of suffering before we could all move past it. "The way he lost control is no different to the way you and I both ended up having sex with men other than our boyfriends. You were right, it just happens."
"Pardon me, did you just say I was right?"
I groaned at her and poured her a shot of congratulatory tequila. "Lap it up, Bethy, because it'll be months before you hear me say that again."
"I'm keeping score, you know."
"Oh yeah? How is that looking?"
She snorted and tossed back the shot, hissing through its burn. "Dire, as ever. My day will come, Douglas." I sincerely doubted that it ever would. If Bethany hadn't yet realised that there was method to my madness after all of this time, the chances were slim to none that she would ever reach the realisation.
She huffed with displeasure when Cole slowly approached the bar, heavy eyed and uncharacteristically shy. There was something he had to say- that much was obvious- but his ability to do so was stunned by his unwillingness to force the words. Adam had exerted his will over something and Cole was being forced to make a move he didn't want to, so whatever it was, he wasn't going to give it up without a fight.
"Get on with it, Fiore, I'm not doing this for you." Adam's unexpected snap was vicious and cruel, not at all what I had expected to spill from his mouth. I had thought him to be somewhat more compassionate, but there again, considering how everyone had spared him of the honesty which he deserved, I couldn't really blame him for being more than a little pissed off.
Cole opened his mouth to speak and was only halfway through saying my name when his phone rang loudly and rattled on the bar. He glanced down at it and squinted- clearly itching to answer the call but not wanting to appear rude.
"Cole, it's okay."
He whined quietly and pulled a face, torn by opposing thoughts. "I'm really sorry, it's one of my students." He grabbed his phone and mouthed 'sorry' again, making for the doors quickly and addressing the student as 'Isla'. I was sure that I knew the name somehow, but it hardly seemed feasible that I would know any of his students- sixteen year olds weren't exactly on my list of preferred acquaintances.
"Is that normal practice?" I frowned down at the floor for a moment before turning to Adam. "Giving your personal phone numbers to students?" Aiden had given his number to me, but our teacher-pupil relationship had hardly been orthodox.
"Sometimes." He took a large gulp from his pint and sealed it with a gasp of quenched thirst. "Some of us give out our numbers in case students need help with coursework and suchlike, but most of the time they just text us with bullshit excuses for wagging off so we can't mark them down with an unauthorised absence."
"Devious." I wished I'd thought of something as ingenious when I'd been at college- classes were nothing more than a place for covert cat naps when I always read ahead and did extra research. "So calling at ten on a Thursday night is unusual?"
Adam emptied his glass and held it out to Bethany for a refill. "Unusual but not unheard of. She's probably stoned again. She was the girl who asked you if you were Nathaniel's bitch, remember?" I strained my mind to think back to the day I'd staggered into the college and been accosted by a girl who'd looked at me like I was dirt. I vocalised my disapproval with a retch when I recalled the patchy green hair and dismissed the subject with a pilfered can of Red Bull.
My back straightened suddenly with no provoc
ation. Cole had been gone ten minutes and my gut told me that something wasn't right. It just seemed too long for him to have been talking to a teenager, and his jacket still hung over the back of a chair in my direct line of sight. That little voice in my head said that something was amiss, and having suffered the consequences of ignoring it once already, I was heeding the warning well. I rubbed at my stomach to smooth out the knot that formed there and stared out across the sea of faces, wondering if maybe he'd sneaked back in and I'd missed him.
"Are you alright?" Bethany asked me, with a hand rubbing across my shoulders.
"Something isn't right, Bethy. I can feel it." I rubbed at my eyes when they were inexplicably drawn to the door and I was filled with the need to go outside. I swiped my phone up from a shelf underneath the bar and shook my head with a sigh. "I'll be right back, I just..." I couldn't finish the sentence because I couldn't explain it. It was the kind of force I felt that drove me to turn around when Nathaniel entered a room, but not him. It was too dark to be him. What I felt seemed to be more like sensing the presence of death and despair.
That feeling didn't fade when I threw the doors open and stepped out in the heavy rain that fell from an inky black sky ribboned with silver clouds. There was nobody else around, just an empty street broken with puddles. The downpour was so strong that it created a deafening ripple that I couldn't hear my own mind over. In such a miserable setting, it only felt right that something would lurk out there. I didn't know from what angle it would arrive or the form it would take, but there was no doubt in my mind that it was there.
My intuition led me around to the left hand side of the bar, to a small alleyway that could be accessed from the cellar. Nobody ever went there- the ground was too uneven and littered with broken glass, and the walls trailed with creeping thorns that clung to the cracks in the mortar. With no source of light except the small sliver of a moon and the dim rays that travelled from the street-lights across the road, I had only my sense of touch to guide me.
"Cole!" My call out was redundant against the thrashing cloudburst. I brushed my sopping hair out of my face and stood with my hands on the walls on either side of me. Every inch of my body stung from the heavy droplets that pummelled me and threatened to rip me open, and my breath was jagged and laboured through the effort of moving when I felt like I was submerged in treacle. I was crazy to be down that alley in the dark, but blind conviction told me that I had to be there.
And then I smelled something metallic, so strong that I could almost taste it. If I'd have been sucking on a penny, it would have been the only flavour that I could compare it to. Pulling out my phone, I held it out in front of me to bathe the alley in the weak blue light of the camera's flash, and saw the evil that had drawn me out into the storm.
One body laid crumpled on the floor while two others mercilessly beat it to a pulp. Nothing could be seen of them apart from their eyes- the black ski-masks they wore covered all of their faces and their PVC trench coats and weighty boots gave no hint to their stature. Their victim covered their face with their arms, but I knew from the torn shirt and the grey argyle tie that I had been sent to judge them. The man who had threatened to take my life now depended on me to save his.
I froze for a moment, knowing that I held an insurmountable power to sway the events in the alley that night. I could walk away and say I'd seen nothing, let these thugs do to him what he would have done to me. It would be retribution for all I'd lost because he'd been so jealous and arrogant. I could deny all knowledge and fake my woe at the news of him passing, laughing at his demise while others genuinely wept, feeling that justice would have been served. Couldn't I?
Chapter Thirty
I tried to take a step back but my feet were firmly planted to the ground. Of course I wasn't that person- I never was and I never would be. As angry as I may have been at Cole- no matter how heavily I guarded that anger with indifference- it was not my place to decide whether he lived or died, just as it shouldn't have been his place to dictate my mortality. He would go to Hell for seeking to play God with my life, but I certainly wouldn't follow him there for the same crime.
I flew forward into the fray and threw myself onto the closest man. "Get the fuck off him!" I screamed, scratching at his face and thrusting my knees into his back. He was built like iron and I didn't stand a chance against him.
"Cecelia, no!" was the only thing I heard before my targeted assailant spun around and knocked me to the ground with a fist to my face. My head hit the ragged concrete with a bone splitting crunch and I felt my lungs void of all air. The man stood over me and a well timed flash of lightning lit up his face. My bleary vision caught sight of two cold ice blue eyes staring down at me for a moment, before they screwed up tight and turned away.
"Bail, you idiot!" The other attacker jumped up from Cole and spared a glance at me before they fled unsteadily from the alley, leaving me winded, bloody faced and feet away from their victim.
I made an attempt to move towards him but the back of my skull seared with intense pain if I did so much as blink. I wondered how I would ever get us out of that alley, if there was any possibility that I could shout loud enough to split the din of the storm and the music from inside the arm. And then Material Girl began to blare nearby, and only then did I realise that my phone had been in my hand the whole time. My thumb found the strength to move and the sound of the bar sprung from my phone and filled the alley.
A small distant voice yelled over the crowd noise and music. "Cici, where are you? You said you'd just be a minute!" I grunted through the pain that moving my arm caused and raised my voice just enough to be heard.
"Bethy," I croaked, "the alley behind the cellar. Bring- ah!" My teeth gritted at the jolt of agony in my face, "Bring torches. Shit..."
My vision blurred the crescent moon overhead and the beating rain hailed down on my broken body. A door slammed open nearby and then nothing.
"I can't believe you're still writing at a time like this." Bethany sighed at me disapprovingly while I lounged out across three seats in the waiting room with my laptop across my legs. She looked gaunt and bewildered- she couldn't handle the sight of blood at the best of times, and it had come delivered with two unconscious bodies. I could tell that the image still haunted her after three hours in the accident and emergency department. I'd escaped with a broken nose, two black eyes, a bigger split in my lip and a minor gash on my scalp- I considered myself lucky. The look on her face gave the impression that she was still mentally planning my funeral, like I could keel over and die at any minute. "I don't think Nathaniel is going to mind if your final draft arrives a little late considering the night's events."
I pursed my lips and shook my head at her. "No, I want to get this out of the way. So much bad stuff has happened since I met Nathaniel, I just want to end this chapter of my life, so to speak." I was desperate to escape from all of the drama and heartache, and as soon as this novel was finished, I'd never have to play a part in his life again. I could send back the keys to the office and all of the gifts that he'd given me, and make believe that he'd never walked into my life. Living in denial was a concept that I was familiar with and accepting of, and all of the public reminders of our relationship would soon be replaced by posters for perfumes and articles about emaciated models with eating disorders. We would be archived, and I would return to my unremarkable life of bar work and late nights, cheap clothes and abstinence. "How's Cole?"
Bethany shoved my feet over to steal one of my seats and twisted my laptop around to face her. "Surprisingly alright actually. They're x-raying and scanning him but they think he's walking away with just a lot of bruises, a few cracked ribs and a broken arm." She looked up at me sternly, silently admonishing me for throwing myself into the brawl with no consideration for my own safety. "You might have saved his life, Cici." There was no 'might' about it- I had seen the eyes of one of those men and they were not eyes that reflected lightness and restraint. "I really admire you for that, you know
. You could have just left him there."
"I thought about it," I confessed, "but my body just wouldn't let me walk away. If I had, I may as well have just killed him myself."
I leaned back against the wall behind me and folded my arms over my body. I had reached my physical limits and was running on empty. No amount of coffee in the world was going to get me off of those seats. Bethany rolled up my coat as a makeshift pillow and ordered me to lie down. "No, my novel." I objected, but was met with a glare and a hand in my face.
"Shut up immediately. How much more could you possibly have to do?" There was no answer. My mind had given up the creative ghost and all of my grand ideas had been noted. But I felt incomplete, like it still lacked that final sparkle. "I thought so. If Nathaniel has any issues, I'll tell him to correspond with me, ok?"
I fell asleep before I could answer, too weary with exhaustion to battle on. I knew that her willingness to exclude Nathaniel from my life was her way of protecting me, but the thought of never hearing that sharp pronounced voice again nagged at me and stalked me to my dreams. And those dreams were of Hell, but rather than sitting with him dead in front of me, there was nobody at all. I sat on my own in that blinding whiteness, nothing but a bed and a window as company. No escape and no real source of stimuli. Yes, this was Hell alright.
"Happy birthday, Cole." He raised an eyebrow at me as I passed him a small plastic cup of the foul piss-water that the hospital called 'coffee'. He was still surprisingly handsome considering his battering- his impulsive reaction to cover his face meant that he was relatively unblemished- lucky sod- and his only immediately obvious injuries were the large supportive bandage around his mostly exposed torso and the plaster cast around his left forearm. Honestly, I was a little resentful that he came off so well and wondered which of the heavy objects in the room would serve best to even the odds.