by Mia Ford
Shit, I think I might be talking about something completely different now. I don’t want to let any of my real stuff out. I shake my head and I spin just as quickly to stalk away.
“What the hell?” he shouts as I stalk off. “You bitch!”
Urgh, what am I doing here? What the hell have I come to this place for? I’ve managed to avoid the city for most of my life, I don’t see how I’ve managed to end up here now. If it was for anyone else in the world, anyone but my dad, I just wouldn’t be here. Not when I know there’s a minute chance that I might see him.
I’ve spent the last year not thinking about Brandon Heath-Smith at all. Every time he’s cropped up into my mind I’ve done something different to distract myself, but now that I’m here in the same place as him, it isn’t as easy. Knowing my damn luck, I’ll bump into him and a number of floozies just to rub salt in the wound that I’m still living my boring old life in the town, and he’s living it up here. A reminder that he left me because I’m so dull.
I just need to get my ass to the drug store, then back to the motel. That’s it.
Once I’ve locked the world out, it’ll be so much easier. Then I can forget all about Brandon, the city, and all of the past that I don’t want to think about anymore. I can focus just on Dad, the one person who really needs me. All the other stuff is meaningless.
I breathe out a sigh of relief as I finally see the store I need and I push the door open to step inside. The warmth brushes past my cheeks and stains them a funny shade of red. There are a few other people in the store and just because I really don’t want to end up in anymore awkward conversations with anyone I fix my eyes on the ground and I step forwards.
There’s a queue at the counter, so I take my position at the back and I wait. As I do I tap my feet on the ground impatiently. I’m like a coiled up spring ready to explode.
Ring, ring… Ring, ring…
“Oh my God!” I mutter to myself in shock as my cell phone blasts out. My heart pounds angrily as I’m shaken from my spiraling thoughts. I don’t even take a moment to stare at my screen because the noise is so loud. I just hit the answer button. “Hello?”
“Oh hi, it’s Doreen.” I blow out some relieved air as I realize it’s my only friend. My only real friend in the world, the older lady who works at the bar where I can barely play anymore because I work so much. “I just wanted to check in to see how you’re doing.”
She might not be the ideal person who I want to be my friend, but she’s the only one who cares enough about me to check in. A warm, fuzzy feeling fills my chest.
“Hey, Doreen. Yeah, all good thanks. We went to see the specialist today and I think she had some great things to say to help out Dad.”
“Hmm, and how does he feel about it all?” She knows him too well. “Let me guess, he barely listened to any of it. Now he’s sleeping it off somewhere.”
“Are you here?” I ask in a teasing tone. “Because that’s exactly what happened. Now I’m at the drug store picking up some pain pills for him. Hopefully that’ll help him with his pain.”
“Oh girl, you go through so much. I wish there was more I could do to help you.”
I cradle the phone closer to my ear and listen to her caring voice. “Oh thank you, Doreen, I wish that you were here too. You’re so awesome.”
“You’re the one who’s awesome, sweetie. You’re the one who goes through so much.”
“I don’t know about that. I just do what I can.” I edge ever closer to the counter. “I just want Dad to be okay.” I get a little choked up. “I don’t want to lose him like I lost Mom.”
Oh God, this is too much. I don’t want to end up an emotional wreck in the middle of the drug store. Why did I bring up Mom? That was such a mistake. Now I can feel the tears building up, desperately wanting to fall. Shit, I’m a damn mess.
“Anyway, I better go,” I tell Doreen thickly. “I’ll give you a call a bit later, okay?”
“Well just know that we’re all here thinking of you, wishing you and your dad well.”
That’s the one thing I love about living in a small town, not that it’s so small anymore but I don’t want to worry about that because it leads to dreaded thoughts of him, but people really care. I might be lonelier than I’ve ever been, I might feel like I don’t really have anyone, but I do. It’s just me who keeps myself distant.
“Thank you, Doreen. I appreciate your support. Speak soon.”
As I hang up the phone I bite down on my bottom lip to keep the emotion locked away. I keep throwing myself into work to try and distract myself from him, but it’s also meant I’ve locked myself away from everyone else. I’ve been so concerned, not letting another man in so he can’t hurt me again, that I’ve let no one in. No one.
Urgh, the fact that I’ve made my own life difficult is horrible.
“Can I help you, miss?” the pharmacist asks me, grabbing my attention.
“Oh, sorry.” I glance up to see his warm brown eyes drawing me in. He smiles at me, and his friendly nature allows my shoulders to relax just a little bit. “Yes please. I have a prescription here.” I grab it out of my bag and hand it to him. “It’s for my father.”
“Right of course, I will sort that for you.”
I tap my fingers against the counter as I wait for him to sort it out for a moment. I feel sickly impatient while I wait for him. It’s only been a few seconds, but I’m so desperate to get away from everyone else that it feels like forever.
I tie myself up tightly, my fingers coil around the edge of the counter, a sickness swirls inside of my stomach. I don’t know why, but I have the intense sensation that something is really wrong. Maybe it’ll be the pills, maybe the specialist won’t have written out the script right, or maybe it’s just a bolt of anxiety that hasn’t really come from anywhere. It’s bolting through me, consuming me, sending fizzing electricity all over me… but not the pleasant kind. It’s very uncomfortable.
Damn this stupid city. I need to get out of here. It’s messing with my mind.
“Here it is.” Eventually he turns around and he hands me a package. “And here’s the paper work to sign for it.”
“Right thank you.”
I scribble my name down and take the bag from him, trying to shake off the horrible sensation inside my chest. I have the drugs now, I can help my dad, I don’t know why I’m still feeling off. Maybe I need to grab myself some pills while I’m in here, something to get rid of my headache or to calm me down. I don’t know what, but I might as well try and help myself while I’m here.
“Thank you for that.”
I turn on my heels and head towards the shelves, I feel guilty for thinking about myself. And not just with the headache pills, but with all of it. I need to stop worrying about a ghost from my past, there’s so many people here that I’m not going to see him, there’s no chance at all. I can’t get myself all worried about him when he doesn’t exist anymore. Not to me. Just because he had a profound effect on my life, doesn’t mean I have to lose myself along the way.
I force a smile up onto my lips as I move through the aisles, just trying to make myself be happy. I want to fake it until I make it. For my dad’s sake. I can do it for him.
But then it falls away when I sense a prickle on the back of my neck, a sensation that someone is staring at me, intently like they know me. It can’t be, I know it can’t, there’s just no way… but it kinda feels like it might be. I need to spin around, just in case, just to rule out the possibility.
Chapter 18 – Brandon
Oh my God. I shake my head and blink a few times, trying to correct my vision. It can’t be. It just can’t.
But it is. The thing is I know it is. I can just sense it right down to my bones. When I first came home to the city, I thought I saw her here, but that long vanished when I realized that I was just being stupid. She wouldn’t come here, there’s just no way. Not when she hates me. But now, a year later when I’ve just decided to move on with my life, here
she is again.
“L… Lola?” I stammer awkwardly, feeling all weird inside. “Is that you?”
She looks the same. Exactly the same with her flame red hair, and her bright blue eyes, but she looks like a different person as well. She hasn’t got her sweet little cowgirl outfit on, or anything similar. She has a plain white tee shirt and dark denim skinny jeans on. She looks quite a lot like every other girl in the city. The spark isn’t there as much within her anymore.
“Brandon?” She looks resigned as she says this. “What are you doing here?”
“Me?” I take a tentative step closer to her. “I live here. What are you doing here?”
Her expression hardens. I can almost see the shitty way that I left her spinning through her mind. I want to reach out to her, to touch her, to try and connect with her again, but I know it’s the wrong thing to do. I know she’ll snatch her arm away as if she’s been burned and the way that my fragile heart is hammering, I don’t think I can take it.
“I’m here for my father,” she says quietly. “He needs to see a specialist.”
I part my lips, wondering if I should offer to pay again, almost as an automatic reaction, but I quickly stop myself at the last moment. We aren’t in that place anymore… to be honest I don’t know if we were in that place ever. I think I overstepped even then.
“Oh right, I see. That’s… I’m sorry to hear that. I hope he’s doing okay.”
“He will be, I hope. I guess we’ll just have to see.”
I nod a few times, wondering what I should say next. This is the second chance that I’ve always wanted, that I never knew I would ever get. I could explain now, I could tell her that I made a mistake when I left her behind, when I decided to pick my career over my love life, but hearing it in my mind with her standing in front of me, they just sound like pathetic excuses. There are so many ways I could have apologized for that, so many times I could have made it okay, but I didn’t. I’m a pitiful human being.
“Did you want to…” I start, about to break the ice and just offer for her to come out for a drink with me. I hope that when we loosen the tension around us, we might actually be about to make things okay, but I don’t get to finish my sentence.
“Oh, Brandon!” Franko’s voice rings out as he crackles loudly and grabs my shoulder. He might be fun, but it seems that he’s rubbish at reading the room. “You are coming out for my birthday, right? That little hot thing that works for you, Sandi with the big boobs.” I slide my eyes closed in dismay at his horrible way of describing my personal assistant… in front of Lola too. Now she’ll think I’m a sexist pig. Probably me too. “Well she told me that you were hesitant at first, but now you’re all for it.”
“Oh well…” I don’t know anymore, things have changed now. I shrug, but Franko doesn’t seem to sense my hesitancy.
“Good, because it isn’t a night without you. You’re always the wild one who makes things get crazy. Oh and between you and me, Sandi is seriously hot for you.” Oh God, this man needs a punch just to shut him up. “Actually that isn’t between you and me, she’s been telling everyone for weeks how she wants to ride you. I think that you’re in for another hot affair.”
He pats me again then walks off, calling out how he’ll see me later as he goes. He blows in like a hurricane, then swishes out again leaving a God damn trail of destruction behind him. I don’t even need to look at Lola again to know that she’s disgusted in me. She never got to know the playboy version of me. The man that she spent time with was someone better.
“Well, it sounds like you have a fun night ahead of you,” she says coldly, not even meeting my eyes as she does. “I better not interrupt.”
“No, wait.” She takes a step away from me but I reach out to grab her arm to stop her. “Please, Lola. You can’t just go. You can’t just breeze into my life and leave again without giving me a chance to explain.”
“I’m not here for you,” she snaps angrily. “I came here for my father. If I wanted to see you, I would have contacted you, wouldn’t I? But I didn’t. I wouldn’t want to speak to someone who thinks it’s okay to just vanish without even saying goodbye.”
That causes my hand to fall away from her because I know that she’s right. I did leave her. I did run away like a coward without even explaining. I should be punished for that. She should hate me. I wish I could be better for her but I can’t. I can’t be what she wants.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper back to her “I know I don’t deserve it, but please just give me a chance to explain. I want to tell you why…”
“You’ve had a whole year to tell me why.” She holds up a bag of pills to me. “Now I need to get back to my dad because he needs me, or did you forget all about my complicated life when you left to come back to a life of partying and screwing poor innocent girls who work for you. Real classy of you by the way.”
“That’s not me. That’s just what Franko said…”
“So you’ve never done that?” She throws her hands onto her hips angrily, knowing that she has me pinned into a corner. I have acted that way before, I have been that person. But I’m not anymore. How can I make her understand that? “Just what I thought…”
Ring, ring… Ring, ring…
I grab my cell phone out of my pocket, trying to end the call rapidly before it fully interrupts my conversation with Lola, but not before she catches the name on the screen.
“Sandi. So it wasn’t just Franko then?”
“She’s my personal assistant. She calls me all the time.”
But as I think about the way that I left things, with a promise that maybe something that might happen between us, which I said with my eyes if not my words, and the words fall apart guiltily on my lips. It isn’t what she thinks, but at the same time I’m not totally innocent either.
“Right, well I have everything that I need now so I don’t need to be in this store anymore. I can’t stick around with you having this pointless conversation. We haven’t seen one another in a year, so why we’re arguing I don’t know.” She pushes past me and makes her way towards the door. As she goes I can feel her, and my second chance, slipping away, but for some reason my feet are frozen to the spot. I can’t seem to make my body move however hard I try. “I would say that it’s been good seeing you, Brandon, but just like last time it hasn’t.”
As she opens the door and lets a cold blast of air inside, I shiver. But I don’t think that it’s a chill from the weather, I think it’s the horror of her words. She thinks our time together was horrible, judging by the look in her eyes, she doesn’t remember anything good about it. How can I ask her if she’s seen the lake now when she looks so distraught by me?
Damn it, it wasn’t ever supposed to be like this.
When me and Lola started seeing one another, that’s all it was. Some time to have some fun together. A short term fling that neither of us would read too much into. She needed some fun and I needed a distraction to get through my time in her town. It wasn’t supposed to be something that left us both scarred. We got in too deep and it left things messy and awkward. Even though we don’t live near each other for it to affect us all the time, it seems that we’re still both incredibly affected by it.
As I turn back to pay for the headache pills that I have in my hand, I almost trip up over something left on the ground. It glints in the light so I bend down to pick it up. It’s a key, and judging by the key ring attached to it, it belongs to a motel not too far away from here. It must be the place that Lola and her father are staying in.
My heart races in my chest, anxiety courses through my veins. I realize now that I have another option. I could answer my cell phone that’s ringing again in my pocket, undoutably Sandi who’ll want to confirm that I’m still going out tonight because clearly she’s more than keen to hook up, I could hand the keys in to the pharmacist here and cut all ties with Lola forever. I could accept that it’s too difficult which means we definitely aren’t meant to be…
Or I
could give it a go. I could chase after her and really apologize.
My heart hammers violently, my mouth runs completely dry, and my brain races. My thoughts dart back and forth, from decision to decision. I know what I want to do, I always thought if I was given a second chance I would take it, but now that it’s here I don’t know if it’s a good plan. I don’t know if it’s sensible to try and push thing that seems desperately done. Maybe what I should do is just let it go. Maybe this moment is only supposed to be closure.
“That’s a dollar,” the man says grumpily to me. “For the pills.”
“Oh right.” I almost forgot where I was while I suffer through my personal dilemma. “Yes, of course.” I hand him the cash with a strange look on my face. “Thank you.”
“Are you okay? Do you need some help?”
I shake my head. I can almost feel the color draining from my cheeks. I feel sick, but I’m not. I’m just confused. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I just… I’m sorry I have to go. Thank you.”
I turn on my heels and stomp off rapidly with the keys still clutched between my fingers. Screw closure. It’s only closure if I decide it’s closure and I damn well don’t. Lola burst into my life and she changed me, she’s turned me into someone different and I want to be that man. I don’t want to be the idiotic party boy anymore, that just isn’t me. Maybe it’ll turn out that me and Lola aren’t meant to be but I need to give it a shot. I can’t spend another day wondering what if? I need my answers and I need them now.
I’m coming for you, Lola. I need to speak to you and this time I’m really hoping that you’ll listen to me.
Chapter 19 – Lola
I stomp with rage down the street, hating the world as I make my way back to the motel. I shouldn’t have come out, I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea. I also don’t know how I thought I’d escape seeing him in this whole city. It doesn’t matter how many people are here, we’re pulled to one another like magnets. Even if we want to repel each other, we can’t.