Lovers Leap

by JL Merrow

  And what? Find out Rufus still hated him? Even if by some miracle he didn’t, Michael would still be stuck with a bloke he’d never get to see. And Christ, it wasn’t like he even wanted a sodding boyfriend. Things were so much simpler when he just went out with girls.

  There were a couple of girls giving him the eye right now, in fact. They were perched on a rock near where he stood, huddled close either for warmth or for maximum gossip and giggle potential. They were in their early twenties, he reckoned, and both were pretty good-looking, at least as far as he could tell under all the layers they had on. Michael shivered, reminded he hadn’t dressed for sea breezes.

  The girls giggled some more. “Come over here and we’ll warm you up,” one of them called out to him. They looked all right—up for a bit of a laugh, and not too tarty in the way they dressed. Mum would probably love it if he brought one of them home.

  With a weird feeling in his guts like it’d been too long since breakfast, Michael flashed them a smile and shook his head.

  Then he walked back to his car.

  Thursday nights were kickboxing nights, but Michael decided discretion was the better part of not getting his bollocks kicked in on the off chance Trix turned up. The mood he was in, he probably wasn’t safe to spar with anyway. He couldn’t help thinking of those girls down by the coast, and it made him fucking mad. They could have been total slappers, shoplifters, benefit cheats, whatever. How fair was it that he could’ve taken either one of them home, but not the bloke he lo—not Rufus, who was the most selfless person he’d ever met?

  He thought about heading down the pub, but, well, people would wonder why he was there on a Thursday, and anyway, too pissed off to risk fighting was probably too pissed off to be drinking. He wasn’t worried about turning into a violent drunk—Michael didn’t do that—but sobbing his heart out in front of everyone would be well embarrassing.

  Besides, if he went to his local, the Pig and Whistle, Gaz would probably be behind the bar, and him and Gaz had a sort of thing where if neither of ’em had a girl, they often ended up in Gaz’s room above the pub, making their own entertainment. Normally Michael was well up for some home entertainment after a breakup, and he wasn’t sure why he was so dead against it now, cos Christ, wouldn’t a bit of something uncomplicated be just what he needed? But somehow it felt wrong. And the more he tried to think it through, tried to work out what was going on in his head, the more wrong it felt. And the more sad.

  But he couldn’t stay in and watch telly with Mum, because he just couldn’t, all right? So he ended up going for a run, going miles further than he usually did, probably setting a new personal best for speed, as if that fucking mattered to anyone. He staggered home sweaty and exhausted to find Mum asleep in front of Question Time, all those sodding politicians arguing with each other, yap yap yap, shouting and ranting and saying sod all that was any use to anyone.

  Michael hauled himself upstairs and had a bath, then towelled himself off, flopped on the bed, and lay there staring at the ceiling.

  How come he’d never realised how empty his life was?

  It’d seemed fine before he’d met Rufus, and Christ, just thinking about him set off a wave of longing that hurt like fuck. Shit. Maybe he should bite that bloody bullet and say something to Mum? Whatever happened, it couldn’t feel worse than this, could it?

  He didn’t know. He just didn’t fucking know.

  Michael closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he pulled on some jogging bottoms and went downstairs to wake Mum up so she could go to bed.

  Liz’s “as soon as I can” turned out to mean “the day after tomorrow,” which Rufus wasn’t at all sure he was actually ready for. Despite the fact he’d moped so much the previous day that Dad and Shelley kept giving each other anxious glances whenever he walked into the room.

  Shouldn’t he give Michael more time to cool off? Then again, judging from past experience, that’d only make it more likely he’d find someone else before Rufus got a chance to explain things. And, yeah, ask him what really happened with Trix, but Rufus had to keep reminding himself about that one. Because Michael wasn’t a prick, no matter what Liz thought.

  “Are you sure about this?” Rufus asked for like the umpteenth time as he drove them to the ferry. They were going over Brading Down, the whole of Sandown laid out below them on the left like a really big screen showing Google Earth, and on the right, he could see across the Solent to the mainland, where Michael was. A weak winter sun kept poking its head around the clouds, making the surface of the sea all sparkly.

  “Well, yeah. I’m not letting you face this on your own.”

  “I mean, leaving Kieran all day? With Shelley?”

  “He loves his Auntie Shelley.”

  “Yeah, but— Shelley? Aren’t you worried she’ll, I dunno, forget to feed him or leave him on a bus somewhere?” Oh god. Should he have left her the car after all?

  “Roo, if your stepmum was mentally incompetent, I don’t think your dad would have married her. She’ll be fine. She’s babysat for me before.”

  “Not for a whole day.”

  “She’ll be fine. Look, we’re doing this, all right? So stop being like the merchant of gloom. You’re giving me a headache.”

  Rufus fell silent, and tried to enjoy the drive. Which was hard, cos now the best bit was behind them and they were onto the main roads, or at least what passed for main roads on the island. Rufus had never driven on the mainland, but he’d heard it was a lot different, with, like, multiple lanes and traffic systems everywhere.

  And if he was really, brutally honest with himself, worrying about Kieran had been a bit of a welcome distraction. Now he wasn’t worrying about that, all kinds of other worries were creeping in, like maybe Michael would just slam the door in his face. Or Trix would never give them the address. Worse, they’d get to Trix’s place only to find she and Michael had got back together . . .

  And then there was the other thing.

  Rufus drove past Queen Victoria’s old country cottage and through East Cowes to the ferry terminal, where they got directed to lane three, and parked behind a Peugeot with two enormous black dogs in the back. Their ears pricked up as he pulled on the handbrake, and they gazed at him, panting, their tongues hanging out like they were really happy to see Meals on Wheels had just delivered.

  “Boat’s in,” Liz said, pointing as if somehow Rufus might have managed to miss a bloody great car ferry. Although to be fair, most of it was hidden around the corner, behind some boxy red brick buildings. There didn’t seem to be a lot of people travelling today, which on a weekday in early March wasn’t all that surprising. There were more trucks than cars, most of them belonging to supermarkets.

  Rufus stared, wide-eyed, as a thought hit. “Oh my god, I just realised. If there’s a zombie apocalypse, the Isle of Wight’s going to starve, isn’t it? Cos, yeah, they could stop the ferries running and maybe the people would be safe from the virus or whatever, but no way is there going to be enough food to go round.”

  “Nope. I give it a month before people turn cannibal. A week if it’s summer and we’ve got all the grocks here too.”

  Rufus shuddered, remembering a couple of guests at the B&B who’d not been happy when they’d run out of sausages for breakfast one morning. “Couple of days, I reckon. Um. Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “Jesus, don’t start that again!”

  “It’s just . . .” Rufus clenched and unclenched his hands on the steering wheel. “What if there’s, you know, an accident or something? Or I get on the ferry and I’m not all right? I mean, they’re not going to bung it in reverse and come back, are they?”

  Liz twisted right round in her seat to give him a hard stare. “I thought your ferry thing wasn’t a real thing?” she said slowly.

  Rufus took a deep breath, his hands all clammy on the wheel. “It’s. Um. It’s a bit of a thing.”

  “Rufus! You told me it wasn’t.”

  “I never said it wasn�
�t a thing.”

  “You told me it was all about your mum. When she was ill. Your dad made you go on this school trip to see some play, and when you got on the ferry you threw a wobbly—”

  “Had a panic attack.”

  “—cos you were worried she was gonna die while you were off the island. And then you made out like it was all about worrying the boat was gonna sink, cos you didn’t want your mum to know why it really happened.”

  “Well, yeah. Basically.”

  “And ever since then you’ve been using it as an excuse every time your dad goes all noble and says you oughtta get off the island and train as a chef, cos you’re worried Shelley’ll leave him if you’re not there to do all the work in the B&B.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Roo, have you ever stopped to think there is so much wrong with all this? You know your dad wants what’s best for you, not for him. And I don’t reckon you’re giving Shelley enough credit, either.”

  Rufus stared guiltily at his worryingly white knuckles. “She doesn’t know anything about running a B&B. You know that.”

  “Maybe if you lot—that’s you and your dad—stopped treating her like a total airhead, she’d stop acting like one?” She glared at the dogs in the car in front. One of them let out a mournful howl, and both of them lay down and stopped looking out the window. “Anyway, this is so not the point.” Her voice softened. “Roo, your mum died years ago. Your dad’s fine. You haven’t really got a thing about boats, so why are you getting in a flap about this one?”

  “I don’t know, all right? It’s just . . . I was fifteen. How do I know what I was really panicking about? What if it is a thing? What if I really am gonna have to stay on the island all my life?”

  Liz’s face was set to does not compute. “Well, wouldn’t you wanna know?”

  “No! Not if the answer’s bad. I mean, yeah, I want to stay and help Dad, but . . . what if that’s the only thing I can do? It’d be, like, the Isle of Wight’s turned into Alcatraz.”

  “That’s bollocks. There’s always other things you can do. Like hire a helicopter.”

  “Yeah, and pay for it with what? My soul? How am I going to manage that, every time I want to pop home to see Dad and Shelley?”

  “Look, this isn’t the point. The point is, if you never try and get on a ferry, you’re gonna be stuck here all your life anyway.”

  “But I won’t know I’m stuck.”

  “Yes, you will. Cos I’m gonna call you up every day and tell you ‘You’re stuck,’ until you grow some balls and get on this fucking ferry.”

  “Why are you so keen to do this anyway? You don’t even like Michael.”

  “Cos it’s not about Michael, this. Have you even been listening? It’s about you, confronting your thing.” Liz sniggered. “And if you’re really lucky, at the end of it all you get to confront Michael’s thing.”

  “Har har.”

  “Now come on, the bloke’s waving at you. Time to man up and get on that boat.”

  Rufus took another deep breath, and followed the black dogs to his doom.

  “Well, that was a bit of an anticlimax,” Liz said half an hour into the ferry crossing, shoving a chip in her mouth.

  Rufus glanced up from his plate. “Hey, we’re only halfway across. I might still panic.”

  “Yeah, and I might agree to go out with that bloke in the caff who was eyeing me up, but no one round here’s holding their breath.”

  “Fair point. Have you got any more ketchup left?”

  Liz rummaged through the pile of sauce sachets she’d picked up. “Nope. Brown sauce, mayo, or vinegar.”

  “Mayo, please. Ta.” Rufus squeezed it onto the edge of his plate and dunked a chip thoughtfully. “You know, I thought it’d be like being on the train or a bus or something, but it’s more like waiting for a train in the station cafe. If I didn’t know we were moving, I really wouldn’t know we were moving.”

  “Yep. Welcome to the thrilling experience of being bored off your tits on the Isle of Wight ferry. But you must’ve been on it before—I mean, before the one with the panic attack.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” Rufus screwed up his face, trying to remember. “Far as I remember, it all seemed a lot more exciting, then. Cos, well, I hardly ever went away with the family, what with the B&B. And school trips are different, cos you’re with your mates.” He beamed. “Hey, I’ll be able to go and visit them now.” Most of his old mates had moved off the island when they finished school, and only ever came back at Christmas and the summer holidays. If their parents had moved off, they never came back at all.

  “See? This is why I wanted you to do this.” Liz waved her chip around in emphasis. “You’re free now. You can do anything you want.” Her eyes turned sly. “Do anyone you want.”

  “Michael’s the only one I want,” Rufus said, and glared at her. “So we are not turning round and getting on the next ferry back home, yeah? We’re going to find him.”

  “Yeah, whatevs. You got a pen? Someone’s left a Daily Mail on the table over there, and I wanna do the puzzles.”

  Trix’s address was in Calmore, which was out of Southampton on Salisbury Road and would’ve been dead easy to find even if Rufus hadn’t had GPS on his phone. It was just as well. Mainland roads really were different, and Rufus was getting tired of other drivers honking their horns at him. He was doing his best, all right? It wasn’t his fault he kept getting in the wrong lane.

  As it happened, he could tell how close they were getting by the way the butterflies in his stomach kept multiplying. “How do we even know she’s going to be in?” he fretted, hunched over the wheel. “It’s Friday, right? She might be working.”

  “They took a week off, remember? So there’s a fair chance she’s there. And if she’s not, we just camp out on her doorstep until she gets home, okay? Right—it’s over there, yeah?” She pointed, and Rufus pulled into the small parking area that luckily had several vacant spaces. He parked next to someone’s Jeep and hoped the Focus wouldn’t get a complex about it.

  Trix’s building was one of those modern, red-brick blocks of flats that weren’t at all blocky and had windows where you’d least expect them. There was a security door at the bottom, with buttons to push for the individual flats so you could try to persuade the occupants it was safe to let you in, even though the speaker thing made you sound like a Dalek. Luckily, though, someone had propped it open with a brick, so they just went straight on up the stairs to flat three’s front door.

  Liz paused, her fist inches from the door. “Right, here we go. And Roo? Leave all the talking to me, right? The last thing we need is you going all gooey-eyed over her bastard ex.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know the drill.”

  “Well, don’t forget it. I know what you’re like. You’re totally useless when you’re in lurve.” She rapped sharply on the door.

  There was a wait of about a minute, which was just enough time for Rufus to start thinking, Oh god, she’s here but she’s in bed with Michael, they’re totally back together, shag, shag, shag, when it opened.

  “Yeah?”

  Rufus stared. The woman in front of them was, like, enormous.

  And not in a cuddly, curvy-girl way. She was about seven feet tall—all right, maybe not, but she met Rufus’s gaze without either of them risking a cricked neck—and had the arms and shoulders to go with it too, nicely showcased in her muscle tank top.

  Worse, her hands were all wrapped up in those bandages boxers wore under their gloves.

  Rufus swallowed. “Um . . .”

  “Hi, I’m Liz!” Rufus did crick his neck then, whipping his head around to stare at his best mate, who’d bounded forward with a breathy cry and a manic smile. “You must be Trix!”

  Trix gave Liz a cautious smile. “Yeah, that’s right. Have we met?”

  “No, of course not! I’d have remembered!” Liz giggled. There was even the suspicion of a snort.

  Rufus gaped at her, struck so dumb he thought he’d
probably never speak again. Had she gone insane? “We’re friends of Judy’s, at the Selsey Hotel,” he said quickly, before Liz could get even more worrying. Okay, so he’d been wrong about never speaking again.

  “Oh, yeah?” Trix’s tone was a different sort of cautious from before.

  Rufus glanced at Liz, but she was still doing that weird thing with her face. And her hands.

  And her entire body.

  Wonderful. Looked like he was on his own here. “Yeah,” he answered. “She said, like, you had a bad experience with a bloke there? Michael O’Grady,” he clarified, although there was a fair chance Trix hadn’t forgotten him.

  Her face darkened. “What’s he to you?” Her nostrils flared.

  Rufus stepped back a pace, worried she was about to start pawing the ground. “Um, he, well . . .” Drying up, he elbowed Liz in the side. Hard.

  “Ow! Yeah, that’s right. He totally did.”

  Trix frowned. “Did what?”

  “Um, hurt Rufus. Yeah. Like a bastard.” Liz nodded manically.

  “So we wanted to get revenge, yeah?” Rufus threw in. “’Cept we don’t know where he lives.”

  Trix paused, then nodded. “Okay. He’s at 23—”

  “We need to write that down!” Liz burst out with. “Can we come in and borrow a pen?”

  Rufus frowned. “I’ve got one.”

  “No, you haven’t!”

  Rufus and Trix both stared at Liz.

  “Yes, I have,” Rufus said slowly. “Remember? We were doing the puzzles on the ferry with it.”

  Liz’s eyes darted wildly. “Then I borrowed it. And dropped it overboard. Remember?”

  She trod on Rufus’s foot.

  Really, really hard.

  Trix snorted a laugh. “Yeah, why not? Come in, Liz. You and your . . . boyfriend?”

  “Oh, Rufus isn’t my boyfriend!” Liz giggled again, stepping into the flat. “We’re both, like, totally gay!”