Incapable (Love Triumphs Book 3)

by Ainslie Paton

  “You do it.” Jamie could, so Angus would still be saved the round.

  “You’re The Voice, man. I thought you could do anything.” Jamie must’ve been egging the room on because they started chanting, slow clapping.

  “This is a set-up.”

  “Sorry folks, he can sing, he can jive, he can’t rap. Poor, old Damon, can’t do the tongue twister lyrics.”

  He turned his head towards Jamie. “Hey.” He could do them, he just didn’t like to rap. It felt too much like one of those thirty-second radio commercials where the legal terms and conditions had to be spoken at breakneck speed without a breath. He’d done too many of those early in his career to think it was fun.

  “Money where your mouth is, mate.”

  No way he was going to let Jamie win. Sam was already rolling a drumbeat, he knew it was on. Damon looked back at the audience and did Tom Cruise from Top Gun, “I feel the need,” Jamie chimed in, Goose to his Maverick, “the need for speed.”

  There was a whoop that was Angus, and Taylor rattled the tambourine. Jamie took the chorus, and they shared the verse, swapping the song’s gender, standing at the centre of the stage, playing more to each other than the audience. He had one of those strange moments where he was so in the groove, so aware, he could see himself outside the song.

  He was happy. He had great friends, money, an amazing life.

  He rapped about test drives and red flags, attitude to burn and bad moves, his voice and Jamie’s a perfect tangle of fast clipped words and power ballad that could’ve been a song about Taylor.

  He could manage this change to his sight, it wasn’t going to be as devastating as Lina thought; she was just being super cautious, because that was her job. He sang about kissing teeth and being baptised, and there was nothing he was sorry about, and so much to look forward to, starting with skin so smooth it might as well be silk wrapped around the complication of a woman reticent enough to like the shadows, but brazen enough to give him an insight into her fantasies.

  When the song ended, Jamie hugged the stuffing out of him and Angus called for one last request. He got Michael Jackson’s Thriller. This hyped up on their own invincibility, they were going to blow the roof off the bar, starting with his best Vincent Price, ending with Jamie’s moonwalk.

  He was a hot mess and the crowd was still cheering when he stepped off the stage, his shirt sticking. A couple of regulars stopped him to have a chat. Angus put a glass in his hand, mineral water and lime. What he wanted was Georgia. He got Taylor.

  “You’re not lonely. I’ll move in when my lease runs out. But I’m paying rent.”

  He threw an arm around her shoulders. She was a sweaty streak as well. He kissed her forehead, got a lip lock on strands of hair plastered there.

  “We have to talk about how it’ll work,” she said.

  It would work because he wasn’t accepting rent and Taylor would have fewer financial commitments and could focus on her music. “Whatever you reckon, Trill.”

  “She’s not Candace.”

  Tay should’ve sound relieved, happy about that. But he heard caution. She wasn’t sold and that was okay, smashing two people together and hoping they’d stick was a mad piece of business. Like being the voice of a cartoon, it was whimsy and weird science and sometimes it tested badly with audiences and got cancelled. Taylor might be right. He had no idea if he and Georgia would rate well enough to survive, but he was keen to find out.

  “You got in her face, didn’t you?” She wouldn’t be the best wingman a guy could have if she hadn’t. She’d probably sent people his way to stall him arriving at their table. He’d have warned Georgia, but then he’d have pretty much ensured she didn’t show up.

  “I don’t get what you see in her, but if you’re looking for someone who won’t challenge you, you’re found her.”

  He released Taylor’s arm, confused. He hadn’t actively thought about Candace for a long time before tonight. Is that what he was doing with Georgia, looking for someone who wasn’t going to dazzle him, or try to make him something he couldn’t be? Taylor was right, his type was confident, and for the most part that’s not how Georgia projected.

  She was an awkward mix of competent and restrained, passionate but inhibited. She had him guessing, and maybe that was all it was, an adult’s only game of hide and seek that had him intrigued for now. When he’d found her out, would he still be as turned on by the thought of being in her life, in her bed?

  And yet, the way she let go of all her shyness in the dark, how she responded to his hands and his lips in the change room, those shining moments grabbed his attention around the scruff of its neck and shook hard.

  Taylor led him to the table. The only way he was going to work it out was over time, and time was another luxury he had. He didn’t sit, family hour was over. He was ready to split.

  Georgia touched the back of his hand and said his name softly. He turned towards her and her hand came up to his cheek, thumb brushing over the dip of his dimple. That wasn’t so shy.

  “You rapped.”

  He laughed. “Jamie is all talk.” He said that loud enough so if Jamie was close he’d get a rise out of it.

  “You’ve got some moves.” Georgia’s voice was hushed, reverent almost, and he regretted playing for laughs. He brought a hand to her back to help shut the rest of the room out. “You did Elvis like Elvis,” she said.

  He dropped his voice to match hers. “Not much I can’t do with the voice box. Got well and truly blessed there.”

  She butted her head to his shoulder, and eased out a frayed, shaky, “Oh my God, yes,” that lined his ears with lust. It’d felt different performing tonight, knowing she was listening. Knowing he’d affected her made it feel like he could see the frost haze in a rainbow.

  “Let’s get out of here.” He wanted somewhere quiet; somewhere he could test their odd theory of attraction, and find out why she’d thought about not coming tonight. But it wasn’t safe to take her home. If he did that, if they fooled around again before she was entirely comfortable with him in her new dress or her old pjs, then he was pushing too hard still. She would definitely cut and run if he did that. “I’ll buy you an ice-cream.”

  A hand ruffling his hair. “Know how to show a girl a good time.” Angus. He spun to face his voice. Yeah, that was lame. They weren’t teenagers. Angus spoke softly, gripping his shoulder. “Stay, place is emptying. The guys have gone. I’ll bring you coffee and dessert.”

  Rescued. “That’d be great.”

  Georgia was already leading him to wherever Angus suggested, one of the corner booths. He slid in first and she came behind him, not close, not touching. It was dark tucked in here, she was a voice, a presence. He reached his hand across the table but she didn’t take it.

  “You’re too much for me.”

  Ah. Here it was. And that was a polite way of saying she didn’t want to get too close.

  “I need to tell you why.”

  “Am I going to like it?” He should shut up and let her get it over with. The sooner the disappointment gut punched him, the sooner he’d straighten up.

  “It’s not a question of like.”

  There wasn’t much else to say. He put a hand to his head, combed his fingers through sweat and gel that’d lost its hold. “If it’s about the dress, we can return it.”

  “It’s not about the dress.”

  Her little finger against his, the lightest pressure. What did it mean if she kept the dress? It wasn’t supposed to mean anything. He’d spent the morning convincing her of that, so he couldn’t pretend it meant anything now. Except it did. If she didn’t confess to being a mass murderer fresh out on parole, or say she couldn’t date him unless he tried some crackpot miracle cure, part seaweed, part meteor, he might get to take that sheath of gossamer off her warm body.

  She moved her hand away. He was left with just her voice. “I told you my husband, Hamish, was injured and our marriage wasn’t good. You know we’re getting a divo
rce.”

  He tucked his chin down, not sure he could keep his expression neutral, wanting to hide it from her. She was going to tell him having one disabled guy in her life was her quota and she wanted to be friends. He couldn’t fault the logic, though it scraped him raw.

  “I used to be different.”

  Five words, not what he expected. All he heard was regret. She was going to tell him something that mattered deeply.

  “I was hurt in the same accident that put gave Hamish a brain injury.”

  Fuck. He jerked his head up and around to face her.

  “You can’t see my scars, but they’re there all the same. I don’t. I can’t. This is hard.”

  Her distress fluttered, wings of pain beating her breath. She didn’t need to do this. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “I’m supposed to talk about it. Talking about it helps to normalise it. And I have to tell you because it might change how you feel about me.”

  He needed more than her voice, because her grief was an arrow point in his chest. “Sit closer, please.”

  “No. I have to finish this.”

  He could move, slide across to her, but she clearly didn’t want that. She sucked air in stages. It ratcheted into her throat like a reverse sob. She was building her defences.

  “We were going to be the next Coldplay, the next Oasis. Hamish and Rafe, Don, Freddy and Clive. Hamish would write the songs, Rafe would arrange them and I was going to give them the kind of sound that would make us all rich and famous. That was the dream. We wanted to give the world new music to dance to.”

  “You didn’t get the chance.”

  She shifted in the silence and all he read was despair.

  “There was a student in a bunch of my classes called Jeffrey Sealstrom. He was brilliant. Topped the year, hardly ever bothered to open a book. He was one of those people who could make you nervous. Partly it was his intelligence; mostly it was his temper. He would menace the lecturers if he thought they were wrong. If you got in his way, or he thought you were wasting his time, he could get physical. He’d smash things, knock things over. Most people tried to stay out of his way. They were the sensible ones.” Her voice, matter-of-fact until now, wavered. “I tried to help him.”

  Damon moved; he needed his hands on her. He got the flat of her palm on his shoulder holding him off.

  “Don’t.” She shuffled further around the curved seat away from him, taking his equilibrium with her.

  “The only reason Hamish got hurt was because he was trying to protect me from Jeffrey.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I told you I wanted to be an audio engineer because sound doesn’t lie. You asked me who’d lied to me. No one did. It was just that I failed to see clearly. I thought Jeffrey was this quirky genius, a freak who was misunderstood. I liked him. I knew he wasn’t normal, but I didn’t judge him. We became friends. I was a naïve fool.”

  Rattle of spoons on saucers. Coffee and cake they’d both ignore arrived. Georgia’s thank you to Angus sounded routine, as if she wasn’t in the middle of explaining how her life got taken apart, how guilt created her future.

  “I could talk Jeffrey down. When he got angry, when he wanted to lash out, I could calm him. He would tell me how sorry he was, how burned up with remorse. I stopped him hitting another student in the lunch queue. There were dozens of people around—but I was the one who reached him.

  “Hamish told me he was bad news. He wanted me to stay away from Jeffrey. We used to argue about him, about how Jeffrey was unstable, but he was always sweet with me. I thought he needed someone to talk to and I wasn’t going to abandon him.

  “Then one day Jeffrey overheard Hamish and I arguing about him. He came to me and asked if I wanted him to do something to get rid of Hamish. I was horrified. I told him I loved Hamish and that if Jeffrey was going to be like that we couldn’t be friends anymore. He backed off. I thought he understood.

  “The night of the attack it was coming on dark, it was drizzling. Hamish and I been at the library. We were supposed to be researching a joint paper, but we were fooling around, snogging in the biology stack. We were walking home to his place and came across a fight. Jeffrey was hitting a student in Hamish’s stats class, Thomas Tines. Thomas was so covered in blood he was barely recognisable.”

  Damon gripped the bottom edge of the banquette seat, upholstery tacks and staples biting into his fingertips.

  “I was different then to how I am now. I was confident. I thought I was invincible. I was in London on an exchange program, a scholarship. I was the girl who organised things, who fixed things for people who couldn’t fix things for themselves. I was into everything that wasn’t nailed down or illegal. My dad was a drunk and I managed him. It never occurred to me that Jeffrey would hurt me.”

  “Oh fuck.” He didn’t want to hear anymore. Didn’t want to know this was Georgia’s reality: the colour of blood and mind-altering fear, the shape of anarchy and the solidity of confusion. But this is what she was made up of, not brown curls and pale skin, but mistakes of judgement and best intentions and inexplicable terror.

  “Please, I need to hold your hand.”

  14: Lost and Found

  “I need you to let me finish.”

  If Damon touched her, she would disintegrate. Sense and reason would stream out of her and diffuse in the atmosphere. The anxiety in his voice was enough to make her want to stop. If he took her hand, wrapped her safe in his lean strength and forgiveness she wouldn’t be able to do this, and he had to hear it all to understand that of the two of them, she was the one who stumbled around blind and needed help navigating the world.

  “I called out to Jeffrey. Hamish tried to stop me but I shook him off. I got in Jeffrey’s face and he let Thomas go. Dropped him like he was a bag of groceries. It was only then I saw he had a knife. Another man, a pedestrian, tried to take it from him and Jeffery stabbed him. Hamish tried to pull me away.”

  She risked a glance at Damon. His eyes were closed. His face contorted. He was there with her in the rain and the fading light. If she touched him, he’d surround her with sympathy when what she needed was something more pragmatic, more like recovery than remembrance.

  “I could see Jeffrey was out of his head; his eyes,” she took a fortifying sigh. “He told me all the people who’d laughed at him needed to die. The police said he had a cocktail of drugs in his system.”

  She couldn’t look at Damon’s face. She’d told this story before. Not often after the investigation, after the trauma therapists had declared her well, but often enough for the words to be there without having to fret them, often enough not to lose her place or to break down. She could do this calmly and knew that made it easier for others to deal with. But as much as she knew this needed saying, she didn’t want to see the horror of it play across his features.

  “I asked Jeffrey to put the knife down. I told him everything would be fine if he put the knife down.”

  Damon’s hand was on the seat, fisted into the red vinyl, depressing the padding. The muscle in his thigh was bunched. “You were insanely brave.”

  There was no way to prepare him for what was coming.

  “Jeffrey put the knife down. He rushed at Hamish, punched him, pushed him until his back was against a traffic barrier. I was screaming at him to stop. He picked Hamish up and tipped him over the barricade. Hamish hit the road headfirst. He was almost crushed by a car.”

  Damon moved, slid sideways towards her, but she stopped him. “Don’t.” She shifted to put distance between them again. “Please don’t touch me. I need to tell you the rest. If you touch me I won’t be able to say another word.”

  His elbows came up on the table. He put his head in his hands. “You don’t need to relive this on my account.”

  Her, “I need you to know it,” made the tendons in his neck flare.

  “Jeffrey was calm then. He said, ‘I did that for you. I did that for you, Georgie girl.’ Hamish spent six months in hospital. He ha
d to relearn how to do basic things again. Thomas had broken ribs, a punctured lung, a broken nose, eye socket, two blown eardrums, multiple stab wounds. He never got his hearing back. Jeffrey didn’t even know who he was. Jeffrey was charged with assault but he got off. He had a cousin who was a Queen’s Counsel. I should’ve known to stay away from him. I should’ve known I had no business trying to reason with a madman. A drunk is one thing but…I was so sure of myself. So arrogant. If I’d listened to Hamish he wouldn’t have been hurt.”

  “That wasn’t your fault. That bastard could’ve killed you both.”

  That’s what everyone said. It didn’t help.

  “The band broke up. Hamish couldn’t stay awake, forgot words, couldn’t read, or write at first. He got savage headaches. We were going to travel, see the world, get married, have one boy and one girl, didn’t matter which came first. We were going to be together forever.” She took a breath and it caught in the back of her throat, tasted like old books and blood. “I put Hamish in Jeffery’s sight.”

  Damon rubbed his forehead as though he was trying to hold the events and his emotions in order. She knew that wasn’t possible. It was too big, too random, too dreadful to make sense of. “You probably saved Thomas’ life.”

  “I couldn’t save Hamish’s. He almost died. Most days he wished he had. His injury was severe, but he was young and fit. We didn’t know how long it might take him to recover. We married when he was still in hospital. And for a while, we were happy enough. His condition improved, but he couldn’t read music anymore or play, he couldn’t work at first. I graduated and got whatever steady work I could. We needed my salary.

  “But Hamish wasn’t the same man. He was in pain. His personality changed. He couldn’t get the kind of job he wanted, we were always short of money, and he needed a lot of help day to day. When we learned Rafe was making it as a composer, Hamish grew bitter.”

  He’d trapped her with love and guilt and obligation, with the tyranny of his physical needs. He needed so much of her help and yet he resented it. He became as rigid and inflexible as the wheelchair he had to use at first and as unreasonable as the wasted muscles in his body. At least her father had never been a mean drunk, just a man who couldn’t cope with the death of his wife.