by Corri Lee
I really didn’t think much of the following moments of silence until I heard Jonathan’s tell beyond the curtained vestibule. For years, I’d won every hand in every card game against him for no reason other than he gave himself away with a little sniff that tailed off with an upper inflection, which almost turned it into a hiccup. Hearing it that instance threw me for a beat, and it wasn’t until I centred my focus again that I thought back to the last thing I’d said.
You’re just one rich girl in the line of many. All he had to do was let you die and he’d have gotten everything you own—all that money you refused to acknowledge for years...
“Are you... Is there something you need to tell me?”
“Not now.” Pinching at various spots in the fabric, Blaze avoided eye contact at all costs. Reeling, I could only find the concentration to be mildly surprised by how loose the dress was in all the places I should have been bulging out. Stomach flu looked to have been the weight loss solution every bride prayed for. “We’ll talk about this later, when we’re alone.”
“We’re never alone.” A crowd of nosey bystanders beyond the drapes was the least of my concerns. Our truly problematic company was always ever in my mind. What looked like an empty room to him was a personality packed microcosm of clashing opinions to me. “You swore to be honest.”
“I was nominated,” he bit out so quickly I barely registered he’d spoken. “When we arrived at the hospital, your parents and Tallulah’s phones were off. It was too early in the morning even for Oscar. As the closest person to you, I was nominated as your next of kin and when your parents arrived they didn’t dispute it. I agreed to give them the power back over your care provided they passed that right on to me, permanently and legally, when you recovered.”
“You allowed the DNR.” The sickening realisation that my so-called beloved partner had given the hospital his blessing to let me die fell out of my mouth before the conscious thought even ran through my head. It didn’t sink in until I’d said the words, and the truth hit me like a physical blow to the stomach, knocking all the air and light out of me.
“You weren’t there, Emmeline. Not really.”
A tugging at my hands made me aware of the fact I’d crumpled into a heap on the floor of the dressing room without even noticing.
How could he? After making out he’d opposed the order all along, how could it really be that he was the one who’d given the DNR the green light? How could he say my parents owed him when he’d been on their side? He’d outright lied to me for the first time.
“Your prospects were a life full of the consequences of multiple organ failure, paralysis and maybe even brain damage. You could have ended up a vegetable, unable to move or speak. As much as I love you, I didn’t want that life for you. I’m not so selfish that I’d make you miserable just to keep myself happy, cupcake.”
But that’s just what he’s doing, isn’t it? Calling the shots to ‘look out’ for you makes him feel better for letting you die but makes you hate yourself.
“It’s so easy to screw up around you, Emmeline. It’s impossible to keep a clear head when every brain cell is dedicated to loving you.”
That was a nice save but it didn’t detract from the fact we were verging on seriously dysfunctional. I’d killed for him and he controlled me in return, yet he wasn’t master of his own vessel, either. In some ways we were completely unmanageable but in others we were so constrained it was suffocating. When so little made sense about our lives, how could we actually justify our strange coexistence?
“Please.” He crouched down in front of me. “Talk to me.”
With something as simple and small as his thumb brushing across my cheek, all the fight left me.
Because his touch made me feel wanted.
Because I didn’t know what I was even fighting anymore.
Because, as he’d rightly pointed out in the hospital, I owed him. I hadn’t earned the right to make his life difficult.
“Take me home.” I stood, using the last ounce of pride I had left to push Blaze away when he tried to help me, and unfastened the knot keeping the dress in place. It fluttered down into a pool at my feet, leaving me naked for all but the underwear I had no idea how long I’d been wearing. All I had left was what he’d given me: one emerald ring and what little dignity he might have provided during my period of convalescence. I had nothing else. My survival had, and would undoubtedly continue, to depend on him. “Take me back to our suite and pretend with me that our lives aren’t complete circus acts.”
He didn’t argue. Even the most delusional man on Earth would have been hard-pushed to deny that our day to day dramas were like something dreamed up by a Generation Y housewife with too much imagination to vent between spin cycles, so arguing would have been feeble. He simply swept me off like the white knight he strived to be, away from the gaping mouths of a stunned audience.
Blaze was good at that—sweeping me away. But not nearly good enough.
Blaze stretched his legs out in the vast space of our Tudor fleet limo. He had the smug, flushed face of a satisfied man, and boy, was he. We’d gone straight back to the hotel from Caroline’s and he’d attempted to ‘pacify’ me from the minute we were alone. I’d tried to fight any inclination I might have had to break from my depression until I realised that a good fucking was exactly what I needed.
And he knew it. My ever watchful and conscientious fiancé remembered from the early days of our relationship that when it came to getting me on his wavelength, it was a task best achieved by drilling some sense into me on the nearest flat surface—which apparently didn’t need to necessarily be either horizontal or soft. Or flat.
Dressed up in my new purple frock and what he assured me was photo-friendly sex hair, I watched him relax like the world was completely in order and problem free. To an outsider, it might have looked that was almost true.
The dress had been delivered to us unexpectedly, an hour after we’d left the boutique, along with a matching hair pin laced with tiny amethysts. The lack of genuine surprise in his reaction when it arrived made me believe he’d somehow planned the whole thing; that the ordeal surrounding wanting to try that damn dress on had been staged; that he was so far into my mind and under my skin that he knew I’d see it and want it. The entire afternoon might have been completely orchestrated, from my storming out to his coming clean about being my new next of kin before vows had even been exchanged.
There again, that could have been my paranoia thinking for me. When that blasted voice started piping up at every turn, I started to second guess everything. Friends would be able to tell whether my head was hosting two minds from the barely discernible but too obvious pause before I’d respond to a question because I’d be scanning their words for a hidden motive, or trying to figure out if they were attempting to trip me up to stumble head-first into humiliation.
That whole part of our disagreement wasn’t really touched until we were showered and waiting for the limo. I’d tried to broach the subject of medication again, certain that it was the better option for me, just to be met with another round of ‘you can beat it alone’.
“You still don’t get it,” I griped, rubbing frustrated circles on my temples. If he seriously thought Fat Emmy would be remedied with sex and positive thinking, he was delusional.
I dunno, I’m not complaining.
“I don’t,” Blaze admitted, maintaining his lazy lounge rather than straightening for the topic like he would if he was going to take a single word I said seriously. “But you don’t understand, either. I’ve seen what you’re capable of. I’ve seen you silence her before, and if you can do it once, you can do it again.”
“Says who?”
“Emmeline.” There it was. The speaking of my name preceding intense condescension. “I get that having her back probably feels like a massive failure, but all you lack is self-belief. I gave you a crutch after the incident at Natasha’s. I didn’t tell you because I wanted it to feel like your own tr
iumph. After flushing those meds from New York, it would have looked like l lacked conviction in my own beliefs to start dishing out a new prescription, and I thought I could wean you off without you ever knowing.” He raised his before I could protest to his gross abuse of my independence and right to dictate my own well being. “I should have discussed it with you when you were discharged, and I’m sorry that I didn’t. Your mental health is a part of your life you have no say in and I took away what little control you had. I understand your distress and I get that if you’re on an even keel, issues like medication need to be put in your hands to regulate. I handled this badly.”
It was too easy. It felt spiteful to question him when it looked suspiciously like I was going to get my own way, but there’s no way he could have had such a drastic change of heart from one discussion with my best friend. Blaze was stubborn and too intelligent to fall for emotional blackmail. Once he made a choice, he stuck with it to the bloody end.
“You still think it’s all in my head. You’re in the same camp as my mother, just thinking that I’ll grow out of it.”
“Give me a break. Please.” Weary, Blaze turned his head towards me and let me see just how badly the day had hurt him. His own choices had almost lost me again and he bore a burden that showed in the redness around his eyes. “I’ve never dealt with anything like this before, Emmeline. I’m picking it up as I go along and I’m going to screw up from time to time. Break an ankle and I’ve got that shit handled. But I don’t know what I’m doing right now and I’m taking the lead from everyone else. Do you have any idea how strange that is for me?”
Sullenly, I reached for his hand and pulled it into my lap. Of course I knew how surreal that was for him, having mostly seen him in complete control of his universe and in bits when it didn’t all go to plan. And of course I knew how horrible it was to have to look to those around you for the right cues on how to function like a human being. I’d been making out for a long time that I was independently living a righteous path, secretly knowing that I just looked for a way to slot in and adapt. Like an outsider.
“We’ll both screw up,” I muttered, watching The Roses slip into view between the shells of cars that didn’t seem to be moving.
Traffic was a thick block of a creeping engines revving angrily at the gridlock around the old converted theatre. Taxis and hire cars battled to merge into the one lane left open on a two way street, the other chocked full of other queuing limousines waiting to unload their celebrity cargo into our engagement party. “What matters is that we—... What the hell?”
Like the Red Sea, the congestion parted the moment wardens realised who was in our limo. Waved through, we shot to the front of the line and parked up right at the doors to the venue.
I’d known that Ivy would go all out and would have a few tricks up her sleeves to make the night memorable. What I wasn’t expecting was to be so stunned by her latest stunt that the next morning’s newspapers would be plastered with my mortified face.
It wasn’t until Blaze had stepped out onto the pavement and turned to help me from the limo’s plush leather interior that I clocked the banner over his shoulder and quickly wish I could climb back inside, crawl into the foetal position and die. He flashed his fake smiles for a minute, going through the motions of distracting the attention from my confusion. It seemed like hours passed before he turned to look at what had me so rigid, and turned as puce as the ink that spelled out, ‘Tudor Initiative Blood Drive.’
“She’s kidding, right?” Livid, Blaze grabbed my hand and pulled me away from the disorienting flashes of the press gauntlet. “She’s got to be kidding.”
Apparently, she wasn’t. Rather than lavish tables laden with extravagant centrepieces and name tags written in delicate calligraphy, my theatre was full of nurses, beds and half-dead semi-famous faces. It looked as though a row of party food had been set up along the edge of the room, on par with the spread for a child’s birthday party. An afterthought to an otherwise incredibly morbid scene.
My sister was talking into a large microphone for a local radio station when we arrived and applause broke out. Daniel and Jonathan were huddled over cups of hot sugary tea having donated blood minutes before. Chris hovered around the nurses, trying to make them laugh with his fake vampire fangs, while my hemophobic father sat in a corner looking sick as a dog.
There were no words for how heartbroken and betrayed I felt in that moment. What should have been an event to celebrate a relationship that could apparently withstand anything thrown at it had been turned into a vampiric horror movie designed to make my family look like saints.
Oblivious to the pain she was causing me, Ivy rushed over and pressed a large red kiss to my forehead. Once she’d let the photographers adequately snap her wiping the lipstick stain away like a doting mother, she held my face in her hands and searched my expression.
Disappointment washed over her features. “You don’t like it.”
“It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, no.”
“You didn’t want to be in the limelight. You didn’t want a fuss.”
“If I’d wanted a fuss, would you have been asking for corneas instead?” Repulsed by her touch, I took a defensive step backwards and found myself pressed up against six foot three inches of hot, angry male. Damp hands found their way to my shoulders, the faint smell of sweat and testosterone filling my head space.
“What have you done, Ivy?” Blaze growled softly, so lowly it was almost impossible to hear. “This was supposed to be a celebration.”
“It is.”
I couldn’t even comprehend how my mother could look so baffled by our wounded disappointment. Had she honestly thought that we’d see this ghastly scene as a party and be in the mood to laugh and rejoice?
Lifting her chin, Ivy smoothed the ripples in the skirt of her sassy crimson dress and arranged herself with all the practised elegance of a rich woman who could do no wrong and would defend herself to the death if she did. “This is a celebration of my daughter’s survival against her own worst enemy: herself. A survival aided by you. All the blood gathered here will save lives and any monetary donations will go to MIND.”
“You’re cashing in on your daughter’s instability.”
Her hands went to her hips. “How dare you. I’m celebrating her life, one she sought to end. I’m raising awareness of—”
“You were supposed to be raising awareness of our engagement! Nothing more.”
Ivy indignantly spluttered into silence, restlessly moving her hands to her neck, sides, then settled into a stroppy arm-folded slump. Despite the gradually quietening room around us slowly filling with tension, Blaze kept his hands on my shoulders, firmly rooted to the spot and charged for battle. For once in my life, I didn’t want to end the attack against my mother. I was pissed off, too. Pissed off enough to bite back.
“All you’ve raised awareness of tonight is Tallulah, patron saint of haemoglobin. This was our night to make an announcement and you’ve turned it into a fiasco to milk money and blood from the upper classes. Our names aren’t even on that God awful banner outside.
“This isn’t for us. This is for you, so you can feel better about the fact our family is broken.”
“Emmy, love...” Ivy went to make an advance towards me, which I warded off with will alone. “You wanted the attention taken off you.”
“I wanted the attention taken off the wedding, Mum! And that won’t happen now. You think I’m less interesting to the public because you’re literally trying to suck the life out them? People are going to want to know what awful fate befell me to justify a blood transplant in the first place. It’s only a matter of weeks before the wedding and your charity choice is outing me as a nutter. You’ve dragged them in.”
“That’s enough.”
Another hand touched my shoulder next to Blaze’s, one that was bigger, rougher and fairly unfamiliar. Still looking seriously unwell, Henry eased me back from my pain of a mother and gave her some kind
of esoteric signal to vanish.
“I can make this disappear,” he murmured softly. “I can keep the press away or I can feed them a fake story. She didn’t tell me she was doing this—there was no time for damage control. I promise I’d have put a stop to it.”
“I believe you.” Honestly, I did. Confessing to his involvement in Regis Lundy’s death had made me see a new side to my father, though who knew if I was reading it right. If I wanted to be sentimental about how he’d opened up to me, I’d say he felt a greater sense of duty to protect my dignity because it had drawn us closer. If I wanted to be cynical, I’d say it was regret, and he sought to preserve my public image because I held the biggest of bargaining chips against him.
Either way, his motivation to ‘fix’ the ridiculous situation was the least of my concerns. The solution was the only thing that mattered.
“Maybe I should just come clean,” I suggested, pushing down the hiss of Fat Emmy practically daring me to get up on the stage I’d drank with rockstars on, and declare myself clinically insane to the public. “Ivy wants to turn this into a crusade; what better way to ‘raise awareness’ than to get up there and tell everyone exactly why they’re giving blood today?”
“Emmeline, are you sure?”
Reaching up, I gave Blaze’s hand a quick squeeze and broke away from him before I had chance to change my mind. Naturally, I understood why he might have some reservations, just like I would have understood if Henry was a little twitchy about me fending for myself, too.
But I wasn’t stupid. I knew what was and wasn’t suitable to be publicly announced. I wouldn’t mention Natasha in any way and there would be no need for anyone to dig around if I explained myself just so.
Don’t be a fool. You can’t pull that off. You can’t do this.