Bad Girl

by Sarah Michelle Lynch

  “And this is leading, where? A sex-ed lesson for eleven-year-olds? Come on, Adam!”

  He laughs himself silly, as do I, falling about in my chair.

  “What I’m so ineloquently trying to say is that, okay… if a man decides to settle down, it’s because it’s special. Because why else would he when he can have as many partners as he likes, in theory? When he’s built to naturally spread it about… when it’s evolutionary to make as many babies as possible with as many women… So, what I’m saying, is that when a man commits, it’s because he’s deadly serious and he’s deadly sure he’d protect you, no matter the cost.”

  “But what if he’s not serious? What if he claims to be, but he’s not? What if it’s a lie, just so he can pretend he’s committed, so he can pretend he’s one of those guys who has the real deal?”

  “Yeah, like Paul,” he says.

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “And could you ever, ever imagine Paul owning up to any of his misdemeanours… ever?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nope,” he says, driving steadily along the motorway and looking out for our turn-off. “No way. He would’ve lied forever. Because he was looking for that fucking perfect thing… and he found it… but he’d never have been able to give up who he is. He’s got too used to getting away with whatever. Fuck, did you know about what he did at my wedding?”

  My stomach churns, trying to imagine. “No, what?”

  “We found him fucking some woman in uniform. In the disabled toilets.”

  “Oh, my, god.”

  “And then later, he and Lily…”

  I cover my mouth. “No fucking way.”

  “Theo wanted to murder the bastard for that when he found out. I had to make him go to anger management or he’d have fucking over-spilt, he was spewing so bad.”

  “So… you and Theo? You’re not like that?”

  Adam shakes his head. “Sex is just sex, Chlo. When you make that magical connection with someone, it changes everything.”

  “Like with you and Susan?”

  “No,” he says, turning the wheel to pull off the motorway, the signs for Harewood up ahead. “I’ve come to realise that was an office romance that went on too long. It wasn’t real. That guy Markos, I saw exactly what you meant. And I realised that’s exactly how I felt, too. Wrecked and a little bit ashamed of myself and also a bit fucking burnt and bruised, my ego reduced to nothing.”

  I turn and look at him, see a tear in the corner of his eye and a wobble in his hand as he shifts gear.

  “I’m so sorry, Adam. If I hadn’t left for Oz, I might have been here to help… to do something before it got out of control.”

  He smiles sadly. “I pushed away the one person who saw through her… the one person who knew.”

  “I’m not proud of who I am and why I’m like I am. Just know, it didn’t please me to dig up the truth on her.”

  “I know,” he says, “I know.”

  He knows why I have this ability to see above the fake smiles and see the person beneath.

  “I wasn’t surprised when I found out about Tom.” I take a shaky breath. “Shocked, devastated, annihilated, but surprised…? No.”

  “I never wanted you to find out,” he says, as the car follows a bunch of others also heading along country roads in the same direction as us. “I was protecting you, Chlo. You have to know that. I’ve only ever been with women I love and I was protecting you. From that truth. From her disgusting nature. I knew if we got too close, you’d find out. And we were young… and I knew what it would do to you back then. I just knew. Even Paul, as much of a cunt as he is, he knew that if you found out, you’d be unable to hold it all in and it’d spread and Tom would be devastated if it got out. Things would have got out of hand and people would have got hurt in ways I did not want to imagine.”

  My lip trembles and I have to hold back my tears, shaking with the effort it’s taking not to cry and end up ruining my face.

  “I watched my own mother… the person who was meant to put me first above all else… I watched her manipulate and calculate for her own gain, all the time. I watched her using men to as a salve for her ego, watched her cavort and stray and float through life on her loose morals and her baseless structure of chaos. I’ve seen the worst of people doing what I do for a living, but the very worst exists in her. The whole lot, she has it in her. I don’t know how she’s still alive, how anyone hasn’t killed her yet… she must always have the next bloke lined up to defend her against the last, that’s all I can say, because she’s pure nasty, masquerading as a poor, wilting flower that needs help. The only people who need help are the ones she’s used and abused, like Tom. No wonder he’s so fucking absent all the time.”

  He keeps one hand on the wheel but reaches across for my hand. “You’re alright, Chloe. You’ve always been alright. Like you said to me. People try to break us, they don’t manage it. You’re you because you’re alright. You got to the places you did in life because you worked hard and sacrificed and at the end of the day, you’re a good girl, not a bad girl. I never believed that for a second, I didn’t. I want you to remember that. Never. You’ve always been a good girl to me.”

  I squeeze his hand back. “That means everything to me.”

  He lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses it. “I know, girl. I know.”

  We drive on and soon the house looms in the distance. Feeling so wrung out once we climb out of the car, he wraps his arm around me and leads me indoors, to the warmth.

  “I’m hungry, what about you?”

  “Shouldn’t we look around first, then get fed?”

  “Let’s get fed, then look around, then get fed again? Sounds good to me.”

  “Typical,” I chuckle, giggling, the sick feeling I had earlier gone – replaced by something entirely new.

  Something like happiness.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Where’s my baby boy?” I cry, walking into Adam’s house, following the scent of clean baby.

  I discover Lily feeding Henry in the spare room, his size having doubled since the last time I saw him. He’s wearing the cutest white onesie with a bit of a fur trim and his hair is getting longer and darker.

  “Oh my god, he’s massive.”

  “Please say that’s fish and chips I smell,” she says, giggling.

  “Yeah, we stopped on the way home. They’re plating it up as we speak.”

  “Yeah? So, what have you been up to today?” She has that sparkle in her eye – intrigue.

  “Well,” I say, as I stroke the baby’s beautiful head, never mind he’s feeding from my friend’s rather large boob. “We drove out to Harewood and Adam needed to eat first, so he ate. Then we looked around the place. It’s lovely, have you been?”

  “Ages and ages ago, on that school trip?”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, they have this exhibition now so you can properly see how the household was run back in the day, fascinating. But then Adam got hungry again, so we ate again.” I giggle, so does she. “And then we had the most wonderful walk around the grounds, really peaceful and serene. We talked about Tom and what happened. We talked about his plans for when he gets to London. I told him what my options are at the moment and he offered to let me stay here once I get booted out on Friday.”

  She strokes my hair back from my face, her expression softened by concern. “What are you going to do, babe?”

  “I haven’t decided for sure yet.”

  “Take your time,” she says.

  I look into her eyes and plead with her, “Lily, help me. What do I do?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” she says.

  “What would you do?”

  “My situation with Paul, and yours with Cole, are different in many ways, but also similar.” She nods her head several times. “But cheating is a red line for me and Paul knew that. When I found texts on his phone, I told him to get out. We didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t try to explain. It was plain as day. He left me al
one in the house while I was miscarrying… he’d admitted the truth about the day of Susan and Adam’s wedding… but it was the texts that broke the camel’s back. They meant that even when he’d been telling me he was going to change, he didn’t mean it. But it was so much more. It was like I knew he’d always be looking for that meaningless outlet… a way he could vacate, even from me. He made me feel like I was a part of his problem.”

  I let her words sink in, then I walk across the room, push the door closed and move back to where she is with Henry, on the bed.

  “Cole says it’s because I’m distant, because I pull away. He says that in the beginning he liked it that it was fun and no strings and then it was only once I’d left Oz, he really knew how he felt about me. But Paul got inside his head when we met him that time. It was just a few weeks before I flew home for your wedding, and apparently, Paul and he spoke in private about how Adam was the one I really wanted.”

  She shuts her eyes, disappointed and saddened Paul would do that.

  “I hate him,” she mutters, shaking her head.

  “But it’s true, Lily,” I tell her, taking her hand. “It’s true. I still love him. I always have, always will. I love him. I’ve thought about him every day for years. I still want him.”

  She reaches out and strokes my cheek. “He loves you, too. I know he does. But I’m not sure in the same way. And I’m not sure if what you feel isn’t just painful infatuation, when maybe you could have something real with Cole, if the two of you might make a pact to do it right, maybe you could.”

  “Oh, Lily,” I sigh, feeling so heavy, so weighed down.

  “My angel, listen to me.” I look up into her tear-filled blue eyes. “You’re the most amazing woman. You deserve the world. Everything in my life, everything in everyone’s we’re close to, it’s all because of you. The way you held the group together… the trips you organised single-handedly. I don’t know if I would have stayed in touch with Theo if we hadn’t had those trips. He might have gone and walked his own path, written me off because I was still infatuated with Paul. The Christmas Eve nights. The summer barbecues. None of any of that would have happened without you. Nor the school council, and the way you lobbied for a school paper so that me and Adam and Theo could have an outlet for our nerdy interests. The netball tournaments you always entered us into. The matches of rounders and cricket we’d have in summer, it was always you gathering people together. Always. When you went to Australia, everything fell apart. People stopped getting together. Hell, I haven’t seen Marie and Sass since our wedding almost a year ago! When we used to see one another all the bloody time!”

  “Sass is good, she’s in New York,” I tell her. “Marie, though? I really don’t know. She’s dropped off the radar.”

  “Chloe, we are all so lucky to know you, let alone have you as a long-term close friend. You shouldn’t live your life according to anyone else’s rules. You should never be with someone who is content to keep you down when it’s so easy to lift you up, all you need is a gentle push to shine. You’re the one I’m going to be reading about in the national news… defending cases nobody else will take on. Sorting out the ridiculous way in which we treat rape victims in this country, not to mention women’s rights and equality and all of that. You are the embodiment of anyone can make it. You can do anything you put your mind to. You’re special. You don’t need any man to know that. You’re special all on your own.”

  I look up, my face contorted, my chin wobbling. “Lily, but I love him.”

  “I know. I know you do.”

  I love two men. In very different ways. But I love them both, I do.

  “But does he want the very best for you in the same way we do? Ask yourself that. That is the only thing I will advise… you have to ask yourself if Cole would put himself before you. Or can he be selfless for once? Can he let go of the way he’s been living? Is he ready to be the understudy? Because he has to be ready for that. Nobody is as special as you. And that’s why Paul treated me badly, Chlo. I know that now. He decided he couldn’t step up to the plate and become my equal. He did that all on his own without anybody’s help. Stuff his history with his dad. Look at you, look at what you’ve overcome. I don’t buy his shit now I look back, I don’t buy it. Every day, every moment, is a chance to change. I gave him ample opportunity to change and be a better person. He didn’t want to have a career. He wanted to bum around, to have no responsibility, and the way his dad was with him gave him carte blanche to do that, in his head. In truth, he knew I was his better and he couldn’t match me. You have to ask yourself, is that the real reason Cole has behaved this way? Because he knows he’s not good enough for you at the end of the day. He knows that. And he’s been trying to destroy this whole thing before it destroyed him… because, and I say this as your friend and as an honorary sister of yours, I think he’s always seen you as a novelty and not as a reality and only when shit hit the fan – as in when you moved back here – only then did he look like a deer caught in the headlights, because suddenly, it got real. If he can’t see you for the person you really are, I’m afraid, it will never work. That’s the only reason why it works for me and Theo. We were friends first and we knew one another really well. I do think things can start out as sex and then you can become great friends as well as lovers, but I honestly think, with all the history you have and all the complexity you possess, he waited too long to figure you out. And that’s why you left. Because you knew that, and you told me that, back when we met for coffee just before my wedding. Remember? You told me there wasn’t enough substance. You said that. Not me. Not anyone. Nobody put it in your head. You knew it then, the same as you know it now, it’s just that you weren’t aware of the process of closure when you first came back and now you are. And you have to get closure, one way or another, like I did with Paul when I finally realised I wasn’t his priority. And thankfully that made it possible for me to move on properly. And here I am now, the happiest woman alive, when a couple of years ago I was in hell, trying to hold up myself as well as a lesser man. And that’s not what it’s about. You don’t exist to hold everyone else up, Chlo. You exist to thrive, to be loved for exactly who you are and to be cherished and find your equal in a man, not a boy, a man.”

  She stops talking, breathing hard, her face red – her passion clear.

  “I wish we were sisters,” I tell her sadly, “more than anything in the whole world. I might have had a friend through it all, then.”

  “We are as good as,” she says, “and it’s never too late to reach in and rearrange, Chloe. I know. One day, the pain you grew up with, it won’t be there anymore. Not as stark, anyway. It’ll be so far behind you, you’ll look upon it as a memory so distant, it’ll appear as though a speck in your universe.”

  “But if I hadn’t had those parties, Tom might not have…”

  “You can’t think like that, Chlo. You’re not the one who abused her power. She is.”

  “I know.”

  I wipe a tear away.

  “ARE YOU COMING DOWN FOR CHIPS OR WHAT?” Theo bellows up the stairs, and we laugh like schoolgirls.

  “We’re coming,” I yell, and Henry wakes up from his milk coma, having not really been sucking for quite a while now.

  I carry the baby downstairs and wind him while Lily follows behind me, her hand on my shoulder. We get into the kitchen and then it’s a mess, it’s a riot… stories pour out from all of us as we eat chips, battered fish and mushy peas, not to mention cans of coke – the dining table covered in stuff. I hold Henry against my chest, the little lad sleeping, Adam watching me the whole time as I eat with one hand and shove food into my mouth with my fingers. I’m giggling as Theo puts on voices and takes the piss out of people he’s going to be working with in TV. I have the smell of baby powder and Johnson’s shampoo in one nostril, greasy food in the other.

  Everything is funny, for some reason, and we don’t stop laughing.

  This is friendship.

  Lily wanted me
to stay over with them all tonight but it didn’t seem right, then Adam argued with me for a full fifteen minutes about taking me home in his car while I stressed it would be easier for me to get the train.

  Anyway, here we are, parked outside my house again, his Porsche having brought me right to the door. He turns the engine off and we sit in silence for a little while.

  I don’t want this day to end, neither does he. However, we don’t have long before the inside of the car gets cold again and he’ll have to switch the engine back on and waste petrol.

  “Thank you for today, it’s been great,” he says.

  “Thank me? Why? You picked me up. Thank YOU!”

  A small corner of his mouth tips up in a grin, then his face transforms into a full smile. He looks really happy and I really want to kiss him, so I lean across, put my hand on his cheek to turn his face and push my lips gently into his – a chaste, tender, gentle kiss. I pull away and clear my throat.

  All these years… all this time…

  Wow.

  “It’s not the same,” I tell him, looking straight ahead.

  “I know,” he says, like he knew all along – that whatever we once had, whatever we were once doing, it was between two people who no longer exist. The chemistry isn’t there, not anymore… the feelings I have are for someone else long gone. We never got to allow the relationship to run its course and all I’ve been feeling, all this time, is a yearning to go back to that. But we can’t. Ever. It will forever be a moment frozen in time… two friends fucking… first love. Not knowing what to do about it. Our hearts clattering around in our chests every time we saw one another. Almost ten years ago. It was painful and beautiful and real. It was… then, not now.