by Kitty French
Tears stung her eyes. ‘I don’t want to,’ she said. ‘I want to live here again with you, like we used to.’
He put his arm around her shoulders and gave her his handkerchief to wipe her eyes, just as he always had.
‘I’d like that too, darling, but look up. Look around. There’s a chance the insurance might cover some of it, but they knew it was already in need of work,’ he said gently. ‘And the time it would take. How long before we could start turning any sort of profit again?’ He sighed and looked at her, forcing himself to be honest. ‘Besides, it’s more than that. It’s me. These weeks of living with Robin have shown me that there is life outside of here. I’m no spring chicken anymore G.’ He squeezed her tight. ‘Those high heels are playing hell with my knees these days.’
Genie had sensed his contentment with his new living arrangements, and she knew it was wrong to feel abandoned by the one person who’d never failed her, to begrudge him the happiness that his life with Robin had brought him. It was just that circumstances lately had left her feeling very alone, and the only certainty she had right now was a few weeks on Deanna’s uncomfortable couch while she sorted herself out. It wasn’t much to go on.
‘How’s Abel Kingdom doing now?’
Genie focused her attention on knotting her uncle’s handkerchief around her fingers.
‘All right, I think.’
‘You think?’
She glanced up at the damaged roof. ‘He’s refused to see me.’
And there it was, the most upsetting fact in all of this. She’d been terrified when Abel had been knocked unconscious by the falling debris, scrabbling out from beneath him, inexpertly checking his pulse and finding nothing. She’d found his mobile in his discarded jacket and called an ambulance, sobbing down the phone so hard that the operator could barely make her words out. The hours afterwards had been a blur of anxiety and panic, punctuated by moments of overwhelming relief. He was breathing. He was injured, but at least he was breathing. The ambulance crew seemed concerned about his head and his shoulder, as she sat beside him on the way to the hospital and prayed only that he’d live. She didn’t care about the theatre, or her own lesser cuts and bruises. She thought only of him, on his knees seconds before the accident, already a broken man. She berated herself a million times over for the way she’d relentlessly goaded him, pushed him to breaking point to prove herself right. And after all of that, she hadn’t proved herself right at all. In breaking Abel, she’d broken herself too. She wasn’t fanciful enough to believe that the physical destruction of the theatre had been of her doing too, but it felt like a bitter irony, as if the tempest playing out on the stage had somehow invited in the deadly bolt struck by the storm outside.
‘Mr Kingdom, please! You can’t leave, the consultant hasn’t discharged you.’
Abel looked up, buttoning his shirt with difficulty. ‘Send me the paperwork in the mail. I’ll sign to say you’re not responsible.’
The young nurse rounded the bed. ‘It doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid. You really need to get back into bed and re…’
Abel’s words cut across hers. ‘I’ve spent three days lying in that bed looking out of that window at that godforsaken greyness. I’m done here. My head’s fine.’ He pulled the bandage from around his skull with his good arm. ‘I can see perfectly well, and a fractured shoulder isn’t going to stop me from catching my flight home.’
‘You can’t fly, Mr Kingdom! Please, let me try to get hold of the registrar at least!’ She backed out of his room purposefully, and Abel sighed darkly. He was leaving this place today. He’d booked a flight home that left in a few hours’ time, and one way or the other, he was going to be on it.
He didn’t need to pack. All of his belongings had been at the theatre and none were salvageable. He had the clothes he’d arrived in, his jacket, and his wallet. Along with the emergency passport his PA in Australia had organised a couple of days back, it was going to have to be enough to get him home, because he’d had a skinful of London and everything that went along with it.
Coming back here had been the biggest mistake he’d ever made. He’d thought he could stamp his authority all over the places that had haunted him as a child, and he’d come to realise since the day of the accident that he didn’t have the stomach to see it through. London had defined his childhood, it wasn’t possible to come back and scrub the bad memories out of existence.
Abel had learned over the years to choose his battles wisely, in most areas of his life. He now knew that however painfully personal this battle was, he couldn’t win it. He wasn’t peaceful with his decision, but the only alternative was to stay here and risk tearing himself to pieces completely to see it through to its bitter end. That simply wasn’t an option. London diminished him. It stole his spirit and infected him with its cold, grey bleakness. He wasn’t proud of the man he’d become here and he wasn’t going to let the process go any further.
Sighing heavily, he picked up the painkillers from his bedside table and tossed them down his throat. His shoulder hurt like a bitch and his headache was no picnic either. The accident in the theatre had been the last straw. How many more signs did he need before he accepted that this thing just wasn’t going to work out? The meeting with his mother shouldn’t have hurt, he’d known what to expect, after all. The news about his father too: on reflection, he’d have been more surprised had his mother have given him any concrete information. It was a hard fact to face that not just one but two parents were utterly indifferent to his existence, but it wouldn’t break him. His mother had taught him early on not to believe in fairytales.
But the biggest reason he was leaving was Genie. He’d never known a woman like her before, someone with such clarity about who she was, or such conviction in her beliefs. She was dangerous to him. Toxic. Her obstinate challenges had backed him into a corner, and he’d come out fighting. He couldn’t explain it or apologise for it, even though he was deeply ashamed of the way he’d behaved. He didn’t want to feel the way she made him feel: insecure and out of control. He only had to look at her and she had him, hook line and sinker, and he didn’t trust her not to haul him so far out of the water that he couldn’t survive. That was why he was going home.
Because he’d met his match.
Standing stiffly, Abel picked up his jacket and walked out of the hospital ward.
Genie rode the hospital elevator up to Abel’s floor, then stood rooted to the spot when the doors slid open and revealed the man himself standing there waiting to ride it back down again.
He reacted the exact same way, then shot her a look that could have killed a less robust person and stepped inside with her.
Oh God, oh God, oh God. What could she say to him? She’d come here today as she had every day since he’d been admitted, but in truth she hadn’t expected to actually see him. He’d turned her away each time, nurses at the ward’s door politely declining her company on his behalf, though she was pretty sure they weren’t passing on his exact words. To find herself granted an audience with him now came as a shock.
‘Abel,’ she said softly, turning to him. His profile didn’t flicker a muscle.
‘Don’t,’ he said.
‘Are you leaving?’ The ward sister had told her on the phone earlier that they anticipated he’d need to stay in for at least another few days yet. She’d been able to get updates on his progress because she was on record as having brought him in, despite not being family. It was a small victory.
‘What’s it look like?’
‘Abel, please. At least look at me.’
His jaw tightened, but he didn’t glance her way. Genie knew full well that her time with him was going to be up in a matter of seconds, and in a panic she turned and pressed the emergency stop button.
Abel looked her way at last, a slow, cold flick of his eyes. ‘If you’re expecting a repeat performance of the last time we were in a lift together you’re going to be disappointed.’
She took his ins
ult and let it hang. ‘You don’t look well enough to get out of here.’
He didn’t; he looked pale, and strained, and he needed a shave.
‘A nurse and a stripper, huh? There really is no end to your talents, Beauty.’
Another barb. Genie winced, letting him throw his arrows. What she needed to say was too important to get dragged into the argument he was spoiling for.
‘Were you going to leave without saying goodbye?’
He turned to her then, revealing his arm strapped across his chest in a dark sling beneath his jacket. ‘We’re not friends, Genie, and this isn’t the movies. I don’t think either of us needs an emotional farewell scene.’
Genie felt his detachment all the way to her bones. ‘I don’t want you to go,’ she said, desperate and raw, and he looked at her, completely unreadable.
‘Why not? You made your point pretty fucking well, don’t you think? We’ve established the fact that I fuck strippers. What do you want me to do? Get it tattooed across my head so I see it everyday for the rest of my goddamn life?’
Anguish filled Genie’s throat with tears. He was too angry to listen to what she needed to say, but he was leaving her life and if she didn’t say it now she’d probably never get a second chance.
‘I’m sorry, Abel. I’m so, so sorry for what happened the other night.’
‘Don’t turn on the crocodile tears on my account,’ he said, leaning his back against the wall, his face flinching in pain.
‘Do you have to keep ramming the point home about how low your opinion is of me?’ she said, finally biting. ‘Never in my life has anyone constantly belittled me as you have, Abel Kingdom and I hate the fact that that I can’t help loving you regardless.’
She stopped speaking several words too late, her chest heaving, both of them shell shocked.
It was the last way she’d wanted to say those words for the first time to the man she’d realised she loved as he’d knelt amongst her smashed up lamp, broken and in tears. In that moment she’d known that somewhere along the line he’d been wounded deeply, that whatever his hang-ups, they weren’t really about her. The fact that she’d pushed him into facing them so starkly made her insides twist with regret. She’d sat beside him in the ambulance that night and wondered if she’d ever get to tell him that she loved him.
‘You love me?’ he said. ‘Have you lost your fucking mind?’
It wasn’t the ideal response.
‘Probably,’ she said, aching to hold him and knowing he’d push her away. ‘Please don’t go. Stay. Take the theatre. It doesn’t matter to me as much as you do. Nothing does.’
He stared at her long and hard, like someone trying to understand an abstract piece of art.
‘You’re on some fucked up kind of guilt trip,’ he said, eventually. ‘You’ll get over it.’ He gestured at his shoulder. ‘So will I.’
‘You’re right, Abel, I do feel guilty. I pushed you and I shouldn’t have made you do something I knew you didn’t want to.’
He half laughed. ‘It was sex, Genie. Fucking. You didn’t make me do it. I did it because I’d had the day from hell and I thought it might make me feel better. It didn’t. Quit blaming yourself and get on with your life.’
‘Really?’ she said, rounding on him. ‘Really? As simple as that? I tell you I love you, and you tell me to get over it then jump on a plane to the other side of the world?’
He nodded. ‘It’s every bit as simple as that. You can keep your tears, and your pathetic excuse for a theatre. I want none of it.’
Wow. He was hard, but she knew better. ‘I don’t believe this anti-love, tough guy act. I’ve seen you, remember? I’ve seen behind your smoke and mirrors, Abel.’
That registered. He glared at her. ‘That’s exactly my fucking point,’ he shot back, his dark eyes furious. ‘I don’t want smoke and mirrors, or lies, or to feel this shitty.’ The bleak dejection on his face sliced her heart in half. ‘That’s exactly why I’m going to fly half way around the world to get away. I can’t think straight,’ he said, getting closer to the truth now, in spite of himself. The anger left his voice, leaving behind a hollow sadness. ‘I can’t breathe around you.’
Was this how it was going to end? A painful conversation in a crappy hospital elevator? Genie couldn’t have imagined a more unsatisfactory fairytale.
‘So go,’ she said wretchedly. ‘Go back home to your beloved big skies, and breathe it all in deep. Fill your lungs, Abel, but I promise you it won’t make you as happy as I can, if you’ll let me. I know you better now.’ She moved close to him and touched his arm, almost crying at the familiar scent of him. She ached for him to hold her. ‘I love you.’
He looked down at her, and she up at him, and the connection that had been there from the first moment they’d met was as strong as ever.
‘I’m not anti-love, Genie,’ he said, as the lift jolted into life. ‘I’m just anti-loving you.’
Genie leaned against the wall and wrapped her arms around herself to hold the pain in as she watched him walk away, taking her heart with him back to the flip side of the world. He didn’t look back.
Chapter Seventeen
If Genie had imagined that Abel would go home and then realise he’d made a huge mistake and come back for her, she would have been disappointed. Days dragged into weeks, and the first and last thing she did every day was to check her emails and texts, with her heart in her mouth in case his name was there. It wasn’t.
Life on Deanna’s sofa was an endless round of late night glasses of wine and heart to hearts, but they could do little to ease Genie’s distress. She’d fallen fast, hard and completely for Abel; he’d rolled into her life and taken over it from the first moment she’d laid eyes on him.
She’d always imaged falling in love would be about romantic candlelit dinners and picnics in the park, a gradual build up to a grand passion, not a rush of white hot lust and emotion that would leave her reeling and trying to stay standing up. He’d blown her away from the second he’d had her write her number on his arm, and she missed his presence in her life more than she knew how to put into words.
The theatre paled into a poor second. She was almost glad not to have to get up on stage, she wasn’t sure her body would have been capable of conning an audience into believing she was having a good time up there. Ever since he’d arrived, she knew now that she’d danced only for him in her head. Had she have been more watchful of her own emotions, she’d have seen the signs, but she’d been so wrapped up in battling him that she hadn’t noticed herself falling. She’d fallen all the same, and she’d let herself get so badly injured that she wasn’t sure how in hell’s name to mend herself.
The doctor couldn’t cure her. Deanna couldn’t cure her. Genie couldn’t cure herself. She was hopelessly in love with a man who didn’t love her back, one who’d deliberately moved himself as far away around the globe as he could to be away from her. It was a pretty categorical rebuff.
Abel buried himself in work. He’d been a fool to ever go back to London: he’d come home feeling ashamed, with his tail between his legs, bashed, beaten and worse off in every possible way. His shoulder hurt like hell in the weeks immediately after his return, but he welcomed the physical pain because it went some way towards blocking out the other worse stuff.
He hadn’t expected to spare any more thoughts for his mother, yet she still weighed heavily on his mind. Somewhere deep inside he’d harboured childish hopes that there was more to their relationship than apathy and bad memories, but the plain truth was that there wasn’t. There just wasn’t. He’d lost his mother in London as surely as if he’d stood at her graveside and thrown in a handful of earth, and she’d taken any answers about his father to that metaphorical grave with her too. Abel struggled on, orphaned by circumstance, alone by choice.
He didn’t think of Genie at all. No way.
He didn’t think of her in the shower in the mornings as he tried to scrub her from beneath his skin.
; He didn’t think of her as he ran on the beach, trying to pound all thoughts of her into the sand.
He didn’t think of her at night when he chased her out of his dreams and woke clammy all over, reaching across the cold, empty sheets. He saw her time and time again as she’d been just before the ceiling came down, coltish in his oversized shirt, stunned by his rage. Shame dirtied him, and if he’d stayed it would have dirtied her too.
How long would this go on for? It had been eight weeks, and already it felt like eight years. His arm had now mostly healed thanks to diligent exercise and the best physiotherapy that money could buy, yet inside he was still every bit as fucked up as the day he’d flown home. His head was a mess, and whichever way he looked at it, he couldn’t see a way out of this besides to keep getting up every morning, hoping it wouldn’t hurt quite as much.
In five days the theatre would be repossessed. Genie had been mentally crossing the days off in her head with a big black marker, like a captive etching marks into the wall of their prison cell. There was nothing to be done but wait, so she just let the days wash over her one by one. She was ready to drown. What use was the theatre now? So much had changed. Her uncle had moved onto the next stage of his life, happily sliding into a disreputable retirement with Robin. She couldn’t imagine herself ever performing again either: her limbs were heavy, her body didn’t want to move to music and her skin was as grey as the London skyline.
She knew that she’d gone as low as she could physically and mentally go, and as hard as it was going to be, in five days time she was going to hand over the keys to this place and draw a line in the sand. Her uncle had raised her well. He’d taught her optimism, and pride, and to walk through life with her glass half full. She’d let it run dangerously close to empty. Five days, and then no more.
She ran her hand over the dusty reception desk, remembering her first encounter with Abel right there on that spot. He’d been so cocky, and she had been so intent on finding out what he wanted that she didn’t take the time to really look at him. Sure, she’d noticed he was hot, but she should have seen more, should have taken the time to notice the vulnerable man behind the facade. Because no one was really what they seemed at face value, were they? Everyone has more to them if you bother to look, and she’d bothered to look to late.