A Work in Progress

by L. T. Smith

  As soon as I entered, she patted the place next to her on the sofa. How she knew I was contemplating sitting on the chair on the far side of the room was beyond me.

  “Thought I’d stop you from doing your usual distancing routine. Come and sit next to me. I need my best mate close.”

  Maybe not so much of a mystery after all.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to retort that she had not had a problem with my distance for the last eighteen months, but I decided against it. Now was not the time to get petty. Besides, a part of me knew that the need for contact wasn’t just one-sided.

  I sat down beside her warmth, with barely time to settle back against the cushions before Gill swapped her seated position for the one she had always loved, one that was both agonising and delicious. She rested her head in my lap, the side of her face pressed against my thigh and her hand curling around my knee. She prodded my knee again and again, as if plumping a pillow, until I leaned over and snatched a cushion.

  “If you insist on sprawling all over me, at least be comfortable. Here.” I dangled the cushion in front of her, and she turned and gave me her endearingly crooked grin.

  Instead of grabbing the cushion, she hesitated, the smile slipping slightly, her brow furrowing as if in thought.

  When she smiled, the notion that she had actually heard the boom of my heart spurred me on. “What? You too important to put the cushion under your head now? Come. Lift.”

  Gill continued to look into me, the smile gone, her expression thoughtful.

  “What?” My head jerked as if I was a chicken pecking at a piece of corn.

  “You do know you’re my best friend, don’t you?”

  The words were spoken so softly, I’d had to lean closer to catch them all.

  I nodded. “Sure. Yes. Of course I do.” My triplet answer was due more to embarrassment than disbelief.

  “If you hadn’t come into my life, I…” She cleared her throat and then began again. “I honestly don’t know.”

  My smile was full and true. “Same for me, Parky. Same for me.” That wasn’t exactly true, but now wasn’t the time to tell her how very different our perceptions of our connection was. That time would never come, so the thought was moot.

  Gill gently tugged the cushion from my grasp. She placed it on my lap, patting and puffing it before settling her head against it, sighing softly.

  Her side profile was perfect, but then again, she was perfect from every angle. Dark hair swept backwards to expose a small ear decorated with two earrings, one on the lobe and one at the top. The latter made me smile. We’d had pinna piercings at the same time, although I hadn’t wanted one. Like usual, I couldn’t resist Gill Parker’s pleadings, and ended up in agony for six months, stubbornness and pride keeping me from taking the bloody thing out.

  “I didn’t come here to blubber all over you, you know.” Gill nestled the side of her face against the cushion, her shoulder digging into my thigh. “I wanted to see if you were okay, cheer you up.”

  “You did. Seeing you always cheers me up.” I closed my eyes and bit my lip. My tone had not come out as joking as I had intended, and I was half expecting Gill to turn and look questioningly at me. But she didn’t.

  “When I spotted Stacy in Next, I was really tempted to hide in the changing rooms, but she collared me before I could kick into flight mode.”

  I chuckled, and she turned and grinned at me before settling back on the cushion.

  “Did she open up the conversation by telling you of another one of my failed relationships, or did she lead in with how fantastic her own life is?”

  A rich, musical laugh rumbled through her, and the shifting expression on her face made me want to trace the line of her jaw.

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Brynn, but your news was neck and neck with the weather report.”

  I shrugged. “Ah well, I never wanted to be headline news. Neck and neck with the weather is fine by me.”

  Gill’s left arm rummaged around behind her until she caught my hand with hers, her fingers wrapping around mine and squeezing gently. Again she tilted her head to look at me. “Are you really okay, Brynn?” Her eyes were fixed on mine.

  I nodded, mesmerised anew by their darkness.

  “Why didn’t it work out?”

  How could I tell her the truth? How could I tell her that no one could ever live up to her, that she had set the bar too high for any of my relationships to ever fill her place in my heart?

  Gill waited for my answer, her expression open and her face stunningly beautiful. It would have been so easy to lean forwards and capture her lips with mine, so easy to escalate that kiss into the one I had dreamed about a thousand times in a thousand different scenarios, scenarios where she loved me just as much as I loved her.

  I shrugged. “We just, erm, didn’t fit. You know?”

  Gill continued to look at me as if she believed I had more to say, but I knew that I wouldn’t be saying “because Jenny wasn’t you” anytime soon.

  A soft sigh left her mouth, then she pursed her lips and shook her head. I didn’t want to ask her what she’d just been thinking or what she was about to ask me before changing her mind.

  Mercifully she turned and snuggled back against the cushion on my lap, leaving me staring at her profile again.

  Silence filled the room, an expectant silence that seemed too quiet, too loud, too everything. Without conscious thought, my hand lifted to Gill’s hair, aching to touch the smoothness I knew so well. I tentatively stroked a lock of hair that was dangling away from her back, suspended in air. Gill gave no sign of acknowledgement—no quick shift away from my touch, no accusation of touching her up. That emboldened me. I gently trapped the silken strand, closing my eyes as I luxuriated in the feel of it.

  “Do you…?”

  Gill’s voice startled me, and instead of letting go of her hair, I pulled it. With force.

  “Aww fuck!” Her exclamation seemed to express both surprise and pain.

  As she recoiled, my instinct was to hold on, and it was only because her hair was so silky that it slipped through my fingers and escaped my grasp.

  Gill shot me an accusing look whilst I tried valiantly to look innocent. I could feel by the wideness of my eyes that I was failing miserably, and I made an effort to get to them appear more natural.

  She rubbed the spot where I had pulled her hair, and I made a hissing noise through my teeth whilst grimacing.

  “I think I caught my hair on a zip or something.” She glanced at my pyjama top and apparently noted there was no zip. Her brow furrowed slightly as she looked at me, her eyes devoid of accusation but not without an element of confusion. “What did I…?”

  She twisted around to face me directly, her hand grabbing my thigh in the process. Her fingers dug in and I winced, but I didn’t make a sound.

  “I can’t see anything I could have caught my hair on.”

  She twisted herself again, her hand pushing against me, trapping the skin somehow. I gritted my teeth, sucking in a groan.

  She shrugged. “Never mind.”

  Gill made herself comfortable, giving her head a last rub before she settled it against the pillow and curled her fingers around my knee.

  A memory filtered up from the recesses of my mind, a memory of sitting in this exact position over twenty years ago in a different room, in a different house, seemingly in a different lifetime. A thirteen-year-old Gillian Parker was sprawled over my knee, her tears soaking my jeans, her body racked with sobs. The echo of sensations sizzled through me as I remembered stroking Gill’s hair away from her face, the tips of it damp, her cheeks flushed and sticky. The sound of her pain was strangled and so bloody raw. My heart hurt so much, so fucking much, and my pain exploded as I realised there was nothing I could do to change what she’d experienced at the hands of someone who was supposed to protect her.

  I didn’t understand half of what she was saying, but I knew it was bad. When she told me her father had come into her
room in the middle of the night, my breath caught. Even I, in my limited and childish perception of life, knew that Terrence Parker hadn’t entered his child’s room quietly whilst keeping the light off so he could beat his daughter black and blue again. Although I didn’t know what was to come, I knew it would be something worse than the physical violence. Sadly, I was right.

  As Gill recounted how she’d watched a shadow furtively move from the doorway to her bedside, her fingers gripped my knee more firmly. Nausea, she said, had ballooned inside her at the sour smell of the unwashed body. Even when she had feigned sleep, trying to hold her breath, she could still smell the rancid odour of alcohol. Without opening her eyes, she knew his face was close. Too close.

  I didn’t exactly know about sex, had never heard of the thing called incest, and still I’d wanted to stop her telling me. I knew that as soon as she uttered the details of what had happened to her, both our lives would be forever changed.

  I think that was the moment that I acknowledged that I was in love with her. Though it seemed as if I had always been madly in love with Gillian Parker, I never admitted it to myself until there was no way I could deny it any longer. At thirteen, I did not fully understand what was going on with me. I had not identified the label attached to that aching longing I always felt when around her as me being a “lesbian.” I just believed that was how everybody felt about their best friend.

  I was seventeen before I realised that what I was experiencing was “full blown stereotypical all out loved up to the eyeballs and never to find anyone else who would ever come close to making me feel as much for another person for the rest of my life as Gillian Parker.” It had sucked big time. Truth be told, it still did.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  Gill’s voice drew me back from the memories, and I could feel the blush of exposure rising to my cheeks. I looked down at her and was surprised to see that she had turned herself around, her face tipped upwards to me, the top half of her body curled into a semicircle. Dark eyes digested me, which usually would have struck me dumb. This time I knew I had to stop skirting around the issue and deal directly with whatever was on her mind.

  “What makes you think Tom doesn’t want to marry you?”

  Her eyes appeared to darken even further, and I had to steel myself to keep from drowning in her gaze.

  She released a sigh and broke eye contact, fixing her attention on her hand as if her fingers had suddenly become extremely important. “I thought it was only fair that I tell him, but ever since I did, he has been behaving differently.”

  Gill began picking at a fingernail, something she always did when she was worried. I waited for her to continue, but it appeared as if she was content to leave her last comment hanging in the air.

  I grabbed her hand, stilling her movement, and the warmth from her blended with my own.

  “How’s he been acting, Gill?” My voice was soothing, nonconfrontational. She shrugged but didn’t pull her hand away. “There must be something he has said or done to make you believe that he no longer wants to marry you.” And if he had, Tom Griffiths was an idiot.

  Gill drew in a breath, deep and full, and held it so long that I suspected it must’ve started to become uncomfortable. The exhalation was long and drawn-out, and it wasn’t until the last of the air was expelled that she answered my question.

  “He’s different, seems off somehow.”

  Her fingers twitched in my hand, so I gave them a reassuring squeeze.

  “We’ve not…erm, you know…been intimate since I told him.”

  Considering my feelings for Gill, I was surprised that I didn’t cheer aloud at hearing that they were not sleeping together. Maybe I was thinking more about how it affected her than my part in it in all, a definite sign of my growing maturity and selflessness.

  “Have you tried to initiate the intimacy?”

  Her eyes flicked to meet mine before darting away. “At first, yes. But he...well, he stopped it progressing to, erm…you know.”

  I nodded, accompanying it with a small smile that I hoped would encourage her to continue.

  “And he also is staying later and later at work. He comes home saying how very tired he is, how the surgery is too busy.”

  “Maybe it is.” I held my breath and waited to see what she would do.

  Her face was tipped downwards, her eyes focused on the top of my hand. Time seemed to drag, and the atmosphere became a tad uncomfortable.

  Slowly, Gill moved her hand from beneath mine, and the coolness of what I had thought to be a warm room met my skin. With a slight push, she moved from being pressed against my thigh to sitting beside me. I could almost feel the wall rising between us.

  “There is something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”

  I noted her nervous swallow and decided I had to get to the bottom of whatever was eating away at her. Everything she had said up to that point could just be coincidental.

  “Is it only his lack of intimacy, and the working late and being tired, Gill? Or is there something else?”

  She sucked in her bottom lip and worried at the plump flesh.

  I wanted to help her, but I was losing patience. Yes, I was her friend, and even though we hadn’t seen each other for eighteen months, I still considered myself to be her best friend. Helping her through the difficult times with her father had been traumatic, something that shattered my view of the world as well as hers, but I stood by her, comforted her, did everything I possibly could to diminish the pain of it all, even though I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. However, discussing intimacy problems she was having with the man who had everything I had ever wanted was pushing the bounds a little bit.

  Before I had a chance to spur her on, she spoke.

  “I think Tom is having an affair with a junior doctor.”

  That was the one thing I was not expecting her to say. Tom Griffiths might be many things, but a cheat was never one of them. “Don’t be silly.”

  Don’t be silly? What the fuck? Why did I say something as lame as “Don’t be silly”? Why couldn’t I be like those friends I’ve seen who just nod wisely and look supportive?

  Gill released a sigh, her face creased in absolute misery. “I’m not being silly. Ever since Gina Donaldson started at the surgery, Tom has used every excuse in the book to stay late at work.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand. I thought you said it was because you told him about your…you know…dad.”

  Gill stood up, the action sharp yet fluid. She walked over to the fireplace and rested her hands on the mantle, her head bowed. I thought maybe she would stay silent for a while as she collected herself, and was surprised when she started to talk, her voice clearly audible even though she wasn’t facing me.

  “I told Tom about what had happened to me because I didn’t want to have any secrets between us. I’ve had therapy, seen the bastard get time, moved on with that part of my life. I thought Tom should know about it, you know, just in case.”

  Just the way she said it set alarm bells off in my head. Her voice was matter-of-fact, cold. Gill had been a wreck, an absolute car crash. Sylvia Parker, Gill’s mother, had not suspected that her husband had been skulking into his daughter’s room at night. She thought that Gillian looking like hell, withdrawing from the family, refusing to bathe or take care in her appearance was just a teenage thing, something she would grow out of. Sylvia was just glad that he had stopped beating the crap out of them all.

  There was a part of me that was still angry at Mrs. Parker for not being more vigilant, not paying more attention to her daughter. Why didn’t she question the reason her husband had stopped treating them all like a punching bag? And why hadn’t she ever had him arrested for hitting them in the first place? If she had done that, the sexual abuse might never have happened.

  But that was all by-the-by now, in the past, although the effects of it were still very much alive. Just looking at Gill’s rigid back was enough to confirm that. />
  I didn’t know how I should act—whether to go to her at the mantelpiece, or keep seated on the sofa. I leaned forwards at the edge of my seat, but deliberated before standing. The action should’ve been seamless—me standing and purposefully striding over to where my best friend was breaking into pieces, followed by me wrapping my arms around Gillian Parker and promising her the world.

  Alas, I was too stupid and indecisive to pull off even the simplest of tasks, like the standing part.

  Gill turned around and caught me half-on/half-off the sofa, almost as if I had lost the ability to support myself.

  In my haste to rectify my inept attempt to stand, I staggered to my feet, the action definitely cockeyed and poorly executed, my movements as awkward as those of a newborn gazelle who had been at the back of the line when the gracefulness was handed out.

  “Fuck it!”

  Although I am not 100 percent sure that a newborn gazelle wouldn’t shout out the eff word whilst plummeting face-first onto the floor, I would like to believe that I would not be the only one who was a total dickhead.

  If I hadn’t been so mortified, I would have laughed at my clumsiness, but laughter was not the plat du jour at that precise moment. Even though I was a tad stunned as I hit the floor, I was aware that Gill was making her way over to me, something I didn’t want to happen. I was supposed to be taking care of her, not the other way around.

  In an attempt to deftly recover, I pushed myself upwards. The back of my head connected with something hard and, if the soaring pain raging through my skull was any indication, that something was quite sharp. I didn’t really need to hear the muffled “Fuck!” to inform me that I had just head-butted Gill in the mouth, the sharp feeling being her teeth.

  I just stayed where I was, frozen to the spot, not even lifting my hand to check whether Gill’s teeth had bitten a chunk out of my head. Ever since she had appeared at my front door, we had been knocking cups over, crying, snapping at each other, or causing each other physical injury, not to mention all the emotion and slagging off of Stacy Greenall.