Gently, he looped his arm back around her. ‘So would this be OK?’
‘If you don’t mind?’ she answered, politely.
‘Not at all. You could even move onto my lap, for a more complete cuddle experience?’
‘Don’t spoil it!’ She frowned in mock reproof. Her voice sounded odd in her head with her ear squashed against him. She closed her eyes, listening to the comforting beat of his body. And suddenly she was talking. Telling him what had happened to her. ‘I was in a relationship with a man called Adam. He was a really good guy. A good boyfriend. Or he would have been for someone else. Not me.’
‘Why not for you?’
A sigh began in the arches of her feet and heaved out through her chest. ‘I’m just a crap girlfriend. Adam did everything right. He loved me and made me feel special. He put me first, he bought me presents, he was thoughtful in bed. He was everything I felt as if I ought to want. Cleo had this awesome relationship – in her own peculiar way – with Justin, and I wanted to feel that way about Adam, too.’
‘But you didn’t?’
‘I tried.’
‘You shouldn’t have to try.’
‘No,’ she agreed, despondently. ‘But I thought that if I could make myself into the kind of woman who would be happy with Adam, then I would be happy with Adam. But there were a lot of differences between us. I’m not close to my parents because they’re very much absorbed in their own little world, but he has this huge family: three brothers, two sisters, at least five-hundred-and-forty grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. It meant a superabundance of family occasions.’
‘Don’t all families have gatherings of the clan? I don’t have siblings but I do have a load of cousins, aunts and uncles, and I regularly have to put on a tie and turn up at a wedding or christening.’
She struggled to express the scale of the issue. ‘But Adam’s mum, Ursula, and all of Ursula’s sisters, throw every one of their children a proper birthday party, every year. Not just when they’re twenty-one or something. Every year – and that’s before they even get started on engagements, weddings and christenings. Ursula Überhostess is a vicious competitor. A fortune goes on balloons and streamers, work-of-art handmade cakes and enough homemade food to save a starving nation.’
‘Sounds a bit full on,’ he admitted.
‘I began to feel like the Queen, obliged to dress up, turn up and smile for hours, whether I liked the company or not. So I generally drank my way through it. And Ursula would take it upon herself to “have a little word with me” about how “bubbly” I was getting. The more little words she had with me, the more I’d bubble. Every time a party invitation arrived, I’d say to Adam, “Why don’t you go to this one without me?” and he’d be so hurt and dismayed that I’d go through the whole torture again.’
‘Definitely girlfriend abuse.’
She laughed, unwillingly. ‘I suppose it sounds as if I’m making a lot out of nothing? But I felt I was being stuffed into a straightjacket of other people’s expectations, and that Adam never saw the real me – just what he thought his girlfriend should be. Anyway, along comes Adam’s thirtieth birthday party. Because it was a “special” birthday, Ursula rented a hall and planned a big bash, mostly populated by Adam’s enormous family, and I really tried to conform. But while Adam got deep into doing the rellies thing, I got—’
‘“Bubbly?”’
‘So bubbly I could hardly stagger about.’ Trying not to let her voice waver, she told him about the helium balloons and how the duck voice had seemed so hilarious. Until Adam’s proposal. And her brutal refusal. ‘… and the whole room went deathly quiet. Then some people began to laugh, as if they knew I could only be joking.
‘But I wasn’t. They realised the depths of Adam’s humiliation and there was this horrible shocked silence, instead.’
Liza closed her eyes against the images of Adam lurching to his feet, death-white, eyes enormous with pain. Stumbling down the steps, blundering through his party guests. The old familiar cold corkscrew of misery twisted her insides.
Dominic held her a little tighter. ‘Public proposals are manipulative because they’re difficult to refuse.’
‘But, unfortunately for him, I didn’t find refusal difficult,’ she pointed out, sadly. ‘He ran off. Rochelle and Angie got me home and I rang him …’ Tears began to slide down her face. ‘I told him how sorry I was and then, well it seemed like the right thing – I said that I thought we were probably over.’ She was drowning in boiling tears, now, choking, sniffing, forcing the words out. ‘Then Adam slashed his wrist.’
Chapter Twelve
Liza blotted her face and blew her nose. She had a pulsing whole-head headache, the table was sprinkled with a confetti of disgusting damp kitchen roll, a wet patch was dark on Dominic’s sweatshirt and her throat felt as if she’d been crying razor blades. Dominic simply held her.
Finally, she took a rasping breath. ‘Most people ask whether he died.’
‘Did he?’
She shook her head, dislodging a late, lone tear. ‘And then they want to know whether it was a real attempt or a cry for help.’
‘Which was it?’
‘I’ve never dared to ask.’
‘You poor woman.’ He gathered her up and onto his lap, just as he’d joked about doing. It really was a complete cuddle experience. Non-threatening, non-sexual; he was just offering her the shelter of his Dominicness. She felt surrounded, enveloped in his warmth. He’d be a good man for cold winter nights. She clung on, closing her sore eyes, allowing herself the heat, the feel, the heartbeat of another body.
‘I’m glad he lived.’ His voice was soft. ‘Not just for him, poor guy, but because you’re staggering around under enough guilt.’
‘Not according to Ursula. The next day, I answered my flat door – I lived in Peterborough, then – to find Ursula screaming, “Heartless bitch!” right into my hangover. I nearly threw up over her.’ Liza shuddered at the memory of the plummeting sense of horror. ‘She told me that Adam had slit his wrist and it was all down to me. Then she jumped back on her broomstick and bansheed off, leaving me terrified, not knowing whether Adam was even alive. So I rang one of his brothers, Ben, and he told me that Adam had cut one wrist in the shower and then come to his senses and called an ambulance. He was in hospital, in no danger but had tendon and nerve damage.’ She scrubbed at her eyes. ‘He had to have counselling, later, and operations to repair the damage. Apparently, it’s pretty agonising to mess up slitting your wrists.’
‘Poor guy,’ Dominic repeated. ‘I think he might have chosen a pretty inefficient way to end things. I’ve read that you have to know how to do a good job and if you take time to research it the moment of blind despair would probably be past. That’s why so many people do a bad job.’
‘Oh.’ She digested this. ‘Are you saying it wasn’t a serious attempt?’
‘I’m not qualified to judge.’ His voice reverberated through his chest wall and into her ear pressed against his shoulder. ‘But he obviously came pretty smartly out of the despair, if he called his own ambulance. How is he now?’
‘I don’t really know.’ Her voice was small. ‘Ben got me in to see him in hospital when Ursula wasn’t around and Adam was so sad. I felt terrible. But I felt … relieved, too, that I hadn’t said yes to him and tied myself up in something I didn’t want.’
She steeled herself for her final confession. ‘When he came out of hospital he kept calling round or phoning. So when I moved here, even though I’m terrified he’ll hurt himself again and it will be my fault, I made it a clean break. I didn’t give him my address at home or work and I changed my phone number.’ She took a shaky breath in. ‘Am I a horrible bitch?’
He stroked her shoulder. ‘No, and I don’t think you need to feel so guilty. Pretty shitty of his mother to blame you for what he did. You’re perfectly entitled to reject a proposal. The circumstances were particularly crap and public for him but, helium and Donald Duck aside, he o
rchestrated it.’
‘Oh,’ she said again. That was what Cleo, Rochelle and Angie all said, too. ‘But can you imagine how devastating it was for his family?’
‘Of course.’ He was stroking her back, now, over and over, over and over, warm and soothing. ‘I can see more clearly that nobody thought of how devastating it was for you.’
She was just feeling reassured and validated by his view of things when he added, ‘And I can even understand why you’d think erasing men and alcohol from your life would stop bad things happening.’
She stopped short, absorbing the arrangement of words, the hint that her thought process was flawed. At last, she muttered, defensively, ‘Well, it worked.’ And in case she got to like the feel of his body against hers, she slid off his lap.
He stayed for another hour, until she was dry-eyed and had drunk more jasmine tea and insisted several times that she was fine. Eventually, she pushed his coat back at him. ‘I could use some time on my own.’
‘OK, I know how it feels not to want fussing over – although don’t tell Miranda I said that. I’ll shoot off.’
She managed a smile, though her face was so tight from tears that she felt as if the skin might split. ‘I probably sound incredibly ungrateful—’
‘I know how it feels to be guiltily ungrateful, too – ditto, about telling Miranda.’ He cut her off with a quick kiss to the temple. She could imagine him giving the same kind of kiss to an aunt. ‘You just want some you time. You’ve had a bad day.’
She rubbed at where a headache pressed with a gnarly hand. ‘And tomorrow’s not likely to be good, either. I have to talk to Nicolas some more. We might not have left much unsaid, today, but we did leave things unfinished because he never actually said that he didn’t want to sell me the lease of The Stables. If he will, then I have to see if I can get the finance. If not, I’ll have to decide when to relocate.’ Then she caught sight of his expression – shock with a generous dash of horror. ‘What?’
‘Shit.’
‘What?’
He blew out his cheeks. ‘I didn’t know that that’s what you were arguing about, that you were hoping to buy the lease. I’ve approached him about it, too. And the hotel – I’m just waiting on Nicolas naming his price before setting up a meeting with them.’
Slowly, Liza slumped back onto the sofa. ‘Oh.’ She held her head harder. ‘But you don’t want anything to do with therapy.’
‘No.’ His eyes were rueful.
‘So … what’s your angle?’
His expression darkened at the edge to her voice. Slowly, he put his coat down and sat down again. On a chair this time. Carefully distant. ‘It all depends on me being able to lease or rent the land beside the centre, going down to the lake. I have an idea for an action-and-challenge centre – paintballing, kayaking, zip ropes, a climbing wall; that kind of thing. My mate Kenny’s an instructor and he’s finishing a contract in America so he might be interested in being a part of it.’
She struggled to make sense of his words at the same time as fighting fresh, self-pitying tears. But I want it! she wanted to cry. ‘They’re outdoor things. I don’t see why you need The Stables.’
‘For changing rooms, team room, showers, kitchen.’ His eyes were compassionate. ‘Sorry. I did ask several times if you were still going to relocate. You said yes. I’m not trying to put you out of business.’
Suddenly, she was on her feet, fighting a feeling of being incredibly, irrationally let down. ‘But that’s exactly what you’re doing.’
He rose, too, warily. ‘But the centre doesn’t work, you told me yourself.’
‘Not with Nicolas in charge – but with me!’ She found herself thumping theatrically on her chest. ‘I can make it work. I’m going to put a beautician in Nicolas’s room and do pampers and parties. And find some way to exploit the wasted space that’s reception. All that’s wrong with The Stables is Nicolas and his dozy ideas.’
Dominic looked uncomfortable, regretful. ‘I’m sorry to spoil your plans. But couldn’t you do all this somewhere else?’
She folded her arms. ‘Couldn’t you put your stupid outdoor games somewhere else? I was at the centre before you came up with your bright idea.’
‘And I made my offer to buy the lease before you made yours.’
They stared at one another.
Liza felt ridiculous. Here she was cuddling this man – taking up all his evening whilst you wailed all over him, a little voice inside her argued – and all the time he was after Nicolas’s lease. Her lease. Anger flickered. She drew herself up. ‘So?’
‘So …?’
‘So what are you going to do, now that you know the situation?’
His gaze narrowed. ‘I’m guessing you have an opinion on what I should do?’
‘Bale out,’ she said, promptly. ‘Because otherwise you’ll put me, Fenella and Imogen out of business.’
‘Or you could pull out? Because otherwise my business won’t get off the ground.’
‘But it’s not your ground!’
His expression softened. His hair was falling in his eyes. Suddenly he looked once again the nice – and smoking hot – guy she’d known till now. ‘So, convince me it ought to be yours. What do you have in place? A plan?’
‘Yes!’
‘Agreement from Nicolas that he’ll sell you his lease?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Do you have the finance to pay the premium, the deposit and the initial rent? The solicitor’s fee? The accountant?’
‘Not yet!’
‘OK, let’s suppose for a moment that you try hard to get the finance, and you can’t.’
‘I’ll keep trying.’
‘For how long?’
‘As long as it takes.’ She matched him stare for stare.
His expression wasn’t soft any more. ‘So you want me to give up all my plans, just in case yours come off? Even though I already know I won’t have trouble with the finance?’
‘Why? Are you rich?’
‘No,’ he retorted. ‘But I have my half of the proceeds from my old home in Hertfordshire plus a sizeable chunk of loss of licence compensation from the insurance I carried as an air traffic controller. I have agreement in principle from my bank for the rest, if the figures turn out to be more or less what I’ve forecast.’
‘Oh.’ She watched him slip back into his coat, her mind working feverishly on potential holes in his clever-clever plan. ‘But you don’t have collateral. I have this house.’
He glanced around, not trying to hide his smile. ‘I should think the mortgage is bigger than the house. It goes well with your car.’ He leaned forward as if to pop another of those annoying little kisses on her forehead.
She swatted him away. ‘Don’t diss my house. It’s my house. It means I don’t have to go and plonk myself on relatives.’ That was mean. That was below the belt. But she’d spent the evening curled up on his lap and now—
‘Point to you,’ he nodded, annoyingly not getting pissed off at her low blow. And he turned for the door, which was a pity because it pre-empted her relieving her feelings by ordering him to leave. ‘Sleeping in my cousin’s spare room sucks and she has a tendency to try and rescue me – that’s another thing I feel ungrateful about. I need my own place. So you can see why it’s important to me to get my business plans on the go. Then I can find a flat and stop my life being so crap.’
‘But my life sucks, too,’ Liza protested at the closing door. ‘My life sucks more.’ Which sounded really childish.
And made him laugh. She heard him, just as the door clicked shut. Bastard.
Chapter Thirteen
It was that day again, Diagnosis Day, when he’d discovered the truth about what he’d fought not to accept. He was locked in.
Dominic could see the huge black padlock on the door of the doctor’s office as he turned away from the big, grey doctorly desk, desperate not to have to see Dr Meadows’s sympathetic expression or hear the confirmation that there trul
y was something wrong with Dominic’s brain. That regular sleep was necessary to normal human function and, for the rest of his life, he was going to need drugs to even attempt that normality.
Despite the futility he lunged for the door but suddenly Natalie was leaning against it, blocking his escape, her eyes filled with accusation – perhaps now he could see why she couldn’t have had the baby? How was she supposed to have coped?
Anger and guilt flooded through him.
They would have found a way.
Other people coped with worse. Much.
But Natalie was turning away—
Dominic surged for the surface of consciousness, trying to fight his way out from under the sleep monster, to burst out of the dream consultant’s room of unhappiness and anxiety.
He lay still, heart pounding, still tasting the sourness of a particularly realistic unreality as he tried to wrestle the negative emotions back into their compartments. Anger. Worry. Resentment. Those emotions weren’t productive. They weren’t even accurate in the context of real life – on Diagnosis Day he’d felt relief, in a massive wave, to learn that there was a physical reason for the horrible sleep attacks and lack of concentration. Something that wasn’t his fault. The enemy had shown its ugly face and so he could learn what to expect and where best to place his defences.
It was almost time to get up, and though his bed’s seductive arms were trying to tempt him back, he needed to get away from the bad dream. He pushed against the mattress, getting himself up onto the side of the bed. Across the room, Crosswind opened one eye then resettled himself on his beanbag. Dominic shoved himself up to his feet, felt on the shelf for his meds, took the white pill, the yellow.
He wasn’t crap – the narcolepsy was. All he had to do was learn to live with it.
And then his first alarm clock went off. He turned on it on a flame of rage, ‘Fuck off!’, slapping at the big blue button so hard that he swiped the clock from the bedside, against the wall and onto the floor.
Crosswind launched out of sleep, bounding to the floor and barking himself round in a furious circle. Then he skittered over to Dominic, whining, ears back anxiously, tail beating at a low, unhappy angle. There’s nothing here, boss. What’s up? Slowly, Dominic sank back onto the bed. ‘Sorry, mate. It’s just me.’ He patted his lap and the little dog sprang up, tail wagging properly now but eyes still worried. Ashamed of letting anger gain control, Dominic smoothed Crosswind’s hairy, intelligent little head. ‘Shh, it’s fine. Don’t fret. I’ll get through it, OK?’
Dream a Little Dream Page 11