Ever After (Dirtshine Book 3)

by Roxie Noir

  “Harry,” I say.

  “Got his number?”

  I shake my head. It’s a fucking mistake, because for a moment I think I’m going to vomit again, right there on the floor.

  “Harry McNair. Probably listed in the phone book.”

  She nods, walks away. I’ve no idea whether Harry is listed or not, but he seems like he would be. Responsible kind of bloke. The sort to take on a man-sized garbage pile like me.

  She leaves. I wait. It feels like an hour, maybe more, and I doze off again slightly, though mercifully I don’t dream.

  “All right,” her voice finally says, and I jerk away. I’m still on the fucking floor, sweat soaked through my shirt.

  “All right,” I echo, still not really sure what’s going on.

  “If you’re sober you can come sign your paperwork out in the bullpen,” she says, her hands still on her hips. “There’s quite a lot and handing it to you through the bars will be a pain in my arse.”

  Paperwork. That’s never good, and it’s particularly not good in jail.

  “What sort of paperwork?” I ask, the pit of my stomach turning over.

  She raises her eyebrows, looking unimpressed with me.

  “First and foremost, I’ve got to have you sign the papers that acknowledge you were arrested for driving intoxicated while in charge of a motor vehicle,” she says, every inch of this woman no-nonsense.

  I rub my knuckles against my mouth, my heart stilling in my chest.

  What the fuck have you done now?

  “I’m pleading not guilty,” I say, mouth dry.

  “It’s not court, it’s paperwork,” she says. “You can make it as difficult as you like, you’re still being charged.”

  I stand, teeth clenched, determined not to vomit though it’s still a strong possibility. The policewoman unlocks the cell, stands aside, lets me through.

  “It’s best to just get this over with,” she says, as if she’s agreeing with something I just said. ““Least you didn’t try to race a train like that drunk bloke did last month.”

  After I sign a mountain of paperwork, she walks me to the front door to wait for Harry, leaving me on a bench beneath an awning, hungover as fuck. I sit there, my head in my hands, brain spinning faster and faster despite feeling as though an elephant’s trying to wrench it from my neck.

  For the first time since yesterday morning, I’m not sorry Frankie’s gone.

  At least she didn’t see me like this.

  Harry pulls up to my cottage in his large black sedan, parks, puts the brake on.

  “Let’s go grab your clothes at least,” he says, unbuckling.

  I sit motionless. The ride here over our shit roads very nearly did me in, and I’ve got my head back against the seat, unwilling to open my eyes just yet.

  “What do you mean, at least?”

  “I mean you can also grab some personal effects if you’d like,” he says as if it’s obvious.

  “And what?”

  “And come stay with Walter and me until you’ve got yourself right again,” he says, and heaves himself out of the car. I watch him as he walks around, head down against the drizzle, and walks into my cottage.

  The front door isn’t even closed. Fuck.

  Slowly, I open the door. I unbuckle my seatbelt. I get out, stomach sloshing, close the door, walk into the house behind myself. Harry’s standing there, in the doorway between kitchen and bedroom, his hands on his hips.

  “I was expecting worse,” he admits, looking around.

  I was too. Last time this happened there was bad fire damage and the condominium downstairs from mine had flooded with an inch of water after the sprinklers went off. I’m still paying for it, the damages taken directly from my royalty checks.

  But there’s not much wrong this time. My smashed phone on the floor in my bedroom, next to the wall where I threw it, where I later sat dialing Frankie over and over. Shattered mirror in the bathroom which I obviously broke somehow.

  Seven years of bad luck, I think to myself in my mum’s voice, then nearly laugh.

  As if it matters.

  And a charred spot on the kitchen table, next to a large purple wine stain, the liquid already sunk into the wood. I freeze in the doorway. Swallow hard, my heartbeat ticking upward.

  The last thing I remember is sitting at this table, reading Frankie’s note, but there’s another memory shoving at me at me, like an animal throwing itself against a cage door. It’s right there, so close, all I have to do is let it through...

  Sitting at the table. Reading the note, head down on the wood. Something about the wording of it.

  Have to leave. There it is but why, Liam, fucking why.

  I move closer, stand next to the chair, close my eyes. Feel the cage door of memory shake and rattle, the rusty lock loose.

  I sat here, convinced myself of something. Let certainty wash over me like a tidal wave of misery but what was it, what fucking was it?

  Right now, I hate myself. I hate my idiot drunk brain and the way it’s so utterly certain of things I can’t even remember later. The memory of what it was shoves again. There’s a creaking sensation, and then suddenly, there it is.

  Have to leave meant she had gone back to Alistair.

  That’s what it was. That’s what I thought, what I was completely fucking certain of, sitting at this table with my face against the wood last night. Even now, sober and so hungover I can barely stand, I can feel the echoes of that certainty.

  There’s no real logic there, no real reason for me to think that, but there’s also no excellent argument against it. She wouldn’t answer her phone, and it’s not as if she’d be the first person to regret a breakup two days after it happened. I knew that when I was hammered, and I know it now, sober.

  A very bad feeling gathers in the pit of my stomach. There’s a suspicion gnawing at me, staring down at the blackened back, the sickly gray swirl of unremembered time and the feeling of knowing myself, of knowing what I can do weighing heavily on me. I’ve done something terrible, I just fucking know it.

  Harry steps up next to me, holding something wrapped in a hand towel.

  “Found your phone,” he says, calm as you like, and then nods at the table. “Lucky you didn’t burn the place down.”

  “I did burn something,” I mutter, transfixed by the burn on the table. Right in the spot I last remember, the bad feeling growing stronger.

  Even if I can’t remember, I’m sober enough to add together one plus one plus one and get three.

  One: I sat here, reading her note, convinced she’d gone back to the Little Lord.

  Plus one: The envelope is gone.

  Plus one: All that remains is a pile of ash next to a book of matches and a scrap of white.

  I pick it up: tiny, triangular, charred on the longest edge. Thick. The corner of an envelope.

  I barely make it to the sink before I’m retching again, heaving, bringing up just bile at first, and then nothing.

  “Lucky it’s not in your eye, whatever you did,” Walter says, leaning in, a pair of needle-nosed tweezers in his hand.

  “I’ve already told you, he smashed his phone to bits and tried to make a call,” Harry says.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t notice until you got here,” Walter fusses.

  “I thought he’d fallen in his driveway or something,” Harry shrugs. “I didn’t realize he had glass embedded in his face like an idiot.”

  It’s also in my hand, my finger and thumb, though Walter’s already taken care of those and I’m properly bandaged up, not to mention my black eye and the ugly welts across my neck and diagonally down my torso.

  Walter, Harry’s husband, and I are sitting on the edge of their bathtub, in their enormous master bathroom, as he picks tiny glass shards from my face and Harry sits on the closed toilet and watches our progress.

  They tried to get me to see a medical professional, but right now I’d rather have glass shards in my face forever than get int
o a car for any length of time. Harry and Walter have given me toast and a horrible-tasting sports drink, and I’m finally feeling marginally better.

  That is, until I tell them about them about the charges.

  “And after nearly catching your entire house on fire?” Harry asks.

  “I don’t think paper burns hot enough to catch stone.”

  “Don’t move your face so much,” Walter mutters.

  Harry just looks at me, waiting for my real answer. I close my eyes, willing memories back, even though I’m not quite sure I want to remember.

  Blacking out from drink usually works this way for me, like a string of light bulbs through a tunnel: the first often gives me just enough light that I can find the second and switch it on, and so on.

  “I deleted her number from my phone as well,” I say. “I must have done at some point, she’s not there now.”

  Harry leans forward, silent.

  “Yeah,” I confirm, trying to speak without moving my face too much. “That was next. That’s how I got the glass in my hand, it took me quite a while to figure it out.”

  I wiggled the bandaged fingers of my right pointer finger and thumb, a stab of regret passing through my gut at deleting Frankie. Even if she did go back to the Little Lord.

  “And then?” Harry asks.

  I close my eyes. This is what Harry does, part of his sober philosophy. He’s a big believer in facing up to the chaos users cause, and even though he’s not really my sponsor because programs and sponsors are utter bullshit, I’m in his house and his husband is picking glass shards from my face, so I’m in no position to fight the man.

  “Then I found a pint of gin beneath my sink,” I say, just as Walter’s tweezers dig particularly deep, and I flinch.

  “Oi,” he says. “After the rum?”

  I grit my teeth, trying not to flinch further.

  “And?”

  “And, I drank it straightaway.”

  Like lights in the tunnel, I can’t stop remembering. Last night comes back to me, faster and faster, likely aided by the fact that I’ve not been that drunk in months and months. Keeps all the incidents from blurring together, makes everything as clear as it’s going to be.

  Drinking the gin, which only made the certainty that she was back with Alistair worse. Meaning she was back at the manor.

  Meaning I had to go fight for her.

  For a long moment, the last thing I can remember is stumbling through my front door, which I apparently left open. Tossing away the empty gin bottle, ready to go take on anything to get Frankie back.

  “Jesus,” I mutter in the bathroom, relaying this to Harry and Walter. Walter pulls another shard from my face, and I take the moment to drink more of the bright yellow sports drink they’ve given me. My stomach rebels for a moment, then accepts that it does need something.

  “Keep on,” Harry encourages me.

  I got into my car. I must have done, because that’s the only way that I could have been charged with driving drunk, but I can’t remember it, as if my brain is putting up one last wall of defense.

  The policewoman said something about property damage, about there maybe being more charges. Did she? Or was I confused, hallucinating or some such, and dear fucking God what did I do?

  Walter’s tweezers dig particularly deep, and I flinch away from him, though Harry’s face doesn’t change.

  “You’ve got a black eye, do you know that?” he says, conversationally.

  I touch my left eye, the puffy bruise just below it on my cheekbone. As if someone didn’t know how to aim a punch, and faraway in the tunnel of my brain, a light in the distance flickers.

  And then there it is: climbing into the shit Vauxhall, taking three tries to start the thing. Backing it into a stone wall before I even left the cottage, barely able to keep it on the road.

  I close my eyes and start praying silently, praying that I won’t remember or that I’ll have done something easy, like drove into a tree.

  Harry waits. He’s patient, like a stone, and he’s got that sober-sponsor air about him right now that I simply can’t fucking stand. It’s half-pity, half-superiority, and it’s the reason that I hate everything about sobriety programs and sponsors and anyone who lectures me on what I ought and ought not do.

  And yet, he’s here. He counseled me against taking a bartending job and he was strongly of the opinion that I ought not drink, ever, and I ignored him and he’s here anyway, picking glass from my face.

  More lights go on.

  “I drove to Shelton,” I say slowly, an ache taking up residence in my jaw. “And I drove through it, and...”

  The words spill out of me, haphazardly, and suddenly the full memory is there, crystal fucking clear.

  Driving through the center of Shelton, nearly hitting a few people. Somehow making it along the winding roads to the manor, but missing the turn.

  My car plowed head-first into a low brick wall, hard enough to deploy the airbags and give me a bad jolt, not hard enough to cause serious harm. The Vauxhall steaming as I got out, bloody-minded, strode up the long driveway.

  Shouting her name. Screaming it. Over and over again, trying to get her to come out and come talk to me, vengeful and angry and smashed to smithereens.

  I wanted her to come out, tell me to my goddamn face that she’d gone back to him. I wanted to see Alistair, tell him that she’s spent two days with me and we’d fucked to hell and back, watch his face when he found that out.

  Hurt her like she hurt me. It was all I wanted, but she didn’t come out. First there was some servant, a driver maybe, then another. I just kept shouting, screaming, and just as the sirens wailed in the distance the Little Lord finally showed up.

  Harry listens to all this, stone-faced. I’m sure he’s thinking something pitying and ugly about me, but I don’t care anymore. I have to get it out, the words tripping over themselves to leave my mouth.

  I don’t remember what Alistair said. I don’t think it was anything.

  I just remember running up to him, punching his goddamn smug face as hard as I could. It wasn’t a good punch, but it felt near-orgasmic, even as someone else grabbed my arms from behind, pulled me back, my legs scrabbling at the gravel.

  Sirens getting closer, lights washing the scene.

  Alistair pushing up his sleeve, rearing back, a grimace of pure rage on his face as he lunged forward, a little off-balance, mashing his knuckles against my cheekbone. I was restrained, and he couldn’t even do it right, probably sprained his hand that way to boot.

  “And yet you’ll be the one charged,” Harry says quietly, and suddenly, everything goes out of me because he’s right.

  It doesn’t matter who could punch who properly, because I’m fucking ruined and he’s still Lord of the Manor. In the bright, sober light of day I’m considerably less convinced that Frankie went back to him — why leave me that note, if so? — but he’s still got everything and I’m facing charges and a fine that’s likely to almost bankrupt me.

  After all, he’s also seen to it that I haven’t even got a job.

  Alistair’s won. He’s won.

  But for two days I had Frankie all to myself, naked in my bed, and even now I think that may have been worth it.

  I close my eyes. Walter pulls out another glass shard, wipes the tweezers on a paper towel he’s got next to him, then peers at the side of my face.

  “I believe you’re all finished,” he says mildly.

  “Thank you,” I say automatically, still mulling over what Harry said.

  Was it worth it? I did fucking destroy her phone number and right now, sitting on the side of a bathtub, drinking something that looks like unicorn piss and telling my sober sponsor about the shit I did the night previous, I’ve got no idea if I’ll be able to find her phone number again.

  Maybe she’s got a website. Maybe it’s as simple as searching the internet for Françoise Strauss.

  Maybe not.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight


  Frankie

  The plane’s fancy enough to have outlets between the seats, and the moment jet wheels touch down at LaGuardia around noon the next day, my phone is charged and turned on.

  I haven’t showered. I haven’t really slept. I did brush my teeth and find a change of clothes, but I’m still a disgusting, nervous wreck mess at the end of the worst plane flight of my life.

  Please have called me. Please.

  I know it’s fucked up of me to leave with no warning like that, without even saying goodbye, and expect him to call hours later anyway. But it doesn’t stop me from hoping anyway.

  Maybe he called while you were in the air and your phone was off.

  Maybe he was still asleep before, and then called while you were flying to Frankfurt without leaving a voicemail, didn’t call while you were waiting in the airport, called while you were flying to Atlanta and didn’t leave a voicemail...

  My phone finally ticks up to four bars.

  No voicemail. No anything. I click my phone off and stick it in the seatback pocket as we taxi to the gate, closing my eyes and leaning back against my seat.

  At least I’m finally home. Manchester to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Atlanta, Atlanta to New York. It took me eighteen hours. I napped a little in airports and a little on airplanes, but I feel like my body’s been stuffed with hay, unpleasant dry and itchy on the inside.

  I’ve been in the middle seat for every leg. For the last two, my seat didn’t even recline, and on the flight over the Atlantic I was next to a large gentleman who snored for nine hours straight.

  And Liam didn’t call me. I thought he would. I really fucking believed it. I imagined myself apologizing that I didn’t wake him up, probably crying or something but saying that I just needed to go home, get out of England, that it had nothing to do with him.

  That he was the one thing that made me want to stay.

  We deplane. No call. Drag myself through LaGuardia, to the baggage claim, where my bags miraculously arrive. No call.