by Laura Carter
I shrug, knowing the answer too well.
“Let me remind you. We fuck and talk about fucking when we’re intoxicated only. You’re breaking the rules to distract yourself and I’m asking you what you need distracting from?”
“How do you do that? How do you get inside my head like that?”
“There’s no skill to it, Jake. You’re as easy to read as a pre-school book.”
I draw in a breath through my nose and lean my head back across the sofa. “You know I’m going to New York next week? Well, it turns out Emily is going too.”
“Emily? The Emily? The Emily who made you emotionally unavailable?”
“That’s the one.”
“Wow. You’re going to spend a week with her?”
“Not exactly. Her folks own the place next door to Drew’s and she’s going to be there.”
“Maybe you won’t see her?”
“I’ll see her. For sure.”
“Are you contemplating not going? Because I don’t think you should let her stop you.”
“I’ve contemplated it, but I have to go. Plus, my flights are non-refundable. I just… Argh, what happens when I see her, huh? What if all those feelings come back and I hit rock bottom? Hell, they’re probably still there, just repressed.” I groan and cover my face with my hands. “Things got so fucked up in my mind about her. I’m afraid I’ll do something stupid.”
She brings her hands to her lap and nods slowly. “Maybe it’s a sign, Jake. I mean, it’s not like you’ve dealt with your issues. She’s there; you’re there. Maybe it would be a good thing. See her. Deal with your shit.”
“You and your signs.”
She points a finger at me. “Hey, how many times have my instincts been off?”
She has a point. I turn away, trying to think of just one occasion. Then the proverbial lightbulb comes on right over my head and I snap my attention to Jess.
She holds up a finger and steps off the sofa. “No!”
“Jess. Come on.” I follow her into the kitchen and pin her against the cabinets. She turns in my arms. Her face is just inches from mine. “Please come with me.”
“No. I am absolutely not getting mixed up in emotional drama. I’ve had enough emotional drama to last me a lifetime.”
I give her my best puppy-dog eyes. “You would ditch your best friend in his time of need?”
“Don’t look at me like that, Jake. I said no.”
I flutter my eyelids. “Pretty please?”
She pushes my chest hard, forcing me away from her. I lean back against the opposite counter and rest my hands by my sides on the work surface. “Come on, Jess. Save me from myself. Isn’t that why we have our pact? To stop us from doing silly shit with other people? It’s just like that.”
“Do you want me to stop you from having sex with Emily or from falling back in love with her?”
“Either. Neither. Both.”
She growls and rolls her eyes but I know she’ll do it. “Could you put on a shirt if you’re going to ask me for favors? It’s not fair.”
I laugh. “Look, you’ve always said you want to run around New York like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2. What if I agree to do that with you? We’ll go find the bird woman from the movie—or similar, because she’s probably dead now. We’ll fit that in around the Hamptons.”
She chuckles but when she looks at me her eyes are full. “I have always wanted to do that.”
I nod. “Is that a yes?”
Her smile disappears, as if she’s remembered something. “Actually, I’m sorry, Jake, but I can’t afford it.”
“Babe, you don’t honestly think I’d force you to do something like this for me and ask you to pay, do you? It’s on me. Obviously. In exchange for your services.”
“You make me sound like a hooker.”
“And that gets me all hot under the collar.”
She laughs.
“Is that a yes?”
She scowls. “It’s a reluctant yes.”
“I’ll take it,” I say with a wink. “Oh, hey, there’s one more thing you could help me with.”
“What now?” She busies herself in the fridge.
“Dumbass that I am, I hit the wrong key and overpaid my rent earlier.” She pauses, holding a jug of water mid-air, her back to me. “Yeah, I overpaid by like two hundred bucks. Think you could let me pay two extra this month and you pay two extra next month?”
She takes me by surprise when she puts down the water jug and steps into me, planting her lips on mine. It’s a lingering kiss that gives me time to enjoy the softness of her skin against mine. I’m about to run my hands up her back and tell her to fuck our intoxication rule, when she steps back and looks at her toes, her cheeks flushed.
“Sorry. I… Thank you, Jake. Thank you for not making me ask.”
I lift her chin with my index finger. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
One side of her lips curls up. “Okay, well, thank you anyway. I appreciate it more than you know.”
The apartment door flies open and Alex walks in, pulling his tie from around his neck. “Fucking shit show at the office today. I hate my fucking job.” He comes into the kitchen and takes a bottle of beer from the fridge. “Fuck my life. That’s all I’m fucking saying.” He leans back against the kitchen counter. “You two all right?”
Jess and I look at each other and laugh. Life would be a damn sight less colorful without our shit-for-brains housemate.
Chapter 4
Jess
I guess we’re going to New York. I don’t like the fact Jake will be paying, but I’m not complaining about going. I mean, sure, I don’t want to be caught up in his melodrama – Jake can be a little dramatic – but I would never have refused to go with him. Not for long, anyway. He would have ground me down eventually. I’m incapable of saying ‘no’ to Jake. Maybe it’s that charm of his. Perhaps it’s the fact he made me remember how to smile again. Or it could be that he’s the best man I have ever known. Well, with the exception of my parents. And right there is the biggest reason I had to say yes. My dad.
I don’t remember much about my dad. I’m grateful to my mum that she shielded her nine-year-old daughter from the darkest days as much as she could. She tried to ease my heartache. I don’t blame her for not being able to, for the fact my heart is still broken now, when I’m thirty years old, or that I wake up each day and think about him, and her. That my heart will never be truly whole. She was my protector, my amour. But I still saw some things that I can never forget.
I remember standing in the doorway of my parents’ bedroom as my mum bathed the sores on my dad’s arms and legs that developed as a result of his being bed-bound for weeks.
I can still see the fluorescence of the hospital lights, illuminating the cold corridors, through the gray of day, and the dark of night, because nothing was bright anymore. The smell of cheap food, mingled with what I now believe was death, comes to me sometimes, as if I’m right there.
Sometimes, when I dream, I am back in his hospital room, watching as his organs failed and he slowly began to drown in his own mucus, only to be pulled back to life by nurses draining his lungs. I still remember holding my own breath as I watched him, feeling like I was sliding under water. It hits me when I least expect it, like when I’m watching a game of rugby and the players pile into a tackle. I can feel the fight for air of the player on the bottom of the pile. In those moments, I am nine years old. And I am helpless.
When I’m alone, if I don’t stay busy, I have moments between conscious thoughts when I hear the last words my parents spoke to each other. They come to me clearly, as if my parents are right beside me, saying the words in real time.
My mum bent over his naked torso, which was not frail and skinny like you might expect in a man who had spent months fighting disease. He was large and bloated f
rom the lethal cocktail of pain medication and steroids being pumped through his veins.
“You can’t leave me.” My mum’s voice broke and she began to sob. “I don’t know how to be here without you.”
My dad opened his eyes, unrelenting, even at the bitter end. For long seconds, I recall only hearing the ominous beeps of machines, counting down, counting him out of this world. Nurses shuffled in the corridor behind me and someone closed the door to give us privacy.
Eventually, my dad found his breath. He told her, “You need to look after Jess. You promised me. As long as you have her, you have me.”
“No. I can’t. I can’t do it without you.”
She cried the words, as if she was oblivious to my presence in the room.
I remember how the ground shifted beneath my feet as my dad dragged air into his lungs for the last time and almost sighed it out. As if he were resigned to letting death take him. As if he were relieved to be going to a better place. As if he were at peace.
What struck me then and has always stayed with me, is how calm settled over me as I watched the pain and grayness leave my dad’s face, as if it were draining from him as his soul left his broken body. Around me, nurses moved to take wires from my dad’s arms and kill the one long, continuous bleep of the machine connected to his body that no longer showed a beat but one flat line of color. His still heart.
A lady who had been supporting my mum in recent days caught her and held her up, lifting her arms from my dad’s lifeless body.
I remember distinctly that I just watched, keeping my eyes open when they wanted to close. I didn’t cry. Not because I didn’t understand that I would never see my dad in the same way again, but because I got the sense that he was still with me. He was in the room. His words, his heart, his soul still existed, just on another plane.
My mum yearned for him desperately in the months after he died. She cried herself to sleep with his name on her lips and his photograph in her hands.
We were inseparable for eighteen months after Dad left us. She tried to keep her promise to stay on Earth for me. But even as I turned ten, then eleven, I could sense how much she wanted to be with him.
We always talked about him. We talked about the time he built me a trampoline in the garden and broke his arm being the first person to try it out for safety. We would smile about the breakfast pancakes he used to make with smiley blueberry faces. He didn’t want his pancakes to be like everyone else’s pancakes. He cooked the smile into the batter so my pancakes were actually smiling at me as I ate them. I often thought about the hours we spent watching movies at Christmas and how Dad promised that one day we would go to New York and run the path Macaulay Culkin ran to get away from the Wet Bandits, from the toy shop, down Fifth Avenue and through a hotel. How he said we could one day go to Central Park in search of the bird woman. His time came to an end before we ever made it. But I’ll do it for us both.
I smile at the thought of Jake running with me. I think my dad would have liked him. He would have thought he was a cheeky little swine, for sure, but a loveable rogue, just like I do.
When Mum got sick eighteen months to the day after my dad died, people used words and phrases like “awful coincidence” and “tragedy.” I understood why people might think that but I knew, somehow, on some level, my mum had wanted so desperately to be with my dad, she’d willed her illness, made a deal with the devil to see my dad again.
I’m not an idiot. I appreciate how crazy that might sound to you. But the thing is, you didn’t know my parents. You didn’t see and feel how much they loved each other. It was tangible. Like a presence in the room whenever they were together. It wasn’t just the looks, the touches, the kisses my dad planted on my mum’s cheek every time he left the house, or the way my mum smiled unconsciously when she was watching my dad do nothing but just be.
He was her soulmate.
They shared the kind of love people lie awake at night and dream of experiencing. Their bond was unbreakable.
My mum cried on her deathbed, told me she had failed him. That she had broken her promise to look after me. But I said, “He won’t care, Mum. He’ll be so happy to have you back. Sometimes we break promises. We do and say things that hurt each other. But we only make real promises and only have the ability to hurt when it’s someone we really care about. He won’t care because you’re with him. You’re leaving me to be with him every day.”
She tried to raise her hand from her bed and reach out to me but she couldn’t. The end was too close. I took hold of her hand and stroked her bare head, which had once been covered in long dark hair, like my own. And I said, “You were broken, Mum. You’ve been broken for too long. Go to him now. Let him fix you.”
A silent tear rolled down her cheek. “You are so brave and beautiful. I’m proud of you, baby girl.”
I squeezed her hand and sat by her bedside until she fell asleep and my dad’s name was the last thing to leave her, as a whisper.
I knew then that she was going. She could see him and she was leaving me to go to him.
Those were the last words my mum ever spoke to me and his name was the very last thing she said.
I cried when she died. I cried because I longed to have both my parents back. Because by the time Mum died I was only thirteen years old and I had to live with an aunt and uncle I’d hardly ever met. But I knew then and I know now, some things are bigger than you, or I, or this world. Some things have to be and will be and will last forever. Some things are more powerful than heaven and earth. Some things are timeless and will forever live on, in some form.
That’s the love my parents shared and I am thankful every day that I got to see and be part of a love like theirs.
It is the greatest love I have or will ever know. I keep it alive, in my heart, and in my soul.
But I fear it. I fear its strength and the things that have to happen for it to live on.
I cherish it and I cower from it.
Love is dangerous.
It has the ability to consume you.
It has the power to end you.
And that’s why the arrangement Jake and I have works just fine.
Chapter 5
Jake
“Jess, come on. We have to get to the airport.” I’m sitting on the sofa in the living room, with my packed case beside me, ready to go. Where, incidentally, I have been sitting for the last twenty minutes…ready to go.
“I’m here. I’m here.”
She comes into view, dragging her case along the corridor. She has on the most outrageously bright lounge pants I’ve ever seen, although she’s paired them with a slouchy beige sweater and a thin scarf—for decoration, not because it’s going to be too cold out. It is only nine a.m. but the end of summer heat is keeping back London’s chill.
She stops in front of me and holds her hands out from her sides.
“Mmm, you’re a five. You know I like that sweater. It’s soft, practical and sexy as sin when it falls off your shoulder.” I wiggle an eyebrow. “But those pants are horrendous.”
She laughs and resumes her hold on her suitcase. I move in and pick it up, handing her my hand luggage bag in return.
Our cab makes good time to the airport. I listen to Jess moan about how it would have been much cheaper to take the underground but as I told her: first, I couldn’t be bothered with the hassle; and second, it’s quicker in a cab at this time in the morning. Third, it’s my money and I’ll spend it how I like.
By the time we get through security, I’m ravenous. I’m a big guy and I work out hard. Plus, I was brought up to have a healthy appetite. “You won’t grow big and strong on water,” Mom would say when we were kids. “You’ll eat what’s in front of you and I’ll hear nothing more about it.”
I think some of it is her southern upbringing. My grandparents were originally from Tennessee. Mom likes fried food, esp
ecially fried peanut butter sandwiches. Killer, in more than one sense!
But I’m definitely not getting food right now. Instead, I’m following Jess around the duty-free store, ‘window-shopping.’ I’ve already picked up some gifts to take with us—tea, Harrods biscuits, the usual touristy stuff.
“Jess, please. You’re killing me, babe. You’ve sampled every moisturizer in here. You’ve sprayed yourself with a thousand perfumes, which are going to drive me nuts sitting next to you on the plane by the way. Can we get breakfast?”
She turns from the shelf of Union Jack souvenirs she’s in front of. She has on enormous Union Jack glasses. She hits something on the arm and red LED lights start to flash as the glasses sing out “God Save the Queen.”
“Is somebody getting hangry?” she asks, planting her hands on her hips.
Despite being hangry, I laugh. “You’re such a goof. Feed me! Now.”
She puts the glasses down. “One more minute. I want to look at—”
I pick her up over my shoulder and casually walk out of the store as she squeals, hitting the ass pockets of my jeans. I think she shouts, “Put me down.” But it comes out like, “Pu. Pe. Put. E. E. Eee. Down.”
We draw the attention of fellow travelers but I don’t put her down until we’re outside a restaurant that looks like it will give me a hearty breakfast.
I don’t come up for air until my plate of bacon, sausage and eggs has been devoured. “God, I feel better for that,” I say, leaning back against the booth, opposite Jess.
She puts down her coffee cup. “I’m pleased you do. I threw up in my mouth over here watching that.”
“Are you really only having a slice of toast and a coffee?” I ask. The vegan thing lasted less than forty-eight hours, in case you were wondering.
“Yep. I love airplane food. All the added salt and sugar they put in there to counteract the altitude taste-bud breakdown. It’s the best.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve never heard this? Altitude, it effects your mind and body. You feel emotions more and you can’t taste as well, so they put extra salt and sugar in the food.”