Poison

by West, Jade

  I adored the giggle that came out of her. “It seems your idea of mud and mine are two very different things.”

  I was laughing along with her. “Maybe bring your wellies next time.”

  Her eyes were straight on mine. “Next time? That’s not focusing on the present.”

  “Cut it out,” I said. “There will be a next time. I’ll have you slopping around this path in better footwear, just like I’ll be taking your ass on the kitchen floor all over again.”

  She didn’t argue, just took another tentative step into the mud bath. I kept hold of her arm, but I was squelching too. I’m not sure whether it was the mud or the laughter that made me slide around alongside her, and I didn’t care. It was absolutely fucking hilarious to watch her drowning in my coat, with the sleeves too long for her, while trying to navigate a ridiculous footpath in ridiculous heels.

  “Stop it,” she said, but she was laughing as hard as I was, pausing with her feet buried deep in a puddle with her legs splattered brown. “We’ll both go flying if we don’t get a grip.”

  Fuck my life, I felt like me as I watched her being her, right there in that moment. It was magic. Magic and stupid giggles and the wind in our faces.

  We were only about halfway up the bank when she slipped a whole load harder and dragged me back a few steps along with her. I managed to keep my balance, and enough steadiness to keep her upright, but it was a losing battle and we both knew it.

  “Back down?” I asked, but she was shaking her head as she laughed.

  “I’m pretty sure back down is going to be even harder than the way up.”

  “I’d carry you if I wasn’t certain I’d go tumbling with the both of us.”

  “Can you even begin to imagine how hard we’d go tumbling?” she asked, and she was doubled up at that, pissing herself laughing so hard it was the most contagious thing in the world.

  Another few steps and she tried to keep to the side of the track, but it was too steep. She slid back into the depths, but her legs slipped wider and she braced herself for the fall. I made a grab for her waist, and I thought I had her, but then Ted sealed the deal by racing on down.

  What a fluffy little prick.

  I shouted him to stop but the wagging, barking idiot goofed right on up, skidding close enough that Anna recoiled a step backwards.

  Backwards down a particularly squelchy divot in the path.

  Backwards down a slurp, and a slip and a tumble that moved in slow motion, her heels finally bailing out of the climb and bailing her legs out with them.

  I watched the scene unfold, arms flailing, hands reaching out and closing on air, and down she went, slapping down onto her front with her tits into a slop of a puddle, and it was classic.

  So classic that I couldn’t breathe for the laughter, and she was struggling too, laughing so hard she had to roll onto her back, caking herself even further in the brown gloop.

  She was hilariously beautiful and her eyes were sparkling with so much fun it would have taken my breath, even if the laughter wasn’t already on the case. I stepped back down to her and reached for her hands and braced myself to pull her to her feet. But it was too much. Too much and too damn stupid for the both of us.

  So I went tumbling too.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Anna

  He was on his ass in the mud alongside me, and I felt like such an idiot for even thinking I’d be up to this in stupid heels. But I was glad I was an idiot. I was glad we were there, wallowing in the puddles, because it was hilarious.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed as much as I was laughing there in the country winds with the fresh air filling my lungs. I reached out for him when I was finally breathing steady enough to attempt the rise, but he was still roaring and held me tight. Mud to mud through the coat that was stupidly big and the stupid skirt that was riding up my splattered thighs.

  And then the dogs came bounding, just as muddy as we were, leaping all over us and barking loud. I held them just as tight as I was holding Lucas, my hands in their damp fur as they licked my face, and it was perfect.

  I gave up on my feet and opted to crawl, and he came with me, on his knees like I was. He took my hand, slopping them joined together in the mud on every shunt forward, and slowly we made our way to the top. He pulled me to my feet when we got onto firmer turf, and then he hugged me tight. I hugged him tight right back and breathed deep and free.

  I was free.

  “Your shoes are fucked,” he said, laughing fresh while stating the obvious.

  “I don’t give a shit,” I said. “It was worth it.”

  We walked along the brow of the hill in the most stunning silence, and it was so rich with green, and rustling leaves and the dogs racing at full pelt. I’d never get enough of this and I knew it. I’d never get enough of him and I knew it.

  I guess that’s when I decided the future was inevitable.

  And if the future was inevitable then so was the past.

  I was scared. Staring up at him and wondering how the hell we’d ever get beyond that pile of hurt he’d slammed into me, and how we’d ever get beyond the repercussions that had cost me so much.

  But I was more scared of how anyone else would get past it, even if I did myself.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, but I didn’t tell him. Not there in that moment. I shrugged and smiled and pointed out another crazy big oak on the horizon and he told me how it was Millie’s favourite.

  He looked at me for a few long seconds before he pulled his phone from his pocket and unlocked the screen.

  He pulled up a video and handed it over, and there was his little girl running around that very tree with her palm flat to the bark. Her giggle was beautiful, her eyes sparkling and so much like his it knocked me sideways. Her hair was like his too, the exact same shade of dark, her colouring a perfect match as it blew behind her as she ran. I couldn’t speak. The pain was in my throat.

  Because that should have been us.

  She should have been mine.

  “Let’s play tag, Daddy,” she giggled. “Bet you can’t catch me.”

  “Smile for the camera and I’ll be right there.”

  She poked her tongue out and did a dance, and the image shuddered as he laughed too loud to hold it steady.

  “She’s beautiful,” I managed to say as the recording came to an end.

  “She is,” he agreed. “Maybe one day you’ll meet her. She’ll love you.”

  That brought the pain up fresh. I took his fingers in mine and kept on walking and kept on breathing, and he raised my damn hand to his mouth and kissed my knuckles, and I knew then I was doomed.

  He whistled the dogs when we completed the circuit and got back to the truck. I was trying to wipe some of the splatted mud from my butt before I got in, but he told me not to bother and got right in himself.

  We rumbled our way back to the house and my heart was thumping, knowing full well we had to confront the place I’d been avoiding.

  He pulled onto the drive and I took the final steps on my trashed shoes, kicking them off by the door and stepping on inside the warm. I shrugged off his coat and he hung it up to dry off, and then we were back through into the kitchen, and he was starting up the kettle and asking me what I wanted.

  I sipped on a fresh glass of juice and watched him making tea, and wondered if there was any way on earth we’d make it through this.

  He laughed again as he scoped out my legs. “Let me run you a bath,” he said, and I nodded. But that’s when I opted for another round. I undid my blouse and dropped it to the floor, unclipped my bra and slid my filthy skirt down my thighs.

  One final high before the low.

  His eyes darkened with fire when he saw what I was wearing.

  I’d been feeling them all the way, the filthy knickers I’d sneakily taken from the counter top earlier when he wasn’t looking. They’d been the most slippery damp between my thighs all the way round that walk.

 
; “You dirty bitch,” he said, and I slipped my fingers right on down.

  He didn’t give me a second. A few long steps and he was down on his knees, his mouth pressed to that filth and sucking hard and his hands gripping my muddy thighs so tight I was his prisoner.

  I wanted to be his prisoner.

  “You’re a filthy beast,” I whispered, and he moaned against my pussy.

  “Takes one to know one,” he said.

  He didn’t pull my knickers to the side and I didn’t want him to. I loved him like this.

  I didn’t know if my legs would hold my weight as I shuddered, so I gripped the counter to the side. My eyes were closed and my body was burning up and the waves took me like I was drowning in the thrill.

  Filth.

  It was filth.

  His mouth was so wet when he pulled away, staring up at me like I was some dirty dark angel.

  He pulled those filthy knickers down my legs and sucked them into his mouth, and my tummy did the dirty flutter only he could give me.

  And then he got to his feet and he kissed me.

  God, I wanted him to.

  I wanted to lap up the filth from his mouth and taste his fetishes. I wanted to kiss him so hard we never stopped.

  He was the one to break it. I was panting as he pulled away.

  “Yum,” he said, and dropped those sopping knickers back onto the counter. “Let’s run you that bath.”

  I hovered in the kitchen to finish my juice while he headed on up, and by the time I caught my breath and joined him the bath was already full. Full and bubbly. I stepped on in and sighed as I dropped into the water, and it was heaven.

  The whole thing was heaven.

  Heaven teasing at the looming hell.

  And that’s when he fucking said it, hand splashing in the water as he sat muddy at the side of the bath.

  “I love you, Anna.”

  It hit so hard I couldn’t face it. I splashed the bubbles and pretended I hadn’t heard him, even though he was right by my side. My brain was spinning with what I could possibly say to that statement beyond confessing the same three words right back at him.

  “Seriously, Anna, I love you so fucking much it hurts.”

  But not as much as it hurt me.

  Finally, I confronted it. I looked him in the eye and I summoned the words, and I said them.

  “Then why the fuck did you fuck me over for Maya Brooks? Why the fuck did you fuck her behind my back and spit in my fucking face, Lucas? Why the fuck did you love her so much fucking more than me?”

  He was silent, his eyes almost as pained as mine must have been. If that was even possible.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, but my head was shaking.

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it. Sorry will never cut it.”

  “I know,” he whispered. “Believe me, Anna. Nothing ever destroyed me as much as seeing you hurting like that.”

  “Fuck off,” I snapped, and recoiled in the bath. And it was there. That hurt and pain and spite spewing up fresh inside after so many years of burying it. Burying everything. “You know nothing about being fucking destroyed. You ripped my fucking heart out, and you laughed. You fucking laughed at me.”

  He couldn’t look me in the eye, and I was glad because mine were welling up, and I hated it, I hated that the tears were coming when it should have been the rage.

  I pulled myself straight up from the water, and pushed him away as he tried to take my arm. I grabbed the first towel I could see and wrapped myself up before I headed on out of there, and he followed me. He still couldn’t look at me as I searched through his wardrobe, trying to find anything that would cut it on my frame since my own clothes were trashed to hell.

  “Seriously, Anna,” he tried. “It’s not like you think it was.”

  “Really?” I spat. “Because it seemed pretty clear to me when you were tearing my heart out and laughing about it, Lucas. It seemed pretty fucking clear to the rest of the world, too.”

  “I know,” he said, and his voice was so fucking heavy it brought the tears.

  “This was supposed to be one night…” I managed. “Shit, Lucas, it was supposed to be one night. Because I didn’t want this. I didn’t want any of this.”

  “I know,” he said again, and then he was right there, on his knees in front of me as I tried to put one of his shirts on. I stopped halfway through, my arms giving up and my hands reaching up to my face to hide the tears.

  This man was my heaven. He’d always been my heaven. He’d been every scrap of sugar syrup my body ever craved, and my heart craved just as hard along with it.

  But he was my fucking poison too. I could feel it running through me. Toxic.

  Fuck what he’d given my body, he’d poisoned my very fucking soul.

  “I told you I didn’t want to do this,” I said through the sobs. “I didn’t want to go there.”

  “We have to, Anna,” he said. “We have to and I’m glad.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Please just hear me out before you say that,” he said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Anna

  Ten years ago.

  I was fidgety on the train, much more so than I should have been. I should’ve had the bliss of calm and retreat and everything I’d been striving for those past three weeks.

  But I didn’t.

  I’d tried Lucas three times already but he wasn’t answering. Shouldn’t have been that much of a big deal, but I hadn’t had a bank of messages through from him like I expected once I switched my phone on. Nothing bar a drunken bleat on night one with typos saying how much he missed me.

  I looked out of the window and tried to summon the inner peace, but I wasn’t feeling it.

  The messages had bleeped through when I got my phone back after the twenty-one day sanctuary up in Perthshire. Mum and Nicola and Dawn and Kelly from work. Hope it’s going well and missing youuuu and can’t wait until you’re home.

  But nothing from him past that one drunken text.

  I tried him again, but still I got voicemail. I would have called someone else, but it was just a niggle down deep and I didn’t want to worry them over something I was probably making out of nothing.

  The train got closer to home and I tried to enjoy the journey. Towns and countryside and a whole world out there to view, but my mind just wasn’t on it.

  I’d always been a self-help kind of girl. I’d always believed in the power of the mind and the soul and all those amazing ways to heal yourself from life’s challenges. They’d said it was stress at the doctor’s. The weird flashes of sickness and the waves across my head and the freaky feelings of déjà vu I was trying to make sense of.

  Stress, they said. Too much on at work, which was likely. Not enough calmness of mind to rest easy, which was likely. So when the retreat came up advertised, with a thousand testimonials singing praises about how much three weeks of seclusion and meditation and therapy had cleansed their souls, I’d thought it was a good bet.

  I’d cashed in three weeks of holiday from work, and Lucas had told me it seemed like a good fit, and I was off on my mission.

  I thought it had been a good thing. I’d been through so much meditation that my mind had flown free. So much therapy that I’d have sworn there was a rose quartz permanently attached to my forehead. Hands-on healing, and hypnotherapy, and circles with drumming. All great stuff, with no weird stress flushes for a couple of weeks. Success.

  And here I was on the train ride home.

  Holy crap, how I’d missed Lucas. I’d missed my man so much.

  I expected him to be at the station when the train finally chugged onto home turf, but he wasn’t there. I braved the rain and found a taxi at the rank and directed the driver to mine, but my heart was really racing by then. I was so worried, I felt sick, even though the rational part of me was still insisting it was nothing.

  We were home in minutes. I paid the driver and grabbed my case from the back and then I was straight up our driveway,
pulling my key from my handbag and letting myself inside with a smile.

  But that smile was soon gone when I saw the state of the place.

  Everything was different.

  Pictures were gone, and the living room looked bare without his books and chair and coffee table. I was reeling as I stepped on through to the kitchen and found him there, standing at the island.

  I dropped my case, only just realising it was still in my hand, and I should have been running up to him with kisses, arms open wide, but I was rooted to the spot, a horrible lump in my throat, even though I didn’t know what it was for.

  “What’s going on?” I said, and my voice sounded distant.

  His eyes didn’t look like his as they met mine. They were cold. Colder than I’d ever seen them.

  “I’m leaving,” he said. “I wanted to wait until you got home to tell you, but I’m done. We’re over.”

  I was shaking my head, not even beginning to fathom what he was saying.

  It was insane.

  So insane I didn’t even know where to start trying to interpret it.

  Over?

  How the hell could we possibly be over?

  We were fine when he left. Hugs so tight and whispers of how much he’d miss me but how much he hoped I’d enjoy my trip.

  Normal.

  Normal and good.

  Normal and us.

  “What?” I asked, but it was weak. Pathetic.

  He took a step closer but was still at a distance. “I’m in love with Maya Brooks,” he told me, and there was no care in his words. “I was waiting until she was ready before I left you, but she’s ready now. I’m with her.”

  I pictured Maya Brooks standing there. Her pink lipstick and high boots and the way she always flicked her hair like she was an angel amongst sinners. I’d known her for years, on the outskirts of our friend group. I’d known she liked him. She’d always hugged him that second too long when we crossed her at socials, and I’d always seen that glint in her eyes.