I still had a bottle of wine in each hand. Luckily, I didn’t let them go. Instead, I hung onto them, I gripped them so tightly that my hands ached. I squeezed the neck of each bottle like my life depended on it. I had to, needed to hang on to them, they were real. As long as I had them in my hands, I knew that I had some kind of a grip on reality. As long as I could feel those bottles, I knew this was really happening.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and pressed myself into him, taking in deep breaths of his scent. I worried that perhaps I was dreaming, that the front door had opened, and I’d fallen and bumped my head. So, I moved the wine bottles I was squeezing, and my brain registered the chinking sound of the glass knocking together.
This was real.
He was here.
In my arms.
“Do you know how long I’ve waited to have you pressed up against me again? How long I’ve wanted to bury my face in your neck and just breathe you in?”
I couldn’t speak. I was terrified that if I did, I would scare away the magic, and it wouldn’t be true. He wouldn’t be there with his arms wrapped around me.
“Do you? do you know, Gia?”
My insides curled in on themselves at the sound of him calling me… that name. Only Sean had ever called me Gia. Nobody else had ever even thought to.
“Four years, G. If you want me to be exact, it’s been four years and eleven days, and every single moment has been absolute fucking hell.” He reached around and used his index finger to lift my chin. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t look, I couldn’t take that chance.
What if I’d finally had the meltdown of all meltdowns and completely lost the plot, and this was all in my fucked up imagination?
In that instant, I’d never, ever prayed so hard to be mentally insane.
“Open your eyes, G. I need to see those beautiful blue eyes of yours.”
“I can’t,” I whispered, my voice barely audible.
“Why? Why can’t ya? I need to see them. I need to look into them and see us. When I look into your eyes, I want to be able to see you and me, and I need to know that we’re still us, Sean and Georgia. Are we? After all this time, are we? Can we still be us, G?”
Very slowly, I opened my eyes, hoping for heaven, fearing all that I would get was hell. They were there, though. Those dark brown eyes with their flecks of gold, my very own personal piece of heaven was staring right back at me.
“There’s my girl.” He smiled that lazy lopsided grin down at me, and I whimpered. He was so much taller than I remembered. Not as tall as Cam, but he was well over six feet.
I didn’t remember him being that tall.
I didn’t remember his voice so raspy and deep.
I didn’t remember so much stubble on his chin.
But those eyes? Those beautiful brown eyes with their flecks of gold? I’d remember them until the day I died.
“Can I kiss ya, G? I want to kiss you. I need to kiss you. I need to know you’re real. Can I?”
I nodded my head, which was, at that precise moment, not attached to my shoulders and was instead spinning off somewhere in the stratosphere. Before I could think anymore, his mouth was on mine. The kiss was soft almost tentative at first. His tongue gently danced with mine, but then it turned deeper, tasting me, his lips harder on mine. He groaned, and then I groaned. He reached behind him and took the wine from my hands but didn’t stop kissing me. He wrapped his arms back around me, and the bottles clanged together, reminding me that this was all real. It was happening. He was there, I was there, and we were kissing. We were there, together, Sean and Georgia.
We finally stopped kissing but stood with our mouths together, just leaning into each other, mouth to mouth, while we looked into each other’s eyes. He had tears shining in his, while my tears escaped and rolled down my cheeks. I reached up and touched his face.
“God, Gia, I’ve missed you so fucking much.”
“You never came back for me, Sean. You just let me go. You didn’t fight for me.”
He frowned and leant away from me so he could put the bottles down on the hall table. He turned and looked back over my face with his eyebrows drawn together.
“I fought, George. I fought until you sent the letters back. I fought until you told me to stop.”
Everything tilted. Panic began to bubble in my belly.
“You sent me letters? When—I don’t—Sean, no, I never said stop. No, I wouldn’t…”
I couldn’t think of a way to emphasise strongly enough that what he was saying didn’t make sense.
“Georgia, I came to your mum’s, but they wouldn’t let me see you. So I sat outside the house in my car all day and all night, but then I had to go back on tour, so I called you all day every day, for weeks. I called, and I wrote and wrote. I sent letter after letter. I sent you the songs that I wrote for you. I wrote down every thought and feeling I had for almost a year. I made videos of the songs so you could hear them. I sent all of it, everything, I sent it all to you.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, to the point where I was shaking my head. “No, no, where? Where did they go?” I thought I was going to be sick. “Where did you send them? You must have got the wrong address.” Which was a ridiculous notion because he had spent more time at my house growing up than he ever had at his own. He knew my address better than his own. Adrenalin was causing every nerve ending I had to tingle. I could hardly draw breath with the panic that was now spreading from my belly, making its way up into my chest.
Is he lying to me?
Just when I suddenly had hope that he was here, with his arms around me, was he going to lie?
Am I going to lose it all again?
He looked as devastated as I felt.
“You sent them back?” He was shaking his head. It was a question, not a statement.
“No. No, Sean, never! I never got them. I never saw them, so how could I send them back?” I was shaking so hard I could hardly control my jaw.
I couldn’t breathe.
Oh God, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t make sense of this, and I couldn’t breathe.
I felt like I wasn’t getting enough air and the hurt and anger in Sean’s voice was making me feel worse
“They came back unopened with a note saying, ‘Please don’t contact me again.’ All of it came back, the letters, the cards, the poems, the videos. It all came back, Georgia. You said you could never forgive me and to stay away.” He was pulling at his own hair and almost sobbing as he spoke. “I wanted to die. I’ve wanted to die every fucking day since. Every day I’ve thought about it, dying, instead of living with this pain.” He punched himself hard in the chest right into his heart as he spoke through gritted teeth. “I just wanted a chance, G. Just one fucking chance to explain. To say sorry, to tell ya that it’s you, it’s always been you, it will only ever be you.”
I knew I was pulling the ugliest of faces as I cried and tried to speak and make sense of what he was telling me. I wanted to scream. This was a mistake, this couldn’t have happened.
“No, Sean! No, I didn’t! I wouldn’t do that. I wanted to see you. I wanted you to come back to me, so badly, I almost died. My heart hurts, so much. The pain… the pain, it’s killing me, it’s fucking killing me, Sean.” I was shaking my head and gulping in air, and my legs wouldn’t hold me up anymore. Lennon appeared at the end of the hallway behind Sean.
“Oh shit!… Jimmie!” I heard him call.
We stared at each other, both of us breathing deeply.
“I don’t understand then, G. Who? Who would do that to us? Jimmie and Lennon know how hard I tried… they know how hard I tried to see ya. They knew about the phone calls and all the stuff I sent ya. How did you not know about it? Surely not your mum and dad?” His mouth was hanging open as he gulped in air the same way I was trying to. He looked as stunned as I was feeling. Someone would know. Someone would be able to explain. But it wasn’t me. I couldn’t comprehend it. I just couldn’t get my head around it.
Jimmie was suddenly at my side, and I was on my knees in her hallway. Sean was sitting cross-legged, facing me with his head in his hands.…
“Babe, what’s going on? Sean?” She looked from me to Sean.
He looked up and at me, and I felt like I was on the verge of an anxiety attack, gulping in air and making sounds that I’d never heard a human make.
“Gia,” was all Sean said as he pulled me into his lap and held me so tightly it should have crushed me. Instead, I started to breathe slower. The air had started to reach my lungs. I looked up at him.
“Who would want to hurt us like that? Who?”
Jimmie was right down on the floor with us, and Len was pacing the floor behind Sean.
Then Marley appeared. “What the fuck, George? What’s wrong?” He moved towards us. “Will somebody please tell me what the fuck is going on?”
Jimmie was crying too, and she didn’t even know what was wrong.
“The letters Jim? All the letters, you told me that she got them?”
Jimmie looked confused and frowned. “She did.” She turned to me. “You did. Your mum said that they upset you so much that we weren’t to talk about them.”
No, no, this couldn’t be right.
Anxiety and dread bubbled in my belly as my skin prickled.
My mum was one of my best friends, she wouldn’t do that. She knew how much I was hurting. “No, no, Jim, I never knew. I never saw a single letter.”
“What?”
“She told me that Sean phoned for a couple of weeks, but after my dad threatened him, he stopped calling.”
“Georgia, I swear to God, I called your house four or five times a day. I begged them to let me talk to you. I wrote letter, after letter, begging you to see me.”
Aside from the sound of breathing and sniffling, the hallway was silent. Sean continuously stroked at my back and my hair with the tips of his fingers and soothed me, calmed me. I suddenly felt like I hadn’t slept in four years, and now, finally, I could.
Sean kissed the top of my head. “G, I love you, babe, but your arse is fuckin’ bony and mine is going numb.”
I looked up at him and giggled. “You love me?”
“Of course I love you. How many times do you need telling? I meant it then, and I mean it now. There’s only you, G. There will only ever be you.” He stood, still holding onto me, and carried me into Jimmie and Len’s lounge. He sat down on the sofa with me still in his lap and said in my ear, “I’ve been without you for four fucking years. I’ll never be without you again. I might just carry you around like this forever.”
I smiled and inside I felt like I did when I first woke up from one of my dreams about him, completely content, cocooned in his arms and in his scent. But then just like in my dreams, reality came crashing back. My mum, my beautiful mum, had betrayed me.
Len passed me a glass of wine and what looked like a whiskey to Sean.
I took a long sip of my drink. “I need to speak to my mum. I can’t believe she’d do this to me. She knew the mess I was in. We’ve talked about it so many times, and I’ve told her I still love you and that I will always love you. I just don’t understand.” I looked across at Marley sitting in the armchair. “You okay, big brother, Marley?”
“Gotta say, little sister Georgia, I’m with you. Mum just wouldn’t do that.” He shrugged, his eyebrows drawn together over his brown eyes and shook his head, “surely Mum wouldn’t do that?” He continued to shake his head and carried on as if he were talking to himself. “I don’t know if I’m just over thinking things, but now that I am thinking about it, she has gone out of her way over the years to stop you two from having any kind of contact. I just thought it was to protect you, George. Then after that Sunday the other month.” I felt Sean hold his breath, and he squeezed me just a little bit tighter. “After the way you reacted that Sunday, I thought she’d done the right thing. But there have been a few times when she’s sort of been a bit irrational about things. Like the way she told me not to give you our address, and she was really pissed off when you found it out. Now, it makes me think she had her own agenda. What if there was more to it than just protecting you? Perhaps it was about hiding what she’d done. I don’t know, I’m just surmising.”
I was bewildered and had no idea what my brother was talking about.
“I don’t understand, Marls. What d’ya mean, giving me your address? I don’t understand?”
“Ours, mine and Sean’s, she told me not to give you our address because she was worried that you would just turn up unannounced. She said you’d been trying to find out where we lived so that you could stalk Sean.”
I was floored, and I was starting to get more than just a little pissed off. “Marley, I have no fuckin’ idea where your place is, and I had absolutely no idea that you and Sean lived together.”
Everyone seemed to stop what they were doing, even breathing.
“George, did you never go to the boy's place and try to get past the reception area? Did you not go there and scream abuse at the security guard and try to kick the doors in?”
I looked around the room at everyone. I looked up at Sean, who looked at me horrified.
“I didn’t know about this babe. You came to our apartment?”
What on earth was going on?
“Are you all deaf or just fuckin’ mad? I have no idea where Marley lives, and I had no idea that Sean lived with him. No fuckin’ idea. Where is this coming from? Who told all of you that I had been there causing trouble?”
There was silence for a long moment as my brothers and Jimmie all looked at each other.
Jimmie shrugged her shoulders. “Your mum, George, your mum told us,” she almost whispered.
My bottom jaw quivered as I tried to hold onto the hurt and betrayal that I was feeling inside. This was at least equal or maybe even worse than how I’d felt about Sean’s apparent misdemeanour four years ago. I burrowed into him and looked up into his face.
“At the very beginning, I told her I didn’t want to hear from you. I’ll admit to that. I told her I didn’t want to see the newspaper stories about what went on in Paris. I did say that.” I turned and looked at Jimmie.
“You were there Jim, you know the state I was in.” I looked at Sean. “I’m sorry, I should’ve listened. I should’ve heard you out. I know I was wrong now, but I swear to you, I never went to where you live. I have no idea where that story has come from or why she would lie about something like that. Why, why would she do that to me?” I cry, devastated didn’t even begin to cover how I was feeling at that moment.
“Oh, babe,” Sean whispered quietly.
“Why, Sean?” I looked around the room at all of them, pleadingly. “Why would she do that to me? Why would she do that to us?” I couldn’t control the sobs as I spoke, and once again, Sean pulled me against him, soothing and calming me down.
Eventually, I resigned myself to what needed to be done. I stood up and instantly missed the closeness of being next to Sean.
“I need to call her. I need to talk to her.” I looked at Len and Jimmie. “Can I ask her to come here?”
They looked at each other. “It’s ten o’clock, George. D’ya think she’ll come out at this time?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I won’t give her any choice.”
I had this little ball of anger that was burning in my belly. If my mum did this, if my mum could’ve prevented the pain and heartache I’d gone through over the past four years by even a fraction, and she didn’t, or even worse if she had been keeping us apart all this time, I knew my relationship with her was over. I would walk away from her and the business without a single hesitation. If I found out that she did this, this hurtful, spiteful thing, we were done.
I went out to the kitchen, took the phone off its base, and with a shaky hand, I dialled my parents’ number. My dad answered.
Did he have a part to play in thi
s?
“Dad, sorry for calling so late, but is Mum there?”
“Hello, treacle. How you doin’? Yeah, she’s right here babe. Love ya.”
“Love you too, Daddy.”
I heard him tell her it was me. I swallowed and licked my lips, but I didn’t seem to have any moisture in my mouth.
“Evening, Georgia. What’s wrong?”
What’s wrong? What’s fucking wrong?
Where would she like me to start? I wanted to scream. I wanted to drag her down the phone line, but instead, I decided to get straight to it.
“Mum, I need you to come to Jimmie and Lens, and I need you to come now. It’s urgent.”
“Georgia, whatever’s wrong? Is someone hurt?”
Is someone hurt? Is someone fucking hurt?
You have no idea mother!
My fingernails were digging into the palm of my hand so much it was painful.
“Yes, Mum, someone is hurt. I don’t want you to panic, but I need you to get here as quickly as you can.” I ended the call before she could say any more. I put the phone back on its base and stood, just staring at it. I knew he was there, even before Sean’s arms wrapped around me and he kissed me in that perfect spot right below my ear. My head was swimming, but I couldn’t help the little sigh that escaped me as I leant back into him.
“We have so much to talk about. So much we need to sort out, but I swear to God, Georgia, I promise you here and now, I will spend the rest of my life making up these last four years to you. Regardless of what has happened since, it all started with me, me and my own stupidity, and I will never put you through anything like that again. I want you back, G. I want you with me, and I want it how it should have been all these years, Sean and Georgia, Georgia and Sean, the way it’s meant to be”
I turned around and looked at him. He looked down at my hand, which was at my throat, and he reached out and moved it out of the way before brushing his fingers over my necklace, my silver G.
“You still wear it?” He brushed his knuckles gently over my cheek and smirked. “Are you blushing, Georgia Rae?” He then licked his index finger and ran it over my face, making a sizzling noise with his tongue as if my face was frying his finger.
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