Her words cut me deep considering what I’d lost and apparently the tight smile, that I was now forcing myself to give her, didn’t go unnoticed by the other occupants of the table. Thankfully, though, giving their food orders was the priority.
After she had left, Isla got up and went to walk around me in the direction of the bathroom giving me the opportunity that I needed to speak to her. I gave her a two-minute head start and then got up.
“I’m going to take Kali for a wander around the place,” I said, not aiming it at anyone in specific and not caring who heard me and who didn’t.
I’d just gotten to the corridor leading to the toilets when Ebru came out of the ladies and saw me walking towards her.
“Hey,” she looked down at Kali who was asleep with his head on my shoulder and her face softened before she looked back up at me.
“Hey baby, I wanted to talk to you alone for a second.” Looking back down at the baby and raising an eyebrow, she pointed out the obvious with just a look. “Well, alone-ish.”
I looked behind me and then down the hallway and took a deep breath. Fuck this was hard. “I wanted to say sorry about when I kissed you at the bonfire. What came out wasn’t what I meant. Listen Isla, I really like yo…”
I was just building up steam when I heard the voice that had haunted me the week before. “Cole!”
It screeched before something hit my back, waking up Kali and making him cry. Please, let it be a nightmare. Please, let me be having a nervous breakdown. Please…”Oh my God, you have a baby?”
Turning around to look at the poisonous bitch who couldn’t sound more horrified if she tried, I made a point of rubbing Kali’s back and gently bouncing him to calm him down. I’d heard that babies and animals could sense evil and I guess this was the proof that that was true.
“I’m gonna go and sit down,” Ebru said quietly from behind me, and then walked past me and the evil cow who was still staring at the baby in my arms.
Once she’d left, I focused my attention fully on the bitch from my past, Adele, who had ruined my life. “What do you want, Adele?”
“I…I didn’t realize that you were a father,” she said, looking at me in shock.
“I’m not, you made sure of that didn’t you?”
“Cole, listen,” I couldn’t listen to any more of her shit and started to walk around her. “Please, wait. I want to explain.” I could hear the whine that had plagued our relationship in her voice. That fucking whine would make an appearance every time she wanted something or wanted to apologize for doing something, and I fucking hated it as much now as I did back then.
Spinning around carefully because of the precious bundle in my arms, I looked at her with all of the hatred on my face that I felt towards her. “There is fuck all that you can explain, Adele. What you did? Fucking shit, what you did was the most disgusting thing you could have done, and I hate you as much now as I did the day you told me.” Her face lost the sweet smile, and she took a step back. “You’re not worth my time,” I snapped and turned around to walk back to the table.
“You okay?” Brett was standing by the bar as I walked past it and from the look on his face and the glare that he was shooting over my shoulder, he knew what had been going on…well to an extent. No one knew what had actually gone on aside from me and the bitch behind me.
Giving him a quick nod, I walked up to the table and passed Kali back to Isla. “I gotta go, guys. I’ll catch you later.” I didn’t wait for a reply before turning around and walking out.
It’s gone…
Fuck me, I hated that bitch.
Ebru
I watched as Cole walked out of the bar. What had happened? Who was she? My stewing was interrupted by Brett taking Cole’s vacated chair beside me.
“Did he leave?” he asked, leaning back and glaring over at the woman who had interrupted Cole and me, and who was now standing at the bar flirting with some guy.
“Yeah. Is he okay?” The only answer I got back from him was a shrug.
“Wait a fuckin’ second, is that Adele?” Ren growled from his chair, leaning back and looking in the direction of the woman at the bar. Brett nodded and looked grimly at the table. “What the fuck is that bitch doing back here?”
Looking back at Brett I asked the question that was rolling around in my stomach like acid. “Who is she?”
The look in Brett’s eyes when he replied made that acid burn harder. “Cole’s ex.”
Obviously, Cole still had feelings for her or she wouldn’t have affected him as much as she had. That realization hurt me more than I ever would have thought it would.
At that moment our food was delivered to the table, but with the loss of Cole and what this week was to me, anyway, I’d lost my appetite so all I could do was pick at it. When would life stop hurting me?
Chapter 4
Ebru
T wo days later…
Closing the door to my apartment, I took off my shoes and moved in the direction of my bedroom as I thought about the night that I’d just had with Caleb and Reed. Johnny was away on business, so we’d gone out for dinner and then went to watch a movie. Normally I didn’t go out when I had work the next day, but I needed a distraction tonight.
Tomorrow was the anniversary of my big sister’s death, the day that I dreaded every year. All day I’d been going through the ‘this time six years ago was the last time that I spoke to her,’ ‘this time six years ago was the last time that I sent her a stupid selfie,’ ‘this time six years ago was the last time I hugged her’. The memories were suffocating me, and I was struggling not to cry and give into the depression that was now a given.
Louise was three years older than me and had only been twenty when she died suddenly. For months she’d been ill and the Doctors had just shrugged it off. When she was at college it started to hit badly, and she was literally dropping like a plank of wood and would feel dizzy a lot of the time. She’d gone through so many tests, and, in the end, the Doctor had told us that it was all psychosomatic.
My parents were self-involved and preferred to follow the Pagan mentality which wasn’t an issue, but the fact that they were negligent when it came to us was. If it hadn’t been for Louise, I wouldn’t have had anyone in that house. I had put what they did to me in a box so that I could move on with my life and not let it rule me, but what they did to Lou I’ll never forgive them for. After hearing the psychosomatic diagnosis, they had decided that they wouldn’t pursue further testing as it was all in her mind and told her that meditating would help. Louise had been terrified and devastated at the diagnosis and the way our parents had responded to it. On one occasion, at a family gathering, she’d blacked out, and they’d told my uncle not to call an ambulance. That was four days before she passed away.
The day before she died, she’d called me to say that she didn’t feel well and I’d gone to see her at her apartment; that was the last time I saw and hugged her. The next thing, I got a phone call at 5AM from her roommate saying that she’d come home late from a party and that Lou was on the couch and wasn’t waking up. Joy had already called 911 before she called me and I rushed to get to her while I listened to her tell the paramedics what was wrong when they arrived.
I knew that they were trying to resuscitate her when I arrived because I’d heard it all down the phone, but it was too late. I’d run into the apartment just as they confirmed that there was nothing else that they could do for her, and I’d stood staring down at my big sister, my best friend in the world, lying on the couch surrounded by medical supplies and some wrappers from the equipment that they’d used. I remember screaming and begging her not to leave me and trying to stop them from taking her away, but nothing worked. To this day, whenever I thought of that moment I had to remember her smiling and laughing because the last image I have of her is not how she was while she was here.
My parents hadn’t been upset when they got the phone call telling them. I’d stayed at her apartment wrapped up in her beddin
g that smelt so strongly of her, so I didn’t know about their reaction until much later when Joy told me. Apparently, when she’d called them, they’d been quiet and had then started talking about how Louise was weak mentally and had let her ‘psychosis’ take over her life and kill her.
At her funeral, they’d been more concerned and upset by the fact that I had insisted on it not being a Pagan service because Lou wouldn’t have wanted it that way. Thankfully, the funeral was beautiful, and we had to put a screen outside of the church because so many people turned up to show her their love. I might be biased, but I never met anyone who hadn’t loved Lou; she was just the sort of person that everyone loved, and I was so damn proud of her.
I’d ended up going against my parents' demands and had also ordered her a headstone that I could change her picture on anytime I wanted. On the bottom of it I’d had the thing that I thought was most applicable to her engraved.
She lived her life for those she loved
And those she loved will never forget her
I remember the day it arrived and was placed on her grave. I’d sat talking to her and crying for six hours, I just couldn’t leave her. In the end, I’d had to because it was too cold so I’d said the words I always said when I had to leave her, “I love you forever,” followed by what had become my standard goodbye. Laying my forehead on her grave, I’d whispered, “I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again, lady.” I’d been saying those words longer than the song had existed for, so maybe it was her? Or maybe I just needed therapy. “Sleep tasty, sweetheart,” I said, before getting up and doing the one thing that I struggled to do every time I came to visit her - leave her behind.
On the way home I’d passed a tattoo parlor where a friend of mine worked and had gone in and got a tattoo done. Now, on my ribs on the left side near my heart it said:
Forever in my heart
Forever on my mind
And always the brightest
star shining in the sky
I’d also had her initials tattooed under it. For some reason, carrying her around with me had helped, but every day had been a struggle after she died.
It had taken us nine long months to find out what had happened to her. At the inquest; they told us that she had been suffering from a condition called SADS or Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. Her blacking out spells had been her literally dropping dead he said because her heart had gone into an abnormal heart rhythm. The irony was, when I got home and looked up the condition, had she been diagnosed properly it would only have taken something like one pill a day to save her life. I had a huge gaping hole in my life and heart that would be impossible to fill, and there wasn’t a day that went by when I didn’t think of her. Heck, six years on, I still went to call her when something happened.
Getting into bed, I lay back and started going through the memories that I had of her. The billion laughs that we’d had together, the sad times, the times when we had kept the other one standing…there were so many. I smiled thinking of my favorite memory of us and saw her with tears streaming down her face as she laughed. Then, when I was seven, and she put a string around my tooth and slammed the door to pull it out and the doorknob had fallen off the door. There were so many beautiful precious memories that were just mine. The one memory that I never wanted to think of came into my head before I could stop it, and I saw her lying on that couch pale, cold and just gone.
Turning onto my side, I closed my eyes and cried until I fell asleep. I would give anything to have her back…
I woke up coughing and struggled to see around the room. What the…my bedroom was filled with smoke?
Throwing the bedding off, I ran to the door and opened it seeing my living room on fire and any access to the front door cut off. What the fuck was I going to do?
I closed the door and dragged my duvet off the bed, using it to stop the smoke coming in under the bottom of the door. Think Ebru, think…
I went to the window and opened it. There was a group of tenants from the building standing there and staring up in horror with fire trucks scattered around. I was on the third floor so I couldn’t just jump out of the window; even if I hung from the window ledge like they tell you to it would be too far to fall.
“HELP!” I screamed, trying to get their attention but I couldn’t stop coughing.
“There’s someone up there,” one of my neighbors yelled and a team of firefighters quickly formed beneath me talking into their radios.
The smoke was so thick that even hanging out the window as far as I could, it was hard to breathe as it surrounded me in a thick, acrid mass.
Coughing and wheezing, all I could think was, maybe today was the day I’d see Lou again? The irony of me dying in this fire on the same day that she died wasn’t lost on me…
Cole
My phone ringing beside my head interrupted the dream that I was having of Ebru, and fuck me it was a good one.
“Lo?”
“You need to get here fucking now!” My friend who lived near Ebru shouted down the phone. I could hear some sirens in the background and the sounds of engines and people yelling.
“What the fuck Sam? It’s fuckin’ 4 in the morning!” I was going to kill him. It wasn’t the first time he’d called me through the night to go and meet him, but tonight I’d been having the best dream of my life.
“Her building’s on fire, man!”
That woke me up, and I tried to untangle myself from the sheets so that I could throw on some clothes.
“Talk to me.” Please let her be okay, please let her be okay.
“It’s on her side of the building and looks like it’s in her apartment. I’m walking around trying to find her, but not all of the residents are out yet.”
I put him on speaker as he continued to look around and threw on some clothes. Running down to the car, I put my foot to the floor and continued to listen to him, adamant that I’d make the ten-minute journey in five.
Watching the road ahead of me, I heard someone yell in the background.
“What was that?” I was almost there, but the road was shut off by the Police so I was going to have to get out and make the journey on foot.
“Oh fuck, it’s Ebru. She’s hanging out her window,” Sam shouted over the noise of people screaming and the engines of the fire trucks.
I got to the police cordon and tried to go under it. “Sorry, Sir, you can’t do that.”
“My girlfriend is hanging out of her window while her apartment burns.” I was embellishing, but right now I was pretty certain that I wouldn’t burn in hell for that lie. “Please!”
A friend of mine, Milo, who had moved back to Piersville three months ago and joined the Police, came up to the cordon tape.
“Your girl’s in there, Cole?”
“Yeah, apartment fourteen, man.” Not saying anything else, he lifted the tape and waved me under it. “Thanks,” I said as I passed by him and broke into a run in the direction of Ebru’s building.
I got there just as they were mobilizing the ladder up to her window, but I could see her choking and sagging as the dark smoke came pouring out of her window. I’d never felt so helpless in my life as I ran up to Sam, not even when Isla was shot.
“What the fuck’s happening? Why are they taking so long?” I shouted over the screams and noise.
“They needed to move the truck,” he nodded his head in the direction of the rig parked under her window. It seemed like it took hours for the ladder to extend, but it could only have been minutes, and then someone was finally climbing to get Ebru. “They couldn’t use the one with the cage apparently because it was needed at the back of the building.”
I didn’t care. All I cared about was that they got to Ebru before she was hurt or suffocated or fuck even passed out and fell out of the window. Watching as the fireman helped her out and onto the ladder before they started to climb back down it, I ran in her direction as they got closer to the ground ready to take her and check her over.
; “Sir, you have to go and stand back where everyone else is. It’s not sa…” one of the firemen tried to stop me, but I was done.
“That’s my girl! That’s her burning apartment that she was just saved from,” I yelled, moving around him in the direction of the silver back sized fireman who was now carrying her away from the rig.
I could hear her choking and wheezing as I got closer to them.
“Sir, you have to move back. We need to take her over to the paramedics,” the fireman said as he tried to push past me.
“That’s my girlfriend,” I shouted over the deafening noises around us. Thank shit Ebru wasn’t with it, or she’d be kicking my balls into my brain.
“Follow me. We’ll need you to give her details.”
When we got to the paramedics who were standing by and the fireman laid Ebru down on the gurney I almost lost my shit. She had black soot all over her face and looked so small and pale. I sent a text to my family and Coleman to let them know what had happened.
I knew that Coleman would update me with the results of the investigation into the fire when he had some. Was it to do with whoever was targeting us? Why would they go after Ebru? I couldn’t stop those thoughts, even as I focused on the beautiful woman lying on the gurney in front of me.
“Do you want to ride with us to the hospital?” The paramedics asked as they loaded her into the ambulance.
I couldn’t lose her; I’d already lost enough and losing Ebru…I just couldn’t.
Ebru
The smell of smoke and burnt stuff was killing me. I’d been in the hospital for fourteen hours now, and I still couldn’t get the smell out of my nose and trust me I’d tried. I’d even gone as far as to stick some soap up there, but all that did was make me gag. Cole hadn’t left my side the whole time and his family were taking turns to bring us both stuff.
I’m pretty certain that everything I had was now ashes, including all of my memories of Louise that I’d locked in a big metal box that I found at a thrift store, and that killed me. The photos of us together, her jewelry, her perfume, her sweater, everything, and I wouldn’t ever be able to replace any of it. My parents had some of her stuff in the attic, and I had stored a box of photos up there too, but it wasn’t the same as the ones of us together.
Providence Series Books 1-4 Page 54