Innocence (26 page)

Maybe I’ll regret it, but I just need somebody.

“Y
OU
’
VE
FALLEN
for a straight guy?” Cass asks, looking up at me from where he lies among his discarded clothes on his bedroom floor.

I shrug. That’s what all but my most basic instincts tell me, but when we’re close, those are the instincts that take over and I don’t know.

“Fuck.”

“Thanks.”

I pick up the lurid Superman pillow off his new bed and hit him with it.

Really I want to tell him about Jay, but somehow it’s easier to talk about Malachi.

“I didn’t mean it like that, but yeah….” He trails off.

I cross my legs and concentrate on pulling the laces out of my shoes and tying a big knot in them. I’ll probably regret doing that later.

“He’s giving you mixed signals?”

I look up. I’d deal with this a whole lot better if he wasn’t giving me
any
signals, if it didn’t feel like his body was calling to mine whenever we get close.

“Being with him is like being inside a lightning cloud.”

“That was very eloquently put.”

“Fuck off.”

Launching himself at me, Cass grins. “I love it when you swear at me. Wanna mess around?” He pins me down on the bed.

“No,” I reply, not very convincingly, since I kind of do and kind of don’t.

“We could just watch each another get off, so it wouldn’t be like it was me getting you off. Or I could suck you, and you could pretend it was him.”

It hurts that he thinks so little of himself. “Are all your ideas this bad?”

Cass rolls his shoulders liquidly and slides off me. I feel lost without his warmth, and a part of me wants to pull him back.

“You seem a little frustrated, is all.”

“I don’t want to pretend you’re him, Cass. I don’t want to use you like that.”

“’Kay.” His arm is covering his face, so I can’t tell whether or not he really is okay with that.

I put my arms around him and pull him into a hug, burying my face is his messy white-blond hair. “My brother is in hospital,” I whisper against it.

“What?” He turns in my arms to look at me, his eyes wide, innocently shocked.

“He was in a coma, and now he doesn’t even remember who I am.”

“What? When…? Is this what you had to go and sort out?”

“No, it’s… it’s everything, Cass.”

I won’t break down, but I let him hold me tight.

C
ASS
WALKS
with me to the hospital the next morning. We’re pretty quiet with each other, but it’s an okay quiet. Overhead the sun is shining, but the air is cold for August and I wish I had a jumper.

As we near the hospital, a few streets over from the hotel, I wonder where Malachi is, if he’s gone there to find me. After last night I find some dark satisfaction in not being there waiting for him, but then I start to feel sick when I imagine him worrying about me. Whatever he feels, I know he at least cares.

Jay’s new ward is in an older part of the hospital. It’s brighter, full of sunlight from the large rectangular windows high up on the walls. We’re among the first visitors there. Not even Dad has arrived yet.

“Hey,” I say when Jay looks up from some hospital leaflet he’s reading about vaccinations. I can’t imagine how hard it must be in here with nothing to do, no one to talk to, and Jay would rather disappear than have any stranger’s attention on him.

“This is Cass,” I say.

Cass holds out the armful of magazines and comics he brought with him and then dumps them on the bed.

“Did I know you before?” Jay asks quietly.

“No,” Cass quickly shakes his head. “I’m just here because your brother’s hot.” He laughs, then yelps when my elbow connects with his skinny ribs.

Surprisingly Jay grins.

We sit down, and Cass spends the next half hour reintroducing Jay to comic storylines and universes. Jay listens to him with a sort of rapt attention that goes beyond what Cass is telling him, and Cass knows it.

It pleases me they get on so well, but when Cass tells Jay how he got the scar on his face, I begin to feel invisible. They share a greater intimacy than I have with either of them right now.

However much it hurts, whatever it takes, I tell myself I just want Jay to be happy.

Trying not to think too deeply about anything, I leave the ward to get a cup of tea. I don’t really know if I should have left Cass with Jay just now. I just couldn’t be there any longer feeling this empty.

At the nurse’s station outside Finn’s ward, I ask if Pixie is working today. She is, but she’s not due in yet. I don’t feel up to seeing Finn right now, so I go outside the front entrance for a bit of fresh air.

As my eyes wander over the cars in the car park, I know I’m looking for him. Maybe I always will be. It feels inevitable, as though these feelings are part of something much larger than I am.

It doesn’t really surprise me that I find him, his car parked in almost the exact same spot as yesterday.

“You weren’t at the hotel,” Malachi says, not looking at me as I get in the passenger seat.

It’s not an accusation, just an observation.

There is a bottle of cheap red wine on the backseat. It’s unopened, and I pretend I haven’t seen it.

“I didn’t want to be on my own.”

He looks like he slept in his car, though Maisie isn’t with him, so he must have taken her back at some point.

“I said the wrong thing last night,” he says.

We both stare out the windscreen like robots.

“It wasn’t wrong if it was the truth. I can’t hide the way I feel,” I say with some difficulty. “But I’d rather know if… if I’m making a fool of myself.”

“You’re not making a fool of yourself,” he admits softly, bowing his head, his hands gripping the smooth strip of leather wound round the steering wheel.

“So what
am
I doing? Because right now I haven’t got a clue.”

Frustratingly he doesn’t respond. And I need to know. I don’t think I’ve ever needed to know anything as much as I need to know this.

“Am I just imagining stuff, or do you—are you attracted to me a bit?” I say in an undignified rush, not looking up or waiting for a reply but just ploughing on through the words mounded up in my mind. “Because it’s kinda driving me crazy when you say one thing and do another.”

“I didn’t think it was ever a question of whether I’m attracted to you or not,” he says, frowning, stroking the leather with his thumbs as though they’re smoothing out imaginary creases.

Oh.

If that’s not the question, then what is?

My heartbeat thumps in my ears, the sound so loud he must be able to hear it, the atmosphere in the car all at once heavy as a falling sky.

I
can’t
be imagining this, but he’s not admitting anything either. “Are you straight?” I ask.

It just comes out. And however awkward it is, I can’t not know. The question has become the one thing that will tell me for certain if this is a stupid, unrequited mess I’ve got myself into. And if he is, I don’t know how I’m going to get over it, but at least I won’t be trying to turn every look and touch into something it definitely isn’t.

But with spectacular timing someone taps on the fucking window behind me. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

“
Cass, your timing sucks
,” I mouth once I’ve wound the creaky window down.

Cass bites his lip and winces. “I gotta go to work. My shift at Burger King starts in twenty,” he replies, crouching down, resting his hands on the half-open glass.

“
Sorry
,” he mouths.

“Okay.” I roll my eyes at him as he glances between us. “I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe.”

“Yeah. I might come see Jay again if… if that’s okay with you?”

The nonchalant way he says it belies the look in his eye—this is important to him. For a moment it confuses me, and then I realize—they connected. On what level I don’t know, but the floor has slipped away beneath me, my heart sunk small and heavy in my chest.

And it hurts. Fuck,
it hurts
.

How long was he in there? Half an hour? And now he has more than I do.

I suddenly wish I didn’t feel anything. I suddenly wish not to
ever
feel anything. A whole barren life is surely better than this.

I shift away from Malachi.

Jealousy creates such dangerous shadows over everything. I don’t want to be like that, feel like that. I don’t want to be so small.

And what sort of brother would stand in the way of friendship, of more than friendship? What sort of love would stand in the way? What right do I have?

So I shrug. Of course. Make him happy. Why not?

Even though a part of me is dying.

T
HE
DRIVE
back to Oxford is tense for so many reasons I’m trying not to think about, most of them to do with the figure lost in thought beside me, but not all.

Tomorrow Jay is going to be discharged from hospital, and Dad wants me to help him settle back home on the boat. My paid stay at the hotel runs out after tonight, and if I don’t stay with Dad, I have no idea where I will go. But too much has happened for me to go back home, and with Jay, I couldn’t take the difference.

Once we’re off the motorway, I open the window, sensing the air has changed, summer has gone, and all that is left is her unsettled wake. The trees are still green, but the fruit all fallen, the fields waterlogged and muddy, the air cooling without the summery warmth—an autumn without the dying.

With every hour Malachi seems to grow as anxious as I am about what we’re going to find in Oxford. I can feel the tension radiating off him the same way the air pressure drops with an approaching storm. It’s in the fixed way he’s holding his head, his arms locked at the wheel as he drives, muscles trembling.

I guess he has good reason.

He loved her.

It’s my deepest fear, buried so deep and dark that I can’t even trace the shape of it—Malachi seeing her and realizing he loves her still. But this is a fear that’s always going to be there, whoever I love. Someone else’s heart can never belong to me, however much I want it to.

And the question I asked him remains unanswered.

“Want to stop for something to eat before we get there?”

“No,” I say softly, shaking my head.

It’s late in the day, and we’ve been driving forever, but I want to get this over and done with. I’m not looking forward to it at all.

“Okay.” The way he says it, I can hear him steeling himself.

When we get to the gates blocking the driveway, I’m shivering. I can’t tell if it’s from cold. We get out of the car, everything all hushy and shadowed beneath the trees, the occasional gust of wind making the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

“I don’t want to do this,” I say suddenly.

Malachi pauses, and his hand, halfway to the intercom, drops down to his side.

“We can leave at any time.” He gives me a crooked smile. “What’s the worst that can happen?” He stops, his face solemn.

What am I going to lose that I haven’t already?
I can see the question in his eyes, though I know he doesn’t mean harm by it.

He’s right.

Taking a deep breath, I reach past him to press the intercom button. Immediately Honey’s voice crackles an excited greeting and the gates begin to glide slowly open.

Malachi drives the Mini onto the loamy ground and parks under a huge sturdy oak losing its leaves, and we get out. I don’t want him to drive. I want to walk the curving driveway, see this place hidden behind the tree line arrive at me slowly. I want the cool whispery air beneath the trees to calm my unsteady heart.

The neatly raked gravel isn’t pleasant to walk on in such thin-soled shoes, so we meander through the trees, following the driveway until we come upon rolling green field after rolling green field expanding away into the distance, horses grazing along the ridges and valleys, the grass so green it hurts my eyes.

“I always wanted to ride a horse,” I say quietly, pausing for a moment. “Do you think they’re Honey’s?”

Featherlight, Malachi takes my hand in his. “I don’t know, but this land belongs to your family, as far as the eye can see.”

We carry on, the drive here bordered by a thick moss-covered stone wall, and after a hundred or so meters, the drive snakes off again into the trees. I catch a glimpse of tall gray chimney stacks rising up higher than the unwavering conifers, and I know we are close.

Cautiously we step out from the tree line.

Honey is waiting for us on the steps of what is possibly the grimmest-looking mansion I have ever laid eyes on. It looks as though it has been carved out of a huge block of granite, all square and gray and imposing. Next to her, on the top step, sits an old woman in a wheelchair, a colorful woolen blanket covering her lap.

I would be more comfortable if Honey was still dressed in her mud-stained jodhpurs, smelling of horseshit, rather than the fitted gray dress and gray heels she is wearing as if she’s in some way just an extension of the huge gray house.

I’m conscious that I slept in the clothes I’m wearing, that they’ve seen better days, that I have holes in my jeans and my shoes, and more than that, I’m conscious that Malachi has let go of my hand.

I feel so cold.

If it wasn’t for how genuinely pleased Honey looks to see us, I’d consider turning round and walking back the way we came. The old woman in the wheelchair just picks at the threads of her blanket, her mouth moving, not even noticing us.

Making her way down the steps, Honey pulls me into a hug before taking Malachi’s hand and greeting him much more warmly than yesterday, even though Malachi isn’t looking at her, really. He’s staring up the steps.

Briskly she takes my hand and pulls me up the steps behind her. “I thought it would be easiest this way,” she whispers as she squeezes my hand hard. “There is someone I’d like to introduce you to.”