The Art of Letting Go (The Uni Files) (20 page)

It’s not the most mature behaviour I have ever come across.

As I haul my sweaty out-of-breath arse up the stairs, I decide enough is enough.

I am going to have it out with him.

Ben’s Room

Okay, it will have to be after he gets out of the shower.

I could barge in there and have it out with him, but I don’t think seeing him all naked, wet, and soapy is conducive to serious conversation.

Instead, I will sit on his bed in my sweaty clothes and wait for him to come out of the shower. I am not backing down now. How dare he ignore me when I have done nothing wrong at all!

At least when I ignored him it was with good reason, never mind that the good reason was mainly due to my own deep-set paranoia and insecurities. That is not the point at all.

Blimey! He showers like a girl! He has been in there for ages!

The Showdown

“What are you doing in here?” He glares at me.

I am going to go out on a limb and say he is not best pleased to see me sitting on his bed.

“Waiting for you to get out of your girly shower.” I glare at him.

“Why are you glaring at me?” he demands.

“Because you piss me off. Why the hell are you ignoring me?” I demand right back.

He breathes a deep sigh and sits down on the bed next to me.

I try in vain not to look too closely at him, maintaining eye contact where possible because he is wrapped just in a wet towel and it is mighty distracting.

“I am not ignoring you, Lilah.”

“I beg to differ.”

He waves his hand at me to shush me.

How very rude.

“I am not ignoring you, Lilah. I just don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

“What you are talking about? I thought things were okay between us.”

“Yeah, they were until you did the whole self-sacrificing thing with your dad the other day. Now I am not so sure.”

“What do you mean ‘not so sure’? I don’t get it. I am just trying to help Tristan.”

“Yes, Lilah, but did you ever stop to think that maybe you don’t have to help and save people all the time?” He runs a hand through his wet hair.

I have nothing to say to this.

“Tristan is a big boy, Lilah. Big enough to get a girl pregnant, and he can deal with this.”

“How? He does not even have a job and Dad was threatening to sell the flat.”

He looks at me like I am mad. “Do you honestly think your brother doesn't have a job?” he asks, sounding incredulous.

“What do you mean? I know he doesn’t have one. Remember, I just spent December with him. He hangs around the whole time working out how to spend Dad’s money.”

“What? No, he doesn’t! He writes articles, lifestyle ones, which magazines pay lots of money for. You just never bothered to ask him what he does.”

Pardon? My mouth falls open to the floor. My waste of space brother actually writes for a living? I did not even know he owned a computer. I can’t believe it, and I can’t prevent the stab of jealousy that hits me when I realise he actually has my perfect job.

It strikes me that I have just played right back into my darling father's hands—again.

Shit.

Ben’s eyes grow wide as he realises I really didn’t know. “So do you see why I am annoyed? I thought that you would be here next year, that I would be able to come and find you again, that maybe if I gave you some space, by the time I got back you might be ready to actually tell me that you are in fact in love me and want to be with me. Instead, you won’t be here. You'll back to pretending to enjoy a life that you hate, just like the first time I ever saw you.”

Again, I can’t find any words and I feel my stomach start to do uncomfortable flip-flop thingys in my stomach.

“Lilah, you have to stop protecting everyone else and let other people deal with their own choices.”

I stare back at him in shock. He knows that I am in love with him, but not telling him so he does not change his mind about going abroad. He knows that I came to university because I wanted to escape but did not want to hurt anyone, which I did anyway.

“I don’t protect everyone’s feelings,” I say.

I don’t. I certainly don’t protect my own.

“Why did you say ‘yes’ to John when he asked you to marry him?”

Ugh, what a question!

I hate to think of that night. The flutes of champagne that I did not even notice until it was too late to make an escape and the look on John’s face that pleaded with me not to let him down.

“Because I didn’t want to let him down,” I whisper.

Ben takes my hand. “All you did was let yourself down,” he whispers back.

We sit there in silence. I don’t really know what to say. I realise Ben has always known far more about me than I ever assumed. More than I know about him.

With a gasp of shock, it hits me that he always knew about John.

“Oh my god! You knew about John, didn’t you? Right from the start. That’s why you weren’t surprised in the Fez Club?”

He absently rubs my ring finger, the indentation from the cursed ring is no longer there.

“I knew that I wanted you, and I would wait however long it took until you were mine. I guess I didn't expect it to go quite the way it has,” he says with a wry smile.

“So where does that leave us now?”

He is going to say that it is over, that our 'let’s pretend' is finished. He is not going to give me my six months with him.

“Let’s just play it by ear, shall we?”

“Okay.” My chest feels like it has been struck a deathblow.

He pecks a kiss on my cheek and then starts to get up from the bed. Before I can stop myself, I grab him and pull his lips to mine. The action is automatic and I can do nothing to stop it. I just close my eyes and hope he does not push me away. He doesn’t, and he kisses me right back.

“Do you think I should talk to Tristan?” I ask after I have pulled away.

“I think you would be crazy not to,” Ben answers softly, giving me a wink which means that he thinks I am crazy anyway.

I must be.

25th January

2.37 p.m.

This lecture cannot go fast enough. I have a date with my brother, and for the first time in what seems like forever, I am actually looking forward to seeing him. Yesterday evening I lay in bed listening to Ben play guitar through the wall and realised that the one person in my entire life that I should be closest to—my twin—is actually the furthest away. So I texted him and asked him to meet me. We are meeting at Costa and I can’t wait. First thing I am going to do is make him buy me the biggest coffee they have in order to make up for all the money he ponced off me at Christmas.

Bloody cheek.

26th January

9.00 p.m.

If there is one day that I will never want to re-live it will be this one.

Scrap that. I do not even want to be able to remember today, I would like someone to take it away. Now.

It is nine o'clock and I am in Ben’s bed. His arms are around me tight and his fingers are tracing patterns along my sides. I do not feel it, though. I am emotionally dead. I have been chewed up by some emotion-sucking monster and spat back out again.

Yesterday, Tristan and I had our first ever grown-up sibling conversation, which was great. Then it all went horribly wrong. So wrong that I wish I could go to sleep now and wake up unable to remember anything that has taken place.

Of all the occasions I have suffered memory misplacement, this is the one time I could truly do with it.

Costa and the Coffee of Truth

I ran out of class as soon as the bell rang and dashed to Deathtrap Cooper, which I drove at high speed into Putney. I was eager to see Tristan and I never thought I would feel that way about him. It was a new crazy friendly feeling. It was a bit odd but I was willing to go with it.

“Why did you not tell me?” I ask, stirring my humongous mocha/choca/every ingredient possible including whipped cream drink.

“Now, let me think, Delilah. Are you aware that you're a little stuck-up?”

I flick a sugar packet missile at him.

“You know, for seven years I watched you shrivel away. The longer you were there at the bank, and the longer you were with that idiot, John, the less of my sister I actually recognised.”

I stare at him. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I couldn’t work out what it was you wanted. You just seemed to be sleepwalking around, completely unaware that life was going on. I couldn't tell what was real and what was an act.”

“So I ask again, why did you not say anything?”

“Because we were estranged enough anyway. I thought that if I called you on your little miserable existence that you would cut me out completely.”

It’s a fair point, I probably would have.

“Okay,” I say. There’s no use arguing.

“You were acting, though, weren’t you, Lilah?”

“Of course I bloody was.”

“Thank fuck for that. For the record, that ring was hideous!”

I laugh very loudly. “Yes, it truly was. I suppose in that case size does not matter!”

We snigger away for a few moments recalling the iceberg ring John had given me that would have comfortably sunk the
Titanic
and its sister ship without taking a scratch.

Well, hasn’t this just been two days of revelations?

“When you decided to go to University, I knew that you had finally woken up. I was really proud of you that day. You finally stood up to Dad.”

“How do you bloody know? You legged it before the row got going!”

He laughs at this. “Well, you made it to University didn’t you? You are far stronger then you give yourself credit for. And you were brave enough to break up with John even though it was the one thing that you dreaded doing.”

“Yeah, look where that got me.”

“It got you free, Lilah. You know that you could tell Ben today how you feel and he would change everything for you. You are all he really wants.”

I scrunch my face into a scowl. “Yeah, but he deserves more. Anyway we are not here to talk about me, we are here to discuss living arrangements.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“I do not want to give in to Dad.” There I have said it.

Tristan gives a slow sarcastic clap of his hands. “At last! She realises the error of her ways!”

I have nothing left to flick at him, so I just stick my tongue out instead.

“So what we going to do?” I ask. I want to hurry this along and get back to Uni so I can tell Ben and Meredith I am a big girl and won’t give in to my tyrannical father.

“How much do you have in your rainy day account?”

“Hundred and fifty grand,” I announce, to which he gives a low whistle, “Would have been more but our little depressed Christmas shopping spree created a bit of a hole, as did Ben’s present. Turns out guitars are bloody expensive!”

He raises his eyebrow again, as if to say,
Yes, you divvy mare, they are expensive when you are attempting to say three relatively little words with it
.

I ignore the eyebrow. It is still bloody annoying, no matter how well we are getting on.

“How about we use your cash for a deposit, and for a new sofa? Don’t think I didn’t find your ink blob, Delilah.” He wiggles his eyebrows at me before continuing. “And I will pay the mortgage. That way, we should get somewhere big enough for all of us?”

“All of us?”

“Well, yeah, you will be with us, won’t you? If you do not go back to the bank, Dad will not have you back home again. Well, not in the next decade anyway.”

He smirks a little.

I think secretly he may be enjoying being Dad’s golden child at the moment. Although it won't last when Tristan announces in a couple of weeks he has knocked up an eighteen-year-old!

“Yeah, I will be with you. You, Meredith, and the baby.” My stomach gives a little flip as I say the words.

He smiles happily at me.

“Tristan?”

“Yep?”

“You know I love you, right?”

There, I said it. I have told one of the two men in my life the words even if I cannot say it to the other.

“Yeah, I love you, too, Sis.”

He is going to say something else, but both of our phones ring at once.

I glance at mine.
Jayne, that’s weird.

Tristan looks at his and reports that it's Ben.

We both stare at each other for a second.

“Meredith!” We both exclaim, staring at each other.

Tristan and I both answer our phones at the same time. Ben and Jayne tell us that Meredith is not well and we should come home. So we go, neither of us wanting to show our panic but still pushing the damn shitty car to the max.

We reach the dorm in record time and may as well walk into a scene from a horror movie. Jayne is crying as we came in the door and I instantly want to throw up. Ben looks even paler than his normal skin tone and just stares at me blankly.

Meredith is in the bathroom and there is blood everywhere. Her jeans, which are still on the floor, are drenched and she is staring at the toilet. She looks up at us as we came in and says words that I will never be able to forget.