“She’s had plenty of time to make that choice. She hasn’t.” He gets between me and the doors, blocking my view. “We should go.” I look up at him, snarling still. “Come on.”
“No.”
He sighs again. “You can’t stay here forever. It’s time to go.”
Brandon walks past me, too, his body pulling the same manoeuvres as Brett’s did.
Walk away.
Open the door.
Shut the fucking door.
Gone.
The slow realisation that she’s not coming hits me like a fucking wrecking ball. It sends all kinds of feelings reverberating around my insides, making what was relatively certain of itself fall into a chaos of uncontrollable grief. Dark thoughts start to circulate immediately, all of them chased with memories of my time before her. Lonely times. Remote times filled with nothing other than confusion and emptiness. They creep in from corners I was beginning to forget, rendering everything inconsequential again. She’s gone – my point for life has gone.
And she’s not just gone. She ran.
I don’t feel the time between standing and leaving. I just exist in it, somehow moved by Gray until we reach the Lincoln and we’re driving away from something I wanted. Roads turn into an endpoint, and before I know it we’re at his place and I’m sitting in a chair with a bottle of brandy at my side. Brandy isn’t what I want. Pills are what I want. One colour specifically. They’re all I can think about as I sit here. Red, like the fucking ring I left for her with. Blood red, like slitting a fucking vein. That’s what that ring meant to me. My blood. Hers.
I look towards the dark hallway that leads upwards to his laboratory, sneering at everything, as Gray moves in my line of sight. He’s like a fucking shadow in my way, a constant fucking reminder of what life could be if she hadn’t run. He brought me back to life. What for? He had no right. As proved by this moment right here. So I drink. I drink a lot, perhaps hoping the bottom of the bottle might show me some of the answers I’m trying to search for. It doesn’t. All it does is fill me with more dark thoughts and more reasons to end this life I was thinking about living again.
One bottle turns into three.
Nothing gets any better than it was.
And those pills up his stairs are still calling me.
Chapter 22
Ally
Constant. That’s how it’s all felt.
I swerve, steer, keep my head down and tuck in tight against the wind. It’s not constant here. It’s free and full of a life I couldn’t live before. Water lies endlessly on the roads, spraying with every next corner I turn to enjoy my sense of freedom. He said I could leave. He said it was over if that’s what I wanted – that I had a choice. I stood and waited and thought and tried to make sense of my life, of his life, and then I was going in. I was. I kinda made that decision under the pressure of it all. I put the ring on my finger and I smiled. That’s all I needed.
And then Brett came out.
He looked at me, at the ring on my finger, and then at the Ducati sitting there waiting.
“You want some space to think?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure I did until he started pulling wires to hot wire the motorcycle, but the second that freedom seemed possible, if not to run then just to think, I snatched the chance to make some decisions in my own damn time. I still don’t know why, but, for now, I need to keep riding and thinking until I do know why.
That thinking eventually leads me to an old truck stop on the outskirts of Poughkeepsie. I keep going until I’m in the middle of town, gaze taking in the dead of night through Malachi’s visor. Nowhere is open. Nowhere for me to have a beer or keep thinking more than I already have done. I don’t even know what I’m thinking about anymore. Everything. Nothing. My life before him. My possible life with him. It would help if I couldn’t feel the sting of cuts on my skin under this leather. Or their cruel beauty that somehow makes me feel lost without him.
When did that happen? When did him hurting me become something I needed? When did cutting my skin become something that bound me to him? It does. Or the time we’ve spent does. But I can’t see what marriage is with him. Fucking around for the rest of our lives, maybe. Him amusing himself with me until he gets bored, definitely, but ongoing love – forever – with children and vows? It’s just not there. It’s a distant haze that seems unreachable for some reason, perhaps lost in that devil I know he is and the inevitable fall that will come.
Pulling over to the side, I lift the helmet, unzip my jacket, and let my hair tumble out into the rain. I’m tired. Exhausted. A beleaguered chuckle falls out of me. Not surprising. I’ve been running my whole life, frightened my whole life, and for the first time I don’t need to be. I don’t need to jump at every sound, every knock at the door, every man. I can rest. Relax. I can know that Brett and Brandon will grow and live and enjoy their life. I can know those things about me, too.
For the first time in a long ass time all of us are free to live however we choose to. He did that for us. Malachi Jones. No, he did that for me.
Why can’t I trust it?
I frown under the low lights casting around in this gloom and watch the rain falling lightly through it. I don’t think it’s him I don’t trust. I think I just don’t know how to trust. Maybe that’s what I’ve turned into over the years. It’s sad. I am. I’ve taken all that past behind me and let it rule me, let it fill me with a fear that Malachi doesn’t deserve to have levelled at him. And now he’s offered me everything, more than any man before him ever has, and I’m here trying to find fault in it somehow.
Slipping my glove off I look at the ring on my finger. One blood red, square cut stone perched in the middle of smaller diamonds. Worth a fortune, I guess. Worth his kind of fortune. It means so much more than the money, though. It’s a lifeline in some ways. A show of that thing that binds us together. His blood. Mine. I stare, letting the shards of colour draw me into them bouncing around under street lamps. Alice Jones. Sounds kinda nice. More than nice.
