Chapter Twenty-Four
Billy
I hated that fucking cottage. Every day, I felt sick just looking at it, and even with Gus hardly talking to me, I couldn’t wait to get in the van and leave.
Taking the bus home was a trip. At least, it would’ve been if the damn thing showed up.
Newsflash: it didn’t, and I contemplated returning to Gus for all of three seconds before I figured walking a mile to the next village would be more fun.
Second newsflash: it wasn’t. And the bus itself was even less of a party, just me and an old guy singing Lionel Richie songs to himself, while the bus called at every obscure stop known to man. It would’ve been quicker to walk, but I was committed and too stubborn to get off and lose the pocket change I’d paid for my lonely seat at the back.
So I stayed on the bus and stewed over the week from hell I’d just lived through. If you could call creeping through life in total silence living. Maybe it would’ve been easier if Gus had seemed happy about it, but he was so far from happy I had an anxiety attack every time I looked at him, and the worst bit about it was I knew it was all my fault. He’d told me a hundred years ago that the two of us together would be too complicated to ever work, and it turned out he was right, even if his idea of a complication was easily fixed by me calling my brother to apologise. Or at least fixing his gate.
But I’d already fixed the gate and promised Luke I’d meet him later. He knew I wasn’t going anywhere. I’d promised him, and finally we were in a place where he believed me. It was only Gus I couldn’t reach.
The bus dropped me at the wrong end of Rushmere. I walked home past Mia’s florist shop, and the insurance offices Barry Keane owned. He was in the window and spotted me as I crossed the road. He scowled and turned away, but his glare held nowhere near enough fire for a man who’d lost his dog and believed me responsible. I imagined all the horrible things I’d do to him if our positions were reversed, if he’d taken Grey from me, and it kept me occupied the rest of the way back to Gus’s empty house.
Disappointment weighed me down as I let myself in. Somehow I’d convinced myself he’d have beaten me there. That he’d be waiting for me with the sunny grin I missed so much. But he wasn’t there, and Grey was too busy sleeping to give a shit that I needed some attention. He rolled over, flicking his tail, the cat equivalent of his middle finger.
I took the hint and retreated to the shower. Then I lingered on the landing, transfixed by Gus’s closed bedroom door. The sight of it moved me in ways I couldn’t begin to describe, and my stomach gave an uncomfortable flip. Gus wanted to talk when he got home, but what if that meant his door was closed forever? As in, he didn’t care if I left town or not, he wanted me gone from his house?
My heart couldn’t fathom those words ever leaving his mouth without the kindness that had made me fall so fucking hard for him, but the prospect of him letting me down gently scared me far more than the ridiculous notion that he’d kick my sad self to the kerb. But as I stared at his bedroom door, dripping water all over his carpet, I felt more than fear.
I crossed the landing and opened the door. His bedroom was empty, and his bed looked like no one had slept in it for a year. A breeze fluttered through his vented window, shuffling the muscle man magazines he kept on his chest of drawers. The pages rose and fell in slow motion, and a sickening sense of foreboding washed over me.
Questioning my sanity, I backed out of his room, returned to my own, and mechanically got dressed. I’d left my phone downstairs. With Luke on his way home from the port, and Gus maintaining radio silence, I expected a blank screen, but I’d missed a call from Gus. And he’d sent me a message.
Gus:com bjmk
Frowning, I scanned the nonsense he’d sent me again, searching for acronyms and hidden meanings I might’ve missed the first time, but came up blank. I called him back, once, twice, three times, but his phone rang and rang, not even clicking through to his voicemail.
He doesn’t have voicemail, remember? The cold call messages annoy him too much.
I’d laughed when he’d told me that. Then I’d nearly cried in the bathroom when he’d drunkenly admitted on the way home from Luke’s barbecue that every unknown missed call had given him hope it was Mia telling him she was coming home, and he’d grown tired of the certainty that she wasn’t.
I knew how that felt, and I searched for that sadness now, anything to ease the rush of anxiety building in my chest, but it didn’t seem to matter how many times I told myself to calm the fuck down, irrational panic swamped me. Gus had never sent me a message that made no sense, and he wasn’t the kind of dude who drunk dialled or sat on his phone. Sometimes he forgot I wasn’t French, but only when I had his dick in my mouth, and there was nothing pleasurable about the cold flush that rattled through me now.
Something’s wrong.
No, it wasn’t. There was a rational explanation for everything Gus did. He wasn’t an impulsive drama queen like me, and perhaps that was his problem—he thought too much, and angsted too hard over shit that wasn’t his fault.
But my layman’s analysis of his mental health wasn’t enough to distract me from the agitation fast taking hold of my brain. I paced the kitchen, and then the hallways where I’d see and hear the van the second Gus came home. But what if he didn’t come home? What if he stayed out all night like he did before? I was beyond worrying about him hooking up with other people, but the prospect of waiting up all night for relief that never came drove me out of the front door.
I was halfway down the drive before I remembered my shoes.
Cursing, I went back for them, and my phone, and called Gus again while I jogged to the bus stop. It rang and rang, until it cut off. Then I called him back to an automated message telling me his number was unavailable.
The finality of it kicked any common sense I had left entirely under the approaching bus.
I threw a handful of coins at the driver and hurried to the back of the bus where I’d get the best view of the traffic on the other side of the road. There was only one way to the next town over. If Gus drove past, I’d see him. But even if he didn’t, the chances of me rocking up to an empty cottage were pretty fucking high.
Didn’t stop me pressing my face to the glass and cataloguing every vehicle that zoomed past the rumbling bus. None of them were Luke’s van, though, and by the time the bus pulled into the stop nearest the cottage—its final stop of the day—I was losing light. If Gus wasn’t here, I’d be walking home in the dark.
If he was, I had some explaining to do. Either way, I scrambled off the bus and ran the short distance to the broken-down cottage we’d been working on all week. The driveway was tucked behind a thick hedge, shielding it from the road. The fading light cast a shadow across the gravel, and at first it looked empty, but as I got closer, the gunmetal grey van glinted beneath the flickering streetlamp.
Gus was still here.
I flew up the drive and hammered on the front door. It was locked, as usual, and I thumped it hard enough to shake the hinges, but he didn’t come.
