“No. I wanted a real answer.”
His brother snorted. “No, you don’t. You want to not decide.”
“Fuck you. I can decide shit.”
“Like what?”
“Uhhh…”
“Exactly.” Martin was cross-eyed but his expression still hit Patrick like a tonne of bricks. Not mean, but patronising. “You don’t know how to decide fuck all, Youngest. You do what you do and let me and Jase and Ant and Dom and Mum clean up the rest. You’ve always been like that.”
* * *
Present Day
Patrick stared at Cheryl. She was so beautiful with her huge shining eyes, loose bits of her hair wisping around her face. They were lying side-by-side as sparks shot all through his body and all around the room. The MDMA had coated everything with a pearlescent glow. He could have stayed in it forever, watching and waiting for Cheryl to talk.
She pressed her lips together, rubbing them slowly. “You sure you want to waste your hotel high listening to me whine about my life?”
She was trying to be sassy, but he heard the insecurity in her voice. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”
She nodded, her pupils like two black disks. “Okay, so it probably starts with my dad abandoning my mum.”
“Shit.” Patrick thought about what Eden had told him with a little stab of guilt. “That sucks. What happened?”
“He was already married. He had an affair with my mum when she was nineteen, then bailed when she got pregnant. He lives in London. Has a whole other family.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. It doesn’t really matter. I can’t miss someone I never met, but that’s just the start. You sure you really want to hear this?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Cheryl counted off on her fingers. “I’m broke as hell, I used to be engaged, my mum has ALS and it’s going to kill her in the next few years, I smoke in secret, I have forehead fillers, and I’ve fucked more dads than prostate cancer. Like… whatever number you’re thinking, I probably clocked it by twenty-one. And obviously that’s about emotional trauma or whatever, but knowing that didn’t exactly stop me from screwing dads. Getting engaged did, but only because Carlo was even more fucked up than any dad could be. Well, I think that’s about everything. Do you want to run away now?”
Patrick couldn’t think of what to say. He’d been expecting something heavy, but more along the lines of an elephant. This was a supermassive black hole. “You… were engaged?”
“When I was twenty-five.” Her expression was torn between humour and misery. “Is that really what you’re focusing on?”
“I guess it’s the thing that’s the most confusing.” He scrubbed his hand through his hair. “Carlo’s the guy you told me about at the motel, yeah? Your serious boyfriend who wasn’t nice?”
“Yeah. That’s Carlo.”
Patrick felt a surge of intense dislike when she said his name but was determined not to show it. This wasn’t about him. “What was Carlo like?”
“He was like… if you opened a drawer and it only had knives in it.”
Patrick nodded, but it was so hard to imagine Cheryl agreeing to marry someone. Especially after what she’d said that night in her apartment. ‘I’m never getting engaged.’
Had she worn Carlo’s ring? Thought about having his kids? And what kind of asshole lost a woman like Cheryl? If he ever managed to get a ring on her finger, he’d rather die than fuck it up.
“Patty-Bear?” She brushed his cheek, sending sparks through his body. “We can stop?”
“Keep going,” he said. “Tell me everything.”
The hours blurred together as he learned how Cheryl’s dad had blown into Melbourne for business, swept her teenage mother off her feet, then melted into the ether. How Bernard Karalis had refused to pay child support and sent back every letter and baby picture Cheryl’s mum mailed him until he gave his daughter an educational trust just to make her go away. Cheryl talked about going to the best girls’ school in the state while her mum worked at a supermarket and re-sold thrift store clothes on weekends. She spoke calmly, the details no longer sharp enough to hurt. Patrick didn’t feel the same. The MDMA had opened a gold portal in his chest and the thought of baby Cheryl and her heartbroken mum made him want to bawl.
Sensing his distress, Cheryl kissed him lightly on the lips. “I’m warning you, it gets worse.”
