Reckless: A Bad Boy Musicians Romance Page 22

  ‘You want to slow down, honey?’ he says.

  I shake my head. ‘I’m good. What even is that stuff, anyway?’

  ‘I forget,’ he grins. ‘Every time we stick a label on the bottle, it just burns right off.’

  He laughs at his own joke, but I don’t. Tonight, a little forgetting would go a long way.

  I finish the drink I’m nursing and slide my glass across to him. ‘One more?’ I ask.

  ‘Come on, Carrie,’ he says gently. ‘Let me call you a cab.’

  ‘M’fine,’ I say. ‘I can walk home.’ As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I’m no longer sure they’re true. The simple face of it is, I’m not even sure I could find the way to the bathroom by myself, let alone back to my apartment, but I’m going to have to find out in short order; even if I don’t leave, the liquor that’s making my head swim is also doing a number on my bladder, and the results aren’t going to be pretty.

  Willie raises one eyebrow as he does it, but he pours my drink anyway. ‘Hmm,’ he murmurs up into his moustache. ‘If you say so. Just say the word and I’ll have one of the boys walk you back, OK? It’s no trouble at all.’

  I give him a quick tip of the glass. ‘Sure thing,’ I say, but I already know I’m not going to take him up on his offer. Home is the absolute last place I want to be, tonight of all nights. My empty apartment, full of photos? No. Not now.

  Five years.

  It’s a hell of a long time, when it’s put like that, and yet simultaneously it feels like no time at all. Five years ago tonight, I was under the harsh fluorescent bulbs in Mercy General Hospital instead of the soft red-and-blue neon of O’Hara’s. I was eighteen years old, not twenty-three.

  And I still had a father.

  I remember him, lying there all stretched out under a thick blanket even though it was the middle of the summer when he passed; it was the only way he could keep his body warm enough to be comfortable. He didn’t look like my Dad then – not the way he had a few years, a few months, a few weeks before. It was like someone had snuck into his room and traded him out for a skeleton while no one was looking. Mom would fuss around him the way she always did, cheerful to the end, constantly propping up his pillows or getting him a drink of water when he asked, even though he was too weak to bring the glass to his lips. I think it made her feel better, having something to do. It made her feel like she was useful, so when she shut herself in her bedroom at night and cried alone she didn’t have that same sense of helplessness. When it was just the two of us – ‘Just the two of us’; what a bitter taste in the mouth that left – she’d pretend she was fine, that everything was normal, thinking that was what I needed.

  It was a long time before anything seemed normal again. Five years on, it still doesn’t.

  ‘Well, look who it is?’

  I recognise the voice; of course I do, despite the fact that I haven’t spoken to him since high school. Why would I? Hell, I’d cross the street if it meant steering clear of a creep like Scanlon. We haven’t shared a single word since the day I slammed his fingers in my locker at school. Oh, he had a lot to say about that, but none of it to me. Just whispers. Malicious little rumours that I knew – but could never quite prove – were down to him. I’m not entirely sure he ever stopped, but after Hale left and Dad got sick… well, what was the point? I had other things to concern myself with.

  Jesus Christ, I think. That’s all I need.

  ‘Carrie,’ he says as he sidles up to the bar and seats himself two stools down the line.

  ‘Scanlon.’

  ‘What brings you to a place like this?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ I say. ‘Mostly the quiet.’

  ‘Trying to give me a hint?’

  ‘Clever boy. How’s the hand?’ I snort, and sip what’s left of my drink. Honestly, I crack myself up sometimes.

  ‘Funny,’ he says. ‘You’re a real funny girl, Carrie Walker.’

  ‘So they tell me.’

  He orders a beer with a chaser, and works his way through most of a bowl of bar peanuts as he stares up at the TV. Every now and then his eyes flick down towards me. They’re cold eyes, heartless eyes. I’ve seen that look before. He’s biding his time until he can make a move, like a hyena in the bushes.

  Well, let him bide. I’m not scared of him. I just order another drink, and then another. The two-stool gap between us shrinks to one.

  But I’m not thinking about Scanlon; I’m not. I’m not even thinking about Hale, although I’d be lying if I said seeing Aaron again after all these years doesn’t put me in mind of all that noise. No, I’m thinking about myself, as I am now and how I was then.

  What went wrong?

  Well, no… I know the answer to that. Everything went south five years ago. If Dad hadn’t got sick, then I wouldn’t have had to pick up so many extra shifts at the Diner to keep things ticking over. I might have been able to go to college like I’d planned. Nursing school. Wasn’t that just the dream? I could have been someone. I could have helped people – people with real problems, not just empty coffee cups. I could have built a life for myself outside of Eden, knowing that Dad was still here to look after Mom. Things could have worked out so differently.

  But no, I think. You just had to go and damn well die. Thanks a bunch, Dad.

  And that’s without even thinking about Hale. Should I have taken him up on his offer, all those years ago? When he ran away and asked me to go with him, with no plan other than getting out of town? If I knew I’d spend the next five years, ten years, twenty years in Eden… would I have found it quite so easy to say no?

  I don’t have an answer to that. I wish I did.

  Willie slides another drink over to me: a higher-priced whiskey than the gut-rot I’ve been working my way through all night long.

  ‘I didn’t order this,’ I say.

  ‘It’s on him,’ Willie replies, pointing to Scanlon.

  I drink it anyway.

  ~~~

  An hour later, I agree to let him walk me home. He doesn’t specify that it’s his home he’ll be walking me to, but we both know the score. He thinks I can’t see it – the predatory smile on his face, reflected in the mirror behind the bar as I pick up my jacket and struggle to put my arms into the sleeves. He thinks I can’t see exactly what’s going on in his sordid little mind. That I’m weak. Vulnerable. That I’m an easy lay that he can brag about to his friends later. I can almost hear him: Hey, guys… remember that stuck-up bitch from high school? The one who damn near broke my hand that time? Well, I nailed her – and on the anniversary of her dad’s death, too! Ain’t that just something? How’s that for levelling the score?

  But the thing he doesn’t see – the thing he can’t see – is that I don’t care. I don’t care what a creep he is. I don’t care about the fact that I’m almost too drunk to stand. All I want is a warm body for the night, and his will do. Just so I don’t have to be alone. Just so I don’t have to dwell on how this became my life, just for a few brief hours. I can deal with the fallout and the self-loathing in the morning. Right now, I don’t care.

  I. Just. Don’t. Care.

  Anything that keeps me out of my own bed tonight is a good thing. Anything that keeps these thoughts away is a welcome distraction.

  Even him.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I say.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Hale’s bike is propped up outside the trailer, and when I see it I can’t help but breathe an enormous sigh of relief. He’s here. I guessed right. There’s still some small hope that this can be fixed, that something can be salvaged from the night.

  So why doesn’t it feel like that? Why does my heart feel like an engine-block in my chest?

  It’s getting on towards dark as I pull up at the Grove. The last sputterings of daylight are smothered in heavy grey clouds on the horizon, thick as smoke; with every passing second they move closer to the threatened downpour, the first real rain Eden will have had in w
eeks. Anyone who’s lived in Texas for more than a couple of summers comes to recognise that kind of storm eventually. They know the feel of change in the air, the sound of distant thunder as it creeps closer and closer across the plains – and then the break as it arrives, of tension broken in an instant. The flood of life-giving water into the dry earth, before the sky clears and the whole cycle can begin again, over and over. The way it always was. Everything repeats, forever.

  Well, I think as I turn my eyes upwards, you sure picked a hell of a time for it.

  The door to the trailer pushes open easily, but there’s no sign of life inside. ‘Hale?’ I call out into the darkness. ‘Hale, are you in here? Where are you?’

  Silence. My words echo off the walls of the empty tin box. It was never what you could call welcoming, but with every trace of the life of Jim Fischer stripped away, the effect is eerie. It doesn’t look like a home. Hell, it barely looks like a house. The place looks like a prison cell.

  ‘Hale?’ I yell out again. ‘Hale, where –?’

  ‘Back here,’ he says. His voice is strained, as though calling out to me requires an unprecedented amount of physical effort – or perhaps the effort Is mental, who knows? Perhaps even now Hale is uncomfortable with the idea of anyone seeing him broken, beaten.

  Even me.

  There’s a chink of orange light coming out from under one of the trailer doors. When I open it, there he is: stretched out on the dusty floor, his shirt open as he dabs at his wounds with a cloth, lit by a single harsh bulb. The side of his face has swollen up from Scanlon’s punches; his left eye socket heavily bruised. He’s not going to be posing for any album covers any time soon, put it that way.

  ‘Oh, Hale.’ I wrap my arms around him and squeeze tightly. Never again, I think. No matter what happens, I never want to see Hale like this again. I never want to see him hurt.

  He winces. ‘Jesus, Carrie,’ he says, peeling me away from him. ‘Easy. Please. I’m a bit tender.’

  ‘Sorry. Are you OK?’

  ‘I’ve felt better,’ he says. ‘But yeah, I’m OK. How did you know I’d be here?’

  I shrug. ‘Where else would you be?’ There’s no way Hale would have gone anywhere else but his home territory – at least for as long as it took him to lick his wounds.

  ‘Your place,’ he says. ‘At first, anyway. Then I realised I didn’t have a key to get in, and I didn’t want to be waiting around in case anyone decided to follow me, so…’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t know if I should have, but I did.’ He pauses. ‘I’m sorry you got mixed up in all this. What happened out there was between me and Scanlon. Not you.’ He reaches a hand up and touches the scratch on my forehead. The bleeding has stopped, but the flesh around it is still spongy and sore. ‘I can’t believe I got you hurt.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ I say. ‘It was Scanlon. All of it. You were just trying to protect me.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Yeah, and a fine job I did of it, too. I just… I don’t know what happened, Carrie. I knew he was trying to goad me into a fight, just like when we were kids, and I was fine with it. Then I saw you there, bleeding, and I… God, I could have killed him right then. I didn’t care what happened to me, as long as I knew you were safe. That was the only thing that mattered.’

  I look down at his torso, seeing the fresh scrapes and cuts mingling with old scars – the product of a lifetime of violence. None of them are bad enough to need stitches, I suspect, although they’re definitely going to need a good clean; there’s a deep scratch on his hip that seems to have picked up most of the dirt that O’Hara’s parking lot had to offer, and I don’t want to imagine what it’s going to look like in a day or so without it. His stomach is dappled with bruises, already a vibrant purple that I know won’t be fading any time soon.

  I can’t help but wonder how much of tonight will show on his body ten years from now, and whether or not I’ll be around to see it.

  ‘Do you need a hospital?’ I ask. ‘Anything broken?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’ve had worse.’ He shifts is position down on the floor, propping himself up with one arm and immediately regretting it, papering over the wince with an attempt at a smile. ‘From my old man, even. Scanlon and his boys are losing their touch.’

  ‘Wait there, then,’ I say. A minute later and I’ve pulled the first aid kit and a sealed bottle of water from Pete’s truck. There’s not a lot in the little green box, but it’s better than nothing: a bottle of rubbing alcohol, some band-aids, some gauze, some surgical tape.

  Even the pain isn’t enough to stop him grinning when he sees it. ‘Nurse Carrie,’ he says as I kneel down beside him. ‘Some things never change, eh?’

  Apparently not, I think.

  He doesn’t protest as I slip his shirt off his shoulders; instead, he reaches for the cotton pads and the alcohol in the first aid kit. ‘Let me,’ he says. ‘I can do it.’

  ‘Hold still.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Hale, hold still.’ I pull the fabric clear of the scratch, and he screws up his face as the dried blood comes loose, tacky against his skin. ‘You OK?’ I ask.

  He nods. ‘Sure.’

  We sit in silence, mostly. My hands are busy with him, tending to him as best I can; it’s been a long time since I’ve had to deal with anything that wasn’t a burn from a hot griddle or an accidental slice from the slip of a vegetable knife, but I think I manage well enough. Hale doesn’t complain more than is strictly necessary, anyway. Every now and then, when the fresh alcohol touches raw flesh, he’ll suck in a sharp breath of air through his teeth, but that’s the worst of it. It’s a strange feeling, to be so close to him and yet so far away – to see his naked torso just inches away from me, knowing that just the other night it was pressed up against me. The fact that we might have been in a similar situation – Hale in a state of semi-undress as my hands caressed his body, but in my bedroom, rather than on the dusty floor of his old home – is crazy to me. It’s funny how things work out.

  Except it’s not, of course. When you consider how fragile the lives we build are, and how suddenly that particular house of cards can come crashing down around us, it’s not really funny at all.

  ‘Carrie,’ he says softly, just as I’m applying the last bit of sticking plaster to the wound on his hip. ‘I’ve got to ask you about something.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  He nods. ‘What Scanlon said. About you two…’

  And just like that, time stops. I don’t know what I was hoping – that he’d somehow forgotten about it? That he hadn’t heard what Aaron had said? That maybe he’d been too busy fighting for his life to pay attention? – but somehow I had managed to convince myself that it hadn’t happened, that that shameful, drunken lapse in judgement could have remained just that.

  ‘Carrie?’

  ‘I don’t know what you want me to say, Hale.’

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Does it make a difference?’

  He pauses, for a little too long. His silence says everything I need to hear.

  I can almost see him replaying Scanlon’s words over and over in his mind. You know I tapped that, right? All those years, while you were out playing your little guitar… guess I might even have beat you to it. Ain’t that a thing?

  I know what he’s thinking. I know what he’s picturing in his mind. I want to tell him that it’s not how it seems, that Scanlon made it sound a thousand times worse than it is, but I can tell from the look of disgust on his face that the damage is done.

  Ain’t that a thing?

  He’s already imagining me and Scanlon, alone – perhaps in my apartment, in the bedroom where he’s spent so much of the last week. He’s imagining Scanlon’s greedy fingers running across my skin – his lips on mine, somehow retroactively ruining what we had together.

 
Because now, whenever he looks at me, that’s all he’ll be able to see.

  I guess I win again. Ain’t that a thing, City Boy? Ain’t that just a thing?

  ‘Say something, Hale. Please.’

  He doesn’t; he can’t. His throat is all stopped up with the betrayal of it all.

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve got anything in me to say.’ There’s a clench in his jaw, that old familiar coiled-spring look. Oh, you goddamn liar, I think. You absolute goddamn liar. You’ve got plenty to say. But isn’t that just Hale through and through? When the going gets tough, he’s the man you want in your corner – but when it comes to any sort of vulnerability, he snaps shut tighter than a bear trap, and woe betide anyone who’s too close when it happens.

  ‘No. Spit it out, Hale.’ Tell me I hurt you. Tell me I fucked up. Tell me anything, Hale – but for God’s sake, don’t shut me out. Not now. Not over this.

  He chooses to stay silent, and a little piece of me hates him for that. How dare you? I think. What the hell gives you the right to block me off over this? After I came after you? After I waited all these years? After I…

  ‘So that’s how it is?’ I say. My fierceness surprises me; it’s a little like something has snapped inside me, something I’m not sure will ever be fixed but damn it, now the floodgates are open. ‘That’s how you want this one to play out, is it? Because I guess you’ve just been a straight-up monk since the last time you were in Eden? No bad decisions on your part – like, I don’t know, maybe banging your publicist? How did that one work out for you, Hale?’

  ‘What happened with Merry is different,’ he says slowly. ‘Not even in the same league, in fact.’

  ‘Oh, sure it is. Why, because it was you doing it and not me? That’s bullshit and you know it.’

  He shakes his head. ‘No, Carrie. Because Merry is Merry, and because Scanlon is Scanlon. Because one of them was a momentary bad decision, and the other one was you picking sides. It was you finding some way to rationalise everything he ever did to me. It was your way of saying that it was OK. That’s why.’