Eighteen
Paige
“Maybe you should take a few days off,” Andrea suggests, as I send yet another customer on their way, making no conversation with them that wasn’t related to their hairstyle.
“I need to work at the moment, Andrea.” I busy myself cleaning up the fallen hair from the floor.
“Do you need to talk about it?”
I pause my sweeping and look up at Andrea’s concerned face. We're experiencing one of the rare quiet times in the salon when we have no clients waiting, and our next appointment isn’t for another hour. So it’s safe to talk. My problem is, do I want to?
Sighing, I fall into the salon chair, leaning my upper body weight on the broom in my hand. “I just…” I start, having trouble working out what to say. I’m trying to let people into my life, but it’s still hard to share my worries when I’m so used to dealing with them on my own.
“Just what, Paige? Talk to me. You’ve been moping around the salon for over a week now,” she prods, wheeling a stool over so she's sitting directly in front of me.
“I went to meet a um… relative, the weekend before last, and it just brought up a lot of… well, shit from my past. Stuff I wasn’t expecting to be reminded of, and I’m just trying to work through it all in my head. I’m sorry I’ve been out of sorts, but I don’t want to take time off. I’d just spend it thinking, and I don’t want to do that.”
“You don’t have to take time off if you don’t want to, Paige. Your work is fantastic as always. My concern is that you’re not your usual bubbly self. I’m worried about you as a friend here, not a boss.” A friend. I’m making friends.
“Thank you, Andrea, but I’ll be fine.”
“Well, I’m here if you need me, OK?” she offers, and I nod, appreciating her concern.
I return to sweep my pile of hair while Andrea moves about the salon cleaning up and preparing for her next client by collecting the supplies she’ll need for a keratin treatment.
“Why don’t you tell me about that boy of yours while we’re quiet? Thinking about him sure puts a smile on my face.” She laughs.
Returning her laughter half-heartedly, I sigh again. “Elliot is wonderful, as always. He’s being so patient with me, Andrea. I’m afraid I’ve been distant with him too since he took me out to Cambridge—that’s where my relative lives—and he was so supportive and amazing while we were there. But I feel like we were in this cocoon that broke once we got back to the flat and around everyone else. We’re still together, but we haven’t been together since then, if you know what I mean,” I say, sharing as much as I’m willing to about the details of our relationship.
“Sounds like you two need some time on your own. Maybe you should book the weekend somewhere, just the two of you?”
The bell rings above the door as a walk-in client enters, so I nod, agreeing with Andrea’s comment. “That might be exactly what we need,” I say before moving to greet our new customer with as much enthusiasm as I can muster.
Elliot
Ever since we came back from Cambridge, Paige has distanced herself from everyone and everything. It’s a little hard for me to handle because our time together was amazing, and I want nothing more than to be with her again. But, during the drive back to the flat this melancholy descended upon her, and I don’t know how to help her out of it.
We’re still together, but not much more besides hand holding, hugging and a bit of kissing is going on—which is fine, of course. I'm not some arsehole who will throw a tantrum over sex. I’m just concerned. Those walls of hers seem to be fortifying their defences, and I’m afraid she'll shut down completely. There’s this sadness in her now, greater than the one before. I think she’d gotten her hopes up, thinking when she met her real dad, she’d finally have a parent who gave a shit. But seeing her mother ruined it for her.
I want to fix it for her, but I know I can't. She won’t talk about it, even though I can see her troubles constantly playing on her mind. It’s shit, because I thought we turned a corner when she told me about her family. But now, I think she only shared a tiny piece of herself and is keeping the rest locked away. Perhaps it’s all buried underneath that tattoo?
“Elliot, I think that weights bench is clean enough now,” one of my co-workers, Natasha says, snapping me out of my thoughts. I'm supposed to be preparing for my next client but I’m in a daze, thinking about Paige. Big shock there.
I check my appointments to see I’m supposed to be training Agy. Suddenly, my day is a little brighter. Taking a walk into reception, I see her standing around chatting to a couple of other women.
“Oh, here he is!” she exclaims happily as I approach. “The light of my life. Isn’t he lovely, girls?” The ladies she’s with all make agreeable noises.
I smile, not really paying attention to their response and lean down to kiss her cheek. “Let’s get started, hey?”
She waves to her friends and follows me to the treadmills where I get her to warm up. Once I have her walking at a comfortable pace, I hop on the treadmill next to her and start to run. I take the speed higher and higher as I lengthen my stride, running as fast as I can without the risk of falling off, a gentle hum from my pumping blood fills my head and makes me feel calmer.
“A little tense today, are we?” Agy asks, her eyebrows rising as she watches me run.
Glancing at her, I nod. “You could say that,” I reply.
“Girl trouble,” she comments, knowingly. “It always is.”
Slowing the treadmill, I look over at Agy with her wavy grey hair cut close to her head, blue eyes that have lost a lot of their light, and slightly weathered skin. She’s probably the kindest person I have met in the UK, and right now; I need an understanding ear.
I slow to a stop and hop off the machine, wiping my face with a towel as I move closer. Agy watches me with her gentle eyes. You can tell she’s expecting me to spill my guts, and she’s right. That’s exactly what I'm going to do.
“It’s Paige,” I start. “We had this amazing week together. She opened up to me, told me a little about her past, and I thought we were getting closer but now she’s back to pushing me away. It’s like we take one step forward and two steps back. I’m trying to be patient with her, but time is running out for me. I want to be with her, Agy. I want our relationship to keep moving forward. I’m planning to come back here to be with her, but I'm petrified that when I get back, she’ll be gone.”
“Have you asked her to go back with you?” Agy asks. We’ve moved on to stretching now, so we’re sitting on mats as I help her limber up.
“No, she’s already said she’s staying here indefinitely. I don’t think there’s anything for her back home.”
“And is she aware you’re coming back for her?”
“Ahhh…”
“Goodness me. No wonder you’re having troubles. You’re a shit communicator.”
I laugh a little at her jibe. “I’m trying not to scare her off.”
“And yet she’s drifting, anyway.”
“What do I do?”
“Talk to her. Sitting around talking to me isn’t helping. You have a few weeks left with her. Figure out what you want and go for it. Sometimes you have to take a risk for the sake of yourself.”
“To be honest, I really want her to come back with me, just until I can get a longer visa and we can come back to live here together. I have a feeling she’s viewing this as a short-term thing but I don’t want to let her go for the months it’ll take to reapply. I don’t want to lose her. I want to see her every day. I want her to be my forever.”
Agy grins. “You’re such a sweet boy, Elliot. Tell her that. You can’t leave things unsaid. Believe me, at my age, I’m an expert on things left unsaid.”
“Your age? I thought you were only twenty-one,” I say, lightening up the mood.
Laughing, she taps me on the arm in good humour. “Oh Elliot, what am I going to do when you leave? I’ll have to train with one of the boring ones.
”
I hold out my hand and help her up off the mats. “Good thing I’m coming back then.”
Paige
My heart skips a beat when I walk out of work and spot Elliot in his usual waiting place. Even though I’ve been less than forthcoming since Cambridge, he’s always right there, ready to walk me home and hold my hand. I feel both frightened and elated upon seeing him. He’s so beautiful and special that it makes me feel like I'm dreaming him up. But I can touch him, so he has to be real.
As if I need to prove it to myself, I place my palms on his chest as I lean into him and tilt my head up for a kiss. He smiles down at me and wraps me in his arms before bringing his head towards mine to greet me with his mouth.
Under normal circumstances, I’m a decent height. But, with Elliot being well over six feet, I feel fairly small around him. I like that.
“Mmm, I missed you today,” he says, smiling as he takes me by the hand. Then he leads me to the station entry instead of the exit.
I look up at him, confused. “What’s going on?” I ask, trotting along after him.
“I’m taking you out. I want you to myself tonight,” he says, his eyes twinkling mischievously.
“OK… well are you going to tell me what we’re doing?”
“Something touristy.”
I lean into him and go with it. We’ve barely had a moment alone together since the motel, and truthfully, I haven’t made much of an effort to be alone with him. I’ve been selfishly brooding, keeping him at bay, while secretly afraid of what he means to me.
The motel room seems so long ago—nine days to be exact—and the intensity of what I felt while we were there scares me. It’s like my life was dependent upon being with him. I’ve experienced intense attraction, but I've never felt that before. That’s new.
Sitting together on the train, I rest my head on his shoulder, squeezing my eyes shut as he plants a kiss on the top of my head. It’s such a small and loving gesture, but it feels like everything to me.
I only have less than five weeks until Elliot goes. I’ve just wasted precious days focusing on my own problems. I’ve been taking his comfort, but I haven’t been giving him anything in return. I’m determined to make this few weeks the best possible. I don’t want to live my life knowing I wasted my time when I could have been with him.
“Elliot,” I say to get his attention. I hear his voice hum through his chest in response. Lifting my head to meet his face, I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry I’ve been so distant lately.”
“You’ve had a lot on your mind.”
I shake my head like I’m trying to rid myself of my worries. “Can we pretend like none of that happened and focus on now? Let all that ‘past’ crap fall away and just be together? We don’t have very much time left, and I want to spend as much of it with you as I can.”
He presses his lips together in a tender smile and reaches up to caress my face with his thumb. “I think that's a perfect idea,” he says. “I want every day to focus on us from now on.”
“I’ve been thinking; Shane and Gavin are going next week, and they haven’t found roommates yet. I was thinking that maybe… we, could share a room? We could just change the listing and get another girl to room in with Naomi and another guy can room with Brian.” I sit up and take a breath, suddenly gripped by the fear that he might refuse me. “What do you think?”
Elliot’s smile takes over his face as he pulls me toward him and kisses me. “I think that’s a wonderful idea,” he whispers. “I would love nothing more than to room with you.” Relief washes over me as we kiss again.
Elliot
“All right, it’s time to tell me where we're going,” Paige says, as we exit the train station at St Paul’s and start up the street.
“I’m taking you on a ghost walk,” I tell her, opening my eyes wide for added emphasis.
She laughs, clutching tighter onto my arm. “Is this a ploy to get me so scared I can’t sleep alone tonight?”
“It might be.”
This ghost walk only runs on Tuesday nights. It might be fun. It might be lame, but a lot of haunted places are actually pubs, so we can always beg off and go to dinner instead if we’ve had enough. At the very least, I figure it might be a good way to learn more about London. Besides the bus tour I did on my first day here, I really haven’t done any sightseeing, and I’m sure Paige hasn’t done any at all.
There’s maybe a handful of other people waiting for the tour when we arrive. Paige is pretty excited about doing this and has been talking about what we might see while we walk. Neither of us believes in ghosts, but we’re keen to see what passes for haunted and are willing to have an open mind in case we’re wrong.
Paige grins up at me and clutches my arm as our tour begins. After our chat on the train, she seems much more relaxed around me. I’m so relieved because I was worried that maybe I had messed things up between us somehow after Cambridge. I just didn’t know how to get us back to how things were in that motel room, despite desperately wanting to feel like that with her again.
The first place we go to is Highgate High Level Station. It doesn’t really look haunted though. The guide, a short, squat man in his late forties, tells us tales of ghost trains and a worker who killed himself here jumping in front of a train. The station has been closed for decades, and the tracks have long since been ripped up, so nature has overgrown. I guess it’s kind of spooky.
“I suppose it looks kind of spooky,” Paige says, echoing my thoughts while she’s looking around.
“Let’s capture the moment, maybe we’ll find an orb in the photo or something,” I suggest, readying the camera on my phone. We stand in front of the entrance, and I hold my phone in front of us to take our picture there. We lean our heads together and smile as I tap the screen. The weather is getting warmer than it was when we first came here, but it’s still cool enough to flush our cheeks and turn our noses red. Paige looks radiant in the image.
“That’s a keeper,” I say to her.
She smiles at me and tugs my arm so we can catch up to the rest of the group who are moving on to a pub called The Gatehouse. It’s a pretty cool looking place, but they have modernised the interior, so it isn’t very creepy either.
We take some photos of the outside and happily accept when a German gentleman from our tour group offers to take one of the two of us together. I do the same for him and his wife before we have to move on to our next ‘spooky’ setting.
“This is pretty fun,” Paige declares as we walk along with the group.
“It is?” I ask, feeling sure this was a complete failure.
“Yes,” she confirms laughing. “We’re being tourists, Elliot! I've never done something like this before. It’s awesome.”
We’re led to the Highgate Cemetery where we’re handed off to another guide who takes us around. The cemetery is actually very creepy. Not creepy in the paranormal sense; creepy because it’s a graveyard and there are these great headstones looming over you, reminding you that people are buried here.
“Oh my god,” a woman shrieks, covering her mouth as the guide’s eyes roll back and he collapses on the ground having what looks like an epileptic fit. Whispers go around the group. ‘It’s a ghost!’ ‘Lord, save us.’
“He’s having a fit,” I yell, rushing to the man’s aid while disbelieving that so many people are just standing by watching him. Paige kneels down beside me as I pull my jacket off and slide it under the man's head.
“What do you want me to do?” she asks.
“Just call an ambulance, I’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt himself,” I say, as I watch our guide foam at the mouth, his body shaking and convulsing uncontrollably.
Paige
“I can’t believe that just happened,” I say to Elliot as we’re leaving the cemetery. We decide that after the guide collapsed that maybe we should call this tour quits and get some food. We got our fright—it may not have been from the supernatural, but it was scary none the less—so
we’re ending the tour and declaring it a success.
I have to admit I’m pretty turned on by the way Elliot took control of the situation. I had no idea what to do, but he just went right on in there the second the guide dropped and took care of everything. I’m very impressed.
“Hang on a sec,” I say as we exit the gates to the cemetery. “I’ll find a pub for us to go and get dinner.” I use my phone to Google a nearby pub and get directions to a place called Flask.
“I think that was supposed to be on the tour,” Elliot points out.
I shrug and put my phone back in my bag. “Maybe we’ll see a ghost there,” I say.
“Maybe… All right, one more photo before this un-ghostly tour is officially over,” he says, readying the camera on his phone.
We lean in together and he turns and kisses my cheek, so I turn my head and kiss him properly on the mouth before the camera app makes its clicking sound to signal the photo is done. He’s laughing as he checks that the photo worked. “That one’s great,” he says, showing it to me.
“You’ll have to send them all to my phone so I have them too,” I say as we start walking toward the pub.
He nods, a thoughtful expression on his face, “So you want to remember me then? You aren’t planning on forgetting me when I go?”
I stop walking and kiss him with as much passion and feeling as I have in me. The world slips away from around us as we stand together, ignoring the traffic and the passers-by as we meld with each other, tasting each other, breathing each other in shamelessly. When we pull away, I can feel us both shaking from the intensity.
“I will dream about you every night for the rest of my life.”
He threads his fingers through my hair and kisses me back, slowly and tenderly. I reach my arms up and wrap them around his neck, pulling our bodies tighter together. My body hums with longing for him. I can’t seem to get enough. I don’t want to ever have enough.
Forever: Beautiful Series, book two Page 14
