Calling Me Away

by Louise Bay

  Whatever there was between us felt thin and temporary and vulnerable. Risky. I couldn’t handle that, not when I’d loved him for so long. This was not going to happen, not now. There was too much that could go wrong. Too much to lose.

  If I ended things now, I might miss out on the love of my life, but there was still a chance that I wouldn’t destroy my family, or my heart.

  Perhaps when he was over Emma, and if he still felt the same way, maybe then I could let myself be with him, want him, love him. For now, we needed to end it for both our sakes. We needed time to make sure we were doing the right thing.

  It would be better to be showered and dressed before I woke Luke to talk. I didn’t want to capitulate under his touch again. If I was ready, I could leave for work while he left my flat. It would be easier, for me anyway, if I didn’t have to be normal with him straight away.

  On autopilot, I showered, dried my hair and dressed. Luke never moved an inch. Anyone else would have suspected he’d died in his sleep. Having known him for most of my life, I knew this was just how he was. As teenagers, and even until recently, Haven and I’d had little consideration for those around us when we woke early, desperate to giggle about boys, parties and alcohol-induced shame from the night before. Until Haven married Jake, we’d regularly stayed over at each other’s houses after nights out. Sometimes we’d even ended up in Luke’s guest room. Unless you were an alarm clock, it was impossible to wake Luke. He insisted his body was tuned into some frequency that meant he never slept through alarms. Sounded like weird, boy logic to me. But whatever.

  Ready to leave—and ready to talk—I programmed the clock next to him and sat at the end of the bed, close but not touching, and waited for him to wake. My heart was hammering through my chest. I knew ending this, or at least pressing pause on whatever there was between us, was the right thing to do. But I needed to get it over with before I had second thoughts. I was giving up the thing I had wanted desperately, longed for even. Luke. And even though it was the right thing to do, it wasn’t going to be easy.

  Luke’s body immediately came awake as the alarm clock began to blare. It was almost cartoon-like, how quickly it happened. As if someone had plugged him in and suddenly, he was working.

  “Hey,” he said, turning as he caught sight of me from the corner of his eye. He started to grin and then, taking me in, the corners of his mouth settled back where they’d been. He knew me so well. Twisting, he sat upright, scrubbed his hands across his face and took a deep breath. He was so fucking beautiful, and right then it just didn’t seem fair that he got to wake up, roll over and floor me with his bed hair, stubbly jaw and golden skin that I knew felt as smooth and warm as it looked.

  Damn him.

  “You want to talk.” It wasn’t a question. He knew me better than that.

  My focus sharpened and I nodded.

  “We got this, Ashleigh. Please trust me.”

  The sound of my full name curled around me. I didn’t hear it often. And only twice from Luke before whatever was between us started. Once, when my parents moved to Hong Kong, and he and Haven came with me to the airport to see them off, and then again at the awards dinner a few evenings ago.

  I blinked and filled my lungs. “I need you to listen. Not reassure me, not try to convince me I’m wrong, that I actually feel differently. I need you to hear what I’m going to say.” I flicked my gaze toward him when he didn’t answer. He was staring right at me, his eyes tight, his brows pulled together in anxiety. His face held all his effort to stay silent, to give me what I wanted.

  “We’ve moved too fast, Luke. You are literally hours out of a long-term relationship that looked like it was heading toward forever. I have been in love with you my whole life—I want this too much. I want you so much that, for the past few days, I’ve been content to be carried away with this.” I swirled my hand between us. The fear of what I was doing climbed up my spine and snatched my breath. I just had to get through the next few minutes and then it would be done.

  “I need to be either nothing to you—”

  “Ashleigh, you could never—”

  I raised my hand at him, stopping him speaking.

  “Nothing . . . or everything. And right now, I don’t think you’re in a position to be making decisions about what or who is everything to you. I need to know this isn’t about you holding on to me because you need something to hold on to. That it isn’t about you being uneasy about all the changes going on in your life right now.” I sank my thumbnail into my finger in the hope that it would distract me from the pain in my heart. “I know you, Luke, and you like things to be ordered and predictable. And I don’t want to be a security blanket for you. I want to be your lover, your partner, your best friend—the woman you can’t live without. Not because it’s easy, but because life would be less exciting without me, less joyous, less sweet. Not because you’re used to me; not because you know me and it’s comfortable.”

  I smoothed my palms over my skirt. I’d said what I needed to.

  Silence pulsed through the space between us, and I tilted my chin up to look at him, anxious about what I would find on his face. It was as if he’d frozen to the spot, still holding himself back.

  I rose from the bed and his hand shot out, grabbing mine. “Can we not talk about this?” His tone was pleading. “I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t know what it means.” He linked his fingers through mine. “Are we done?”

  “For now.” I tried to keep the tightness in my chest from escaping into sobs.

  “What does that mean, for now? Fuck.” He pushed his hands through his hair, clearly frustrated.

  “I just . . . I think you need some time—”

  “I don’t need time. I need you.”

  I took a deep breath. How long had I waited to hear that? Was I really going to walk away?

  “Okay, I need time.”

  “How long do you need?”

  I knew if I gave Luke boundaries, our relationship would simply become a task on his list. If I told him what I needed, how long I needed, he’d diligently work through the to-dos I created and wait. It would be all about me, when I needed it to be about him. My worry wouldn’t dissolve in a set period of time. I needed him to experience life without me, work through the change, the uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty, get past it, enjoy it and then decide it was me that he wanted. Not as a cure, or a convenience, but because he was in love, with me.

  “I need to know that you’ve sorted your life, and that you still pick me. That I’m not just convenient.”

  “Ashleigh, you would never—”

  I couldn’t listen to his counter arguments. “This is what I need. You asked me and I’m telling you. Make new friends, date. I don’t know, get a dog, a new car. Get on with your life. See what it’s like. Show me that I’m a conscious choice for you.”

  “Date?”

  My stomach cramped at his question. What was I thinking? This was going to be horrific. The last thing I wanted was for him to find someone else, but if he did, then at least I knew we weren’t meant to be. If I took what he was offering now, I would spend a lifetime wondering if he was ever really mine. I’d become insecure and needy—a shell of myself.

  “Yeah, date.” I looked out my bedroom window. I needed to leave or I was going to buckle, tell him it was all a big joke. I squeezed his hand, consciously trying to capture the feel of his skin against mine so I could replay it later when I was lonely and longing for him. I pulled my fingers from his and headed toward the door. “I know this is hard.”

  He jumped out of bed, pulling on his boxers. “Jesus, Ashleigh. Are you scared to be happy? Don’t you feel this between us? Why are you walking away as if we’re nothing?”

  I couldn’t turn and look at him. “Luke, you are everything to me. That’s the point. We’ve so quickly slipped into this that it feels like it could be over tomorrow. And if I let myself fall any deeper, it might just kill me. This way it’s only been a few days and
we won’t lose our friendship.”

  “We’ll never lose that, Ashleigh. I promise you.” His voice cracked and the sound tore right through me.

  “Don’t make promises you don’t know you can keep. I need this, Luke. Please.”

  He sighed, and it took all my willpower not to turn and comfort him.

  “If you need me to prove my feelings, then this is what I’ll do. Because you are what I want, Ashleigh. What I need. My feelings won’t change.”

  My heart ached. I wanted to say me too. But something kept me from forming the words.

  Luke

  “So you didn’t go into the office?” Haven asked. She’d come home to find me staring into space. I’d left Ashleigh’s flat and headed back to Haven’s with the intention of jumping in the shower and heading to work. I hadn’t been able to face the day surrounded by Ashleigh’s scent, her words, her doubt. When I’d arrived, I’d sat on the bed, just for a second to gather my thoughts, and when I next looked at the clock half the day had gone.

  I shook my head. “I called them. I’ve kept an eye on my emails. Things will wait.” I would have been a mess at work. Better to feign illness than to turn up and give my clients reason to sue me for negligence. My head felt like a pinball machine as I jumped from being angry at Ashleigh for having so little faith in me, in us, to planning how I was going to win her back, then jumping again to an overwhelming feeling of loss. Perhaps Haven could help me make sense of it.

  Haven looked at me, concern in her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to be so down on your relationship yesterday. I just got spooked. Do you want me to speak to her?” She watched me fill the washing machine with laundry. I’d been able to do nothing all day but think of Ashleigh. I hoped that if I could no longer smell her on my clothes, it would clear my mind, and I could figure out a way to get her back.

  Haven looked at me, sheepish and guilty.

  “It’s not your fault. I knew she was likely to have a meltdown—I mean, come on, it’s Ashleigh—but I thought I could talk her through it. I thought I knew her.”

  Haven narrowed her eyes. “Ashleigh?”

  It took me a beat to realize what she was asking. “Yeah. That’s who she is to me.” Ashleigh had been right. My realization about her and my feelings for her had been sudden. In only a few days she had gone from being Ash—my sister’s best friend, the person I asked to be my plus one if I didn’t want to take my girlfriend, my family—to Ashleigh, someone who made me want to lobby Parliament to pass a law ensuring she had to be naked for the rest of her life. Someone who when she touched me, I felt the press of skin for hours afterward and yearned for it for hours beyond that. Someone I wanted to protect from the darkness, show the light. I wasn’t sure whether it was because we’d known each other for so long, but even though Ashleigh and I had only been together a few days, it felt different, deeper—more profound than anything I’d experienced with anyone else.

  I thought she’d felt the same.

  “Did she say anything? Has she called you?” I asked, desperate to know how I could make it all better.

  “No, I’m sorry.” I could tell by how nice Haven was being that she was worried. Being with Jake had softened her edges, given her confidence, but it hadn’t made her a pushover. She was still capable of giving me a good hard arse-kicking when she felt the need arise.

  “She said that she wants to know that she’s a conscious choice for me. But how can I do that if she’s not with me? She’s worried she’s just . . . I don’t know, available.”

  “Is she right to be concerned?”

  I’d been trying to answer that question all day. “Yes and no.”

  “Fucking lawyers. Give me a straight answer.”

  I scrubbed my hands across my face and squeezed my eyes shut. I wished I were having this conversation with Ashleigh. I wished she’d given me more time this morning. “She knows me, right. So yes, I like constancy in my life. I cling on to things that maybe I shouldn’t to create permanence. It was probably the reason I was with Emma for as long as I was.” There was a dull thud where my heartbeat should be, as if it were cloaked in fog. “But no, that’s not what my feelings, or should I say my change in feelings, toward Ashleigh are about. I don’t know, Haven. I feel like someone took my blinkers off and Ashleigh is a new person to me now. I mean she’s still Ash, but she’s mine now, too. Or she was.”

  “So tell her that. She’s risking her family, being with you. You have to convince her you aren’t going to break her heart. But she’s right, you have to be sure she’s who you want.”

  Ashleigh had been clear. She needed to see that she was my choice. “I’ve never been so sure. There’s no going back for me. I just need to provide her with some evidence. But that’s okay, because that’s what I do, right? I build cases, uncover and present the facts. I just don’t know how to do it yet. But I’ll get there.” I had to. Losing her forever wasn’t an option. “How did Jake win you back?”

  “By loving me. By giving me time and being there to catch me despite me pushing him away and losing faith in us both.”

  So that was it. I had to give her space, show her I’d had time and opportunity to think of every conceivable version of my life, and that I still wanted her at the center of it.

  I’d prove to her that she was my choice.

  My only choice.

  I went to bed early, telling Jake and Haven I was tired. I wasn’t. I had plans to make. A strategy to formulate. I glanced around, my overnight bag slung in the corner, clothes spilling out the top. A bunch of notebooks from work that I’d brought home on Friday were lying on the dressing table. This couldn’t be my life. I pulled out my laptop and logged on. I grabbed a notebook.

  Step one: Find a place to live.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was actually eager to move out of Haven’s home. Perhaps it was partly because it was what Ashleigh needed from me, but all of a sudden, I relished the idea of moving on. As much as I loved my sister and Jake, I didn’t want to be an appendage to their life. I wanted one of my own.

  I fired up a real estate website and started to look at flats to rent near to where Emma and I had lived. As I clicked and scrolled, I realized the pictures were all from a place I’d left behind. There was no reason for me to live in that area. I was starting fresh with only myself to worry about. What did I actually want? Where did I want to be? I had no boundaries, no one to consider while making my choice. I could put a pin in the map and decide that would be the place. The possibilities were endless and in a sense daunting, but a decision had to be made if I was going to move on.

  I did what I did best and buried myself in the details, working my way through different sites, firing off emails, setting up viewings for the coming days. I’d check a few places out and decide what felt right.

  By the time I was finished, it was close to two, but the adrenaline pumping through my veins meant that sleep was a ways away. Was Ashleigh sleeping? Was she worried about if I would be able to do what she’d asked? I closed my eyes and imagined the contours of her body covered by her cream-colored sheets, her hair spread across her pillow, her lips parted. Over the years, we’d spent a lot of time with each other, but it was only in the past few days that I knew what she looked like while sleeping. Bold, funny, energetic Ash slept unguarded. She was soft, thoughtful—a Tennyson-imagined heroine. I logged on to my email.

  Monday, September 12

  Dear Ashleigh,

  You’ve been in my every thought today. I miss you, but I want you to know that I’m beginning to understand what you’ve asked me to do and why.

  I’m going to look at flats tomorrow. I wish you were coming with me. You could help me choose. But you’ll see it soon enough, one way or another.

  Believe in me. Believe in you.

  All my love, Luke.

  My mouse hovered over the send button. Was it too pushy? Did she even want to hear from me right now?

  Eventually, I pressed delete
and logged off.

  Less than twelve hours after finding it on the internet, I stood in the middle of a furnished flat in the center of the city. It was the second one I’d seen. I’d skipped out of work early in order to progress step one on my plan.

  Floor-to-ceiling windows spilled natural light into the flat—very different from the place I’d shared with Emma.

  “You can see the river from outside,” the agent said.

  I slid open the balcony door and stepped out, peering over the wall. It was quiet and high and away from the hustle and bustle of London, despite being right in the middle of things. It was exactly the opposite of the flat I’d shared with Emma and the one I’d seen before this one. Our place had been a Victorian conversion in West London—and a forty-five minute journey into work. This was a ten-minute walk to the office. Emma had loved the original features and the garden at our place. To me a garden simply meant I had to cut the grass or pay someone else to do it. But I’d been happy to go along with whatever made her happy, grateful I didn’t have to make the decision. Now I had to choose, and I found I preferred this sleek, modern, purposefully built flat in the center of town, with no commute and great views. It didn’t require me to do anything. I could just move in and . . . live.

  Would Ashleigh like it? I suppose I couldn’t make this decision with anyone else but myself in mind. That was the point, wasn’t it? This was what she wanted from me. To see the decisions in front of me, weigh each one carefully, then pick. Every hour I spent away from her, my focus was getting clearer.

  Back inside, I ran my hand along the cool marble of the breakfast bar. Could I see myself reading the paper here?

  “There are two bedrooms,” the agent said as I followed her through the flat. She pointed out the master and then the guest bedroom. “There’s a desk in there so you could use it as a study.”