Tapas and Tangelos

by C. K. Martin

  The prospect of there being another woman seemed a much better alternative right at that moment. Instead, all she could see was Hayley’s new old name associated with words like killer, murderer, psychopath. The intimation that she knew what her father had done all along was there for anyone who could read between the lines.

  Her body racked with silent tears as she tried to process this new information.

  Their whole relationship, the one she had fought for with such determination, had been built on nothing but lies. Not the small ones about exes and broken hearts. Not lies by omission. Terrifying, awful lies.

  The woman she had finally allowed herself to fall in love with, the woman she had given all of herself to, turned out to be the biggest lie of all.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Hayley woke up with the warmth of the morning sun on her naked skin. The sheet was tangled around her legs, leaving the top half of her body naked and exposed, but she didn’t care. It felt luxurious to stretch out and feel every muscle in her body sing.

  A contented smile played on her lips. She couldn’t hold it in. Nor did she want to. Images from the night before played through her mind in flashbacks. She hadn’t slept that well in years. Her sleep had been deep and dreamless. It was amazing, this feeling of happiness.

  She rolled her shoulders from the stretch and reached out to the other side of the bed. Kate, if she was lucky, would want a replay of the night before. It seemed impossible not to touch her skin, explore every inch of her again in the light of day.

  Hayley’s hand stretched out, but came across only more crumpled sheets. She turned and saw she was alone. For a second, she thought it might have been nothing but a dream. The smell of sex on the sheets, undercut with the delicate zesty fragrance of Kate’s perfume, told her it was real.

  She strained her ears for sounds in the rest of the apartment. She knew Kate was naturally an early riser. Perhaps she had decided to slip off to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Try as she might, all Hayley could hear was silence. She was more puzzled than worried. Last night had not been like the first night they had spent together, when Hayley had snuck off with her feelings of shame and guilt the morning after. Last night was different enough that she was confident the tables had not been reversed.

  The door to the bathroom was open and the light was off, so Kate couldn’t be in there. Hayley continued through to the open plan lounge and kitchen, starting to feel conscious of her own nakedness for the first time. It too was empty. She walked over to the French windows and tucked herself behind the curtain to look out. The hope that Kate might have let herself out onto the balcony to enjoy the first of the morning sun disappeared when she saw the empty plastic chair, still covered in a faint dusting of sand. Kate was not sitting there, nor had she that morning.

  Hayley drew the curtains back closed and looked around the room. Kate’s bag was gone. A sinking feeling ran through her as she walked back to the bedroom where they had so casually discarded clothes the night before. Hers still lay on the floor in a tangled mess. Kate’s were missing.

  Perhaps, a hopeful, desperate voice from within told her, Kate had left early to get them both breakfast. But surely she would have left a note? Hayley scoured the kitchen for a sign of one, but there was nothing. No indication at all that Kate had ever been there.

  The first two tears fell and she brushed them away angrily with the back of her hand. Getting involved with people was dangerous. How had she let herself get in a position where her heart could break like this?

  She walked back to the bedroom and threw on a pair of shorts and an old vest top. There was no point looking her best. There was no point making an effort. If last night had been worth it, if she had been worth it, then Kate would still be here.

  Coffee seemed the logical way forward. Food was out of the question. As she waited for it to filter through, she turned the events of the previous evening over and over in her head. Each look. Each touch. Every word that had passed between them. She replayed it in minute detail, looking for the moment when she had done something wrong.

  But there was nothing.

  Try as she might, she simply couldn’t see what she had done. When they had drifted off to sleep in each other’s arms, Kate had looked as happy as she had felt. There wasn’t a look in her eyes that warned she was getting ready to flee. There was nothing to say that now she had completed some elaborate scheme to finally get her own way, that would be enough and she would be gone for good.

  Eventually, as she made herself some toast, the tears fell harder and she didn’t try to stop them. She had drunk that first cup of coffee slowly, giving Kate time to return with breakfast and for it all to be a misunderstanding. She hadn’t walked through the door. Hayley knew every coffee shop and store serving breakfast in a five-mile radius. If Kate was coming back, it would have happened by now.

  She forced the toast down her throat, even though she felt sick, not hungry. It tasted like dust in her mouth and swallowing was made harder through the sobbing tears. She had been a fool and now she was paying the price.

  She took a bite out of the second slice and put it back on the plate. It was too difficult to keep eating. How was she going to face the day ahead? How, after reaching the highs of last night, could she get dressed and head down to work as if nothing had even happened? Marco was working the lunch shift and she knew if he didn’t question her outright, then he would do so with his eyes. The shame of her failings as a woman were too much to bear.

  She had given her all. In the end, it still hadn’t been enough.

  Numb, she threw the remains of toast away and placed the used plate in the sink. She would wash up later. Normally fastidious about keeping the small apartment clean, instead she was filled with apathy. There was no point in keeping a tidy house if she couldn’t fundamentally keep anyone else in it.

  Another retch of tears and she walked through the bathroom. She was loathe to wash the smell of Kate off her skin, knowing now she would never feel it again. Each movement of her body was a reminder of what they had shared and with each passing second, the reminder became more painful. She flicked on the light and began to remove her top while it stuttered into life.

  Hayley froze mid-movement, her arms in the air. Through the gap in the material, she failed to see her reflection.

  The cabinet door was open.

  She yanked her top the rest of the way off, her eyes seeing the box of medication before anything else. Her brain tied all the pieces together in less than a second. No, no, no, no.

  No.

  A frantic fear clawed up her throat and the devastation of a broken heart was swept aside in the sudden panic.

  Kate knew. She knew.

  The thought ran around her brain, bashing itself against the sides and not letting anything else in. For what felt like minutes although may only have been seconds, Hayley was paralysed. She had lived this moment over and over in her nightmares. The ever-watchful sense she had carried with her for years, had finally let her down. She had let her guard drop and walked herself into a trap of her own making for the sake of one night in the arms of another woman.

  A woman who she thought she loved, but who would never love her back now.

  That, Hayley knew, was the least of her problems. She looked around the room, thoughts of a shower gone. In its place, she did a quick inventory, scanning for the possessions she would take with her and the ones she could leave behind.

  She had experienced heaven and it had led her straight into hell.

  The act of planning to flee kicked her brain from its foetal state and into life. She ran to the bedroom and grabbed her bra from the floor. She pulled the tank top back on, the fact it didn’t match her shorts not even a consideration.

  She had to move. Kate knew, but Hayley didn’t know for how long this information had been sitting out there. Had she had the chance to tell anyone yet? If Hayley could just get to her first, it might be okay.

  If Hayley could just sile
nce her before she had chance to tell anyone.

  The words echoed her father’s confessions and she retched, the half-digested toast getting stuck at the back of her throat. She made it to the bathroom and threw up, forcing it out so she could get her feet moving.

  It didn’t matter now what memories she carried with her. Her only option was to find Kate and try to explain. There had to be a way to make Kate promise she wouldn’t tell anyone. Not anyone in the town that had become her home. Not one of Kate’s friends or family in a far-off location who didn’t know what the revelation of this secret would do to her. The clock ticking towards the twenty year anniversary of her father’s conviction meant that she was about to become a public commodity again.

  Hayley desperately wanted to believe that Kate wouldn’t see her that way. Even if her pleading fell on deaf ears, then there was a chance that Kate would seek revenge for being duped. She wouldn’t know, couldn’t understand the hell that Hayley had gone through for those years. What damage it would do if she sold her location and new identity to fund the next few years of travels. It made Hayley sick to think about it, but how well did she know Kate, really? It had only been a few weeks and that wasn’t long enough to guarantee that someone could be trusted with your life.

  As Hayley grabbed her keys and headed out the door, all her biggest fears surrounded her and filled her head. They crashed around her like a wave and she knew that she could drown in them. It was that same helpless sensation that had made her life a living hell until she managed to escape it the first time.

  She left her apartment, hollowed by the sensation that she wouldn’t survive it twice.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chad had loaned her his motorbike without question. A vesper he had hired from the city, it wasn’t her usual mode of transport, but that didn’t matter right now. He had taken one look at Kate’s tearstained face and offered to drive her to wherever she wanted to go. He had stood in the doorway of his hostel room in his shorts and reached out for her.

  When she flinched away, he had just nodded and retrieved the keys from his bag. He handed her the helmet, far too big, but better than nothing, and told her to take as long as she needed. She could see him scanning her body for signs of a fight, signs of trauma, but she knew there was nothing. The only physical pain she felt was entirely self-inflicted and she had revelled in every moment of it.

  The emotional pain dwarfed it in comparison.

  She’d driven like a fool but she didn’t care. The roads had been quiet in the early morning. Even the commuter traffic was nothing in the town and the only vehicles on the road that led to the next city along were big trucks and hotel transfer coaches. The occasional car honked its horn at her but she ignored it, weaving in and out of the traffic as she had learned to do in Phuket.

  Kate drove with no intentions, but when she arrived at her destination, it seemed logical that she had been aiming for here all along. The gate to the Parque Natural Granadilla was once again locked, but that would not stand in her way. In her shorts and with only a carelessly filled backpack, she had climbed over in no time and dropped to the ground the other side. Inside the perimeter fence, she felt safe. The park was huge and no one would find her there.

  Right now, Kate really didn’t want to be found.

  She couldn’t face Pablo. Did he know his best friend was actually someone else? How had Hayley, sorry, Rachael, been able to lie to all of them so smoothly about who she really was? How many other women had she lured into her bed with the playing-hard-to-get attitude?

  Was it a cunning and deceptive trick she had learned from her father?

  The anger, the fear and something else, harder to name that almost felt like disgust mixed with shame, rose up in her again. Just thinking about Hayley made her furious. Then she would think back to the night before. Every touch had felt so real. So honest. How could that be when everything else between them had been a lie?

  Her shins caught on the long sharp grass, tearing at the skin. Stomping through the tears, she had veered off the narrow path and into the scrubland. She blindly course-corrected, the pain of the cuts almost a physical exorcising of the pain she was feeling inside.

  Last night, with Hayley’s hands on her, inside her, she had almost said the words. They had been about to leave her mouth when an orgasm, the last of many, had crashed over her and took them from her mouth with a gasp. But she had felt them. She had been willing to say them.

  I love you.

  Were any other words so dangerous?

  She hadn’t said it, but that would never undo the fact she had felt it. The connection between them had been strung like a wire, throbbing and humming alive in the night. Now, in the light of day, those feelings were battered by darker ones, but they had left her. They had not disappeared when she had seen Hayley staring back from her phone, her face captioned by a single word: evil.

  The woman she knew didn’t seem evil. Didn’t feel like the person she had read about in the darkness before her legs had found the strength to get her the hell out of there and into the cool, pre-dusk air. She had walked to Pablo’s in her bare feet, not feeling the gravel underneath as she continued to delve into the digital archives. The cost of a data connection seemed a laughably insignificant concern. Halfway up the hill, the pain had numbed enough for her to approach each click like a research article; a necessary act to discover more about her subject.

  Perhaps that, she thought as she pulled a bottle of water from her bag and allowed her feet to stop their incessant marching from the mess she had found herself in, had been her fatal mistake. She had left without asking Hayley to explain. Without demanding to know what the hell was going on.

  Instead, she had read her way through the news and out of date sensationalism. The picture it had painted was more bad than good. Instead of hearing Hayley out, she had been left with the impressions of others. Could they be wrong?

  She desperately wished they could be. That the woman she knew now was the real one. But wasn’t that the mark of an effective psychopath? Convincing you they were normal enough to get into the car with? To go home with?

  To go to bed with.

  A shudder of horror racked her body at the thought, incongruent with the shudders she had felt the night before. Her mind played tricks on her, imagining alternative scenarios of a morning that might have been. Would she would have shown her true colours? A darker side of herself? Might she have done something in the comfort of her own apartment that would have given the game away?

  Or would she have woken up, made them both breakfast and continued with the elaborate lie until she was able to draw Kate in even closer?

  So many questions and there were no answers. That was the hardest part of this whole mess, Kate knew. There couldn’t be any answers without asking Hayley outright. After everything she had read, she wasn’t sure she would be able to believe her words regardless. The plans and dreams she had enjoyed yesterday of their relationship developing, growing into something unique and special, lay shattered all around her.

  The memory of her kisses felt like a betrayal, bringing back those words with them. I love you.

  Kate had fallen in love with a ghost. A spectre. As real as if she had brought the perfect woman to life with nothing more than the power of her imagination.

  The last information about Rachael Taylor Chapman’s whereabouts was from an article years ago. Even then, it had been purely speculation, naming somewhere in Southern Francee. She had disappeared once her most recent court action had been completed and the libel award had been made. Fallen off the face of the planet and landed back as someone else, behind a bar in a sleepy little foreign town.

  The face in the pictures from back then was haunted. Haunted and hunted. Of that, Kate was sure. But was she haunted by her own guilt, or haunted by her own foolishness for believing in her father? That was the real question. That and the question of what Kate was going to do next.

  Hayley’s fake life had been convinci
ng. There was every chance Kate was the only person who knew the answer to where Rachael Taylor Chapman was. If she wasn’t really innocent, as so many of the tabloids had indicated, then it would almost be a public service to let people know where she was. After all, Kate had no way of knowing if she was really the first person Hayley had allowed herself to be with, or if she was the last in a long line of girls who came through the town and disappeared, presumed moved on to other things.

  Perhaps Pablo really did know the truth and the backpacker’s hostel was an elaborate facade to lure more young women in? Didn’t serial killers sometimes band together? She’d watched a documentary on it when she was at university, late at night when there was nothing else on TV, eating a bowl of microwave ramen noodles and thinking how stupid people were to allow themselves to get into that kind of situation in the first place.

  She shook the thought from her head. That was insane. She was letting the midday heat and her imagination get the better of her, that was all. Pablo wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  Strange she could make that assumption of him, but the doubts about Hayley would not leave her. But Pablo hadn’t been in her bed - twice - and certainly hadn’t wormed his way into a space inside her heart.

  As she reached the spot where the two of them had shared such an amazing time only a week or so before, Kate knew she had to make a decision. Did she give Hayley a chance to explain herself or did she walk away now and leave the whole thing behind?

  Even if she could bring herself to believe that Hayley was telling the truth, could she ever get over such a cruel and brutal betrayal?

  Chapter Nineteen

  As the sun gave way from noon to late afternoon, Hayley became increasingly frantic. She had spent every moment of the day looking for Kate. She hadn’t eaten or even taken a drink of water and she’d rendered herself virtually delirious in the heat.

  Her first port of call had been obvious. She had raced up the hill to Pablo’s, pushing her old car harder than it had ever been driven before. It had screamed as she took the hill too fast, threatening to slide on the gravel when she had hit the turn at the top. Fear and determination had kept her on the road and she had pulled onto the makeshift car park next to Pablo’s hostel with a grind of brakes and gears.