Messed Up and Magic: (A New Adult Romance Novel)

by Stone, Holly

  Messed Up and Magic

  By

  Holly Stone

  Messed Up and Magic – Copyright © 2015 Holly Stone

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United Kingdom. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Art by Holly Stone - Image purchased from www.fotolia.com

  Edited by Craft Write Editing

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Also by Holly Stone

  About the Author

  Playlist

  Chapter 1

  AMY

  I don’t remember the first time I saw Jack. We grew up in the same small town, would have attended the same school, and must have passed each other on the streets so many times when we were skinny kids more interested in our toys and mates and too consumed by our own troubles to notice each other.

  I do remember when he started coming in to buy his chips after school, looking so tall in his uniform. He was always shabby but clean, tie loose at his neck, leather bands on his wrists, big hands sorting through his change and gripping the counter while he waited. He never looked at me when he ordered, but instead focused on the gaudy menu behind my head, even though he knew exactly what he wanted. As I shovelled his dinner into the polystyrene tray, I would feel his gaze following me, watching when he thought he wouldn’t be caught, dark eyes seeking a safe place to rest. I always wondered what he was thinking on those nights when he would sit next to the window, sipping hot tea, contemplating his homework, eating in my fish and chip shop rather than at home. I would catch him looking around as if to check he wasn’t outstaying his welcome, glancing at his watch, rising and packing up slowly to delay his departure. Maybe he thought that I pitied him and maybe that’s why he never said bye when he left.

  I knew most of my customers by name, which was inevitable when you live in a small town and work in a family business. The same people passed through each week, some sharing local news and bits about their day. I’m a chatty person, I suppose, when it’s about things that don’t mean anything. Some people wear their loneliness like a brightly coloured cloak; it shimmered on the backs of the older people who used the place as a social club. I never minded that. It made the job I loathed seem meaningful in a small way.

  Jack wore his loneliness like an undershirt, tucked in close to his body, somewhere you would only glimpse if you looked hard enough and in the right light. I never let on that I noticed.

  Until that night.

  Chapter 2

  JACK

  I was used to feeling as though I was balancing on a ledge and that any little thing might knock me down. I’d lived with the feeling for so long I’d gotten complacent, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I turned down the path to home and saw all my stuff packed up on the doorstep.

  I shouldn’t have been but I was.

  Darren had finally managed to poison my mum into kicking me out. He wasn’t the first of her scumbag boyfriends to try but he was the first to succeed. None of them liked the competition for her affections. Not that there was much affection knocking around for any of us that rivalled mum's love of cigarettes and booze.

  I should have been expecting it. My eye was still swollen from the swing that he took at me the night before, but his nose would take longer to heal. The fight had obviously been the final straw and it couldn’t have been worse timing.

  My ears were already burning from the November cold, the skin on my hands cracking across the knuckles from walking to and from work without gloves. As I neared the front door I reached down to unzip my holdall and check through to make sure everything was there. The TV was on inside the house, blasting out the usual rubbish. I could hear Darren laughing and the smug sound of it made me want to smash my fist through the door and pulverise his fat, red face until there was nothing left but bloody meat. But this place wasn’t worth fighting for.

  He could have it.

  I shouldered my guitar bag and holdall, and grabbed the dustbin liner and satchel from the ground. I didn’t want to think about the way my heart was beating or acknowledge the sheer hopelessness I felt, so I focused on getting moving as quickly as I could, not wanting to give Darren the satisfaction of watching me skulk away, or to see any pathetic attempt my mum might make to convince me she felt bad about what she was allowing to happen.

  There are moments in life when you realise how truly alone you are. I felt hollow with it, brittle and dark. I had one foot dangling over the edge of that ledge as I followed the path back up to town, not knowing what to do next, and it was terrifying. My phone rested in the pocket inside my jacket but there was no one I could call, no one I wanted to see me at my lowest and no one who wouldn’t pity me. I didn’t want to hear the hesitation in their voice when I told them what had happened and they realised I might be hoping for a place to stay. Even my close friends weren’t in a position to offer me that. I’d thought through this situation so many times but never come up with a satisfactory plan. I guess deep down I’d hoped my mum would prove herself to be more loyal.

  I knew that what I had in my bank account wouldn’t cover a hotel room, not until I was paid in a few days. Even then it would only get me by for a couple of nights, maybe. I’d always wondered what circumstances led to people sleeping out in the freezing cold, and felt that creep of uncomfortable sympathy that made me not want to look too closely at them in case I saw they were just like me.

  The parade of shops in North Riding town centre was lit by the synthetic orange glow of the street lamps that ran either side. Without the bustle of shoppers it was eerily quiet, and I could hear the hum of electricity passing through the lamps and the crackle of litter as it tumbled on the wind. It was so late that even the fast food stores were closed up. My friend Cheng’s parents’ restaurant was shuttered and the lights were on in the flat upstairs. It looked warm up there, behind the curtains that kept out the dark winter night.

  The holdall on my shoulder weighed a ton and my hands were cramping from clutching the other bags. I needed to sit down, rest, and take some time to think through my next move, but somehow taking a seat on a bench felt too prophetic, too close to where I might be heading. The war memorial had steps so that was where I went, sitting then resting my gear on the pavement in front of me. I reached for my phone and started internet searching for local hotels and bed and breakfasts, just in case there would be something I could afford. There was no transport running late so I wouldn’t be able to go too far. I called one that was a few roads away but the answer-machine clicked in straight away. I called another that only had a family room available and cost twice what I had in the bank.

  There had been a lot of low points in my eighteen yea
rs. Times when I’d felt as if something had hollowed me out and left only a thin shell behind that would crumble with just a little more pressure. This was so past all that.

  By the time I’d accepted defeat my hands were trembling and I wasn’t sure if it was from the cold, the panic, or an unholy mixture of the two. I rested my forearms against my knees and clasped my hands together, folding in on myself and swallowing against my burning throat. It was at that moment that I heard steps cutting through the quiet, then the push of a door.

  I don’t know what I think about religion, but it is something I have contemplated, wondering if we are just dots that appear and disappear in this gigantic complex universe or if there might be more to our mortal coil than we can see with our eyes. When Amy stepped out of the door of her fish and chips shop, I felt closer to believing there was more than I’d ever been. She’d always been there, a point of consistency at times when there was little stability in the rest of my life. The fish shop had been a refuge of warmth. Maybe that was why I’d chosen a place to sit that was so close. Just being near her was reassuring somehow, but I still didn’t want her to see me at my lowest and most pathetic.

  Amy didn’t notice me at first, concentrating instead on locking up and dropping the shutters. She had left her uniform inside and was wearing jeans with a zipped up navy hooded top and had a big slouchy handbag over her shoulder. She looked tired, not surprising so late in the evening, and I was torn between wanting to watch her and wanting to hide myself, but there was no way I could move away without drawing more attention. We hadn’t ever spoken past me ordering my dinner and her telling me how much it cost, but I’d been going into The Chubby Friar for years and it kind of felt like a second home. If she saw me she might say hi, but I hoped that would be it. My throat was still burning and I knew if I had to talk it would give away more about how I was feeling than I wanted her to know. I looked at the ground.

  AMY

  I was dead on my feet but that wasn’t unusual at closing time on a Friday night. As usual I felt coated in grease and the smell of fried food was on every part of me. I noticed it most when I stepped out the back to put the rubbish in the bins. The first swell of fresh night air brought the odour of fish out enough to make me wrinkle my nose. Funny, when I’d been standing in the stink for over eight hours. I went back in and washed my hands, a silly routine since the first thing I did when I got through the door of my flat upstairs was to strip off my clothes and stand under the shower.

  The restaurant area was dark as I passed through, shadows dancing as the wind blew a nearby tree over the light cast by the street lamp. My eyes were focused on the door, then on my hands as I fumbled with the keys and finally the handle that would take me to freedom. I locked the door and moved to the edge of the shop to activate the shutters. As they lowered I closed off another day in my mind, relieved that it was over, terrified that another had passed and I was still there.

  The door to my flat was to the side and as I turned to walk the ten or so steps I scanned the wide pavement area in front. My eyes immediately landed on Jack, who was sitting on the steps of the war memorial. I looked away for a second; that familiar unease about noticing him was there, but the image I’d collected of him in that glimpse was enough to know that something was up. He was almost folded in on himself, his eyes seemed blank and the usual downward slant of his eyebrows, that made him look a little mournful, was exaggerated. But it was the purple swelling around his right eye and the pile of belongings at his feet that worried me. What I didn’t know was what to do about it. We weren’t friends, we were functional with each other – customer and patron – but he had been my customer for so long that to not acknowledge him when we were the only ones out in the deserted night seemed impossibly remote. Before I got too far along the pavement I looked back at him. He wasn’t looking up this time, eyes on his phone. I stopped walking and stood still.

  “Hey.” My voice sounded ridiculously loud in the silence.

  Jack looked up and did that guy head-nod thing that meant ‘hey’ without having to say anything.

  “You okay?” I asked, even though the answer was obvious.

  His eyes were fierce black, burning with such intensity that it made me shiver. I wasn’t scared of him. He was just a kid, at least five years younger than me, and I’d watched him grow from a boy into this fledgling of a man, his chin dark with a day’s growth and hands that seemed too big for his lean frame. He still had that boyishness about him that made me want to look after him, feed him, give him a place to be if he didn’t have anywhere else. He looked like he didn’t have anywhere else. Why else would he be sitting in the deserted town centre with a pile of stuff that looked like all his worldly possessions at his feet? He didn’t answer my question and looked terribly uncomfortable, as though he wanted to crawl inside his giant holdall to get away from me. His hair was almost black in the sparse light, long on the top and shaved up the sides so close I could see his scalp. It looked as soft as velvet, too vulnerable to be exposed to the savage bite of winter.

  I took another step forward. “Whatcha doing out here in the freezing cold?” I rubbed my arms where the wind was pricking through my thin sweatshirt. His ears looked pink and tender.

  Jack looked to the side, up the road in the direction he always walked when he left my restaurant; towards home maybe.

  “I’m waiting for someone,” he said finally and I jumped at the sound of his deep voice.

  “Yeah?” I said, not really believing him. “You leaving town?” I nodded at the ramshackle pile at his feet.

  He shook his head.

  “You done something bad so you need to leave under the cover of darkness?” I was trying to lighten the situation but outside of my head my words sounded flippant and mean. He looked up at me with such a serious expression I had to reach out and fiddle with the strap of my bag so I had somewhere else to look. The wind gusted again, whipping my hair into tangled strands across my face and burning against my cheeks and neck. I wanted to get inside. “Something happen at home?” I said eventually. Up the road a girl laughed raucously and we both looked in the direction of the noise.

  “It’s not your problem, okay?” he said roughly.

  “You’re right, it’s not. So I’ll just go and let myself into my warm flat and forget you’re sitting out here in the freezing cold, yeah? I’ll sleep really easy with that on my conscience.”

  He mumbled a curse and looked at his feet again. I waited. Sometimes silence is all the encouragement anyone needs.

  “Her scumbag boyfriend has been trying to get rid of me for months. Seems like he succeeded tonight.”

  “You get kicked out of home, Jack?”

  He looked at me when I said his name as if he was surprised I knew it. He’d never introduced himself, I suppose, but I’d heard his friend call to him a few years back and he looked like a Jack. I guess that must be why I remembered it.

  “Yeah,” he said eventually.

  “You got somewhere to go?”

  He looked off into the middle distance again and I knew he didn’t. He didn’t want to admit it but he didn’t want to lie to me either. I had to admire his pride, and his reluctance to be dishonest even when he was in such a shitty situation. I walked forward and picked up a crumpled black bin liner that felt like it contained his bedding and started walking towards my flat. I got about four paces before I looked back at him over my shoulder. He was still sitting there. “You coming, Jack, or do I have to drag you by the ear?”

  The left side of his mouth pulled up at the corner and he shook his head slightly as if he couldn’t quite believe I was real.

  “You sure?” he asked, sounding like he really hoped I was. I wasn’t really. I was never sure about anything but I was good at putting others first. I was a pro at that.

  Out on that gloomy vacant street it seemed like I had no choice but to rescue him. What I didn’t know was that he was going to rescue me right back.

  Chapter 3
r />   JACK

  As I followed Amy through the red door next to The Chubby Friar and up the narrow stairs to her place, I was about as torn as I’d ever been. I mean, I couldn’t deny that I was relieved to be out of the cold, but as my guitar swung and knocked against the wall and I watched her jean covered arse sway up the stairs in front of me, I knew it was going to be awkward.

  At the top of the stairs Amy pushed open a door and walked us directly into a small lounge. It was shabby but cosy, an amalgamation of odd bits of furniture with throws and cushions in bright colours. There was a long sofa facing a medium-sized flat screen TV. In the corner there was an open door that led into a small galley kitchen and a closed door that I guessed must have been the bedroom. She dropped the bag on the floor next to the sofa and looked around.

  “It’s not much,” she said, “but I don’t stay here all the time, only when I have a few late shifts in a row.”

  I nodded, and we stood for a few strained seconds. “Can I get you a drink?” Amy asked, starting towards the kitchen. “I have juice, coke, or a beer if you fancy. Maybe something hot?”

  I wanted a big cup of builder’s strength tea with three sugars to banish the cold in my bones, but my mind was spinning and I knew a beer would take the edge off. One beer was always my limit.

  “A beer, if that’s okay.”

  “I wouldn’t have offered if it wasn’t,” she said and disappeared for a moment.

  I was still holding everything when Amy came back.

  “You can put all that down, you know,” she said, holding out a beer. The heat was already condensing on its sides and her fingers were shining wet.

  I put the holdall and my guitar next to the bag she’d carried up and took the beer. The freezing glass made me shiver but it tasted so good I gulped down half. She was watching me when I looked back at her, a beer in her other hand, still standing.

  “So…” Amy looked around thoughtfully. “There’s only one bedroom so you’ll have to crash in here. You got bedding?”