by Ivory Quinn
She was so away with the fairies that she didn’t notice the still figure on her doorstep until she was halfway up the path and it was too late to turn away. “Gabriel.” The name poured out of her in a whispery rush of silvered breath and she couldn’t stop it. Her whole world condensed down to the metre between them, like everything else had just fallen away. Silence was ringing loudly in her ears and she swayed as panic tried to swarm her.
“You weren’t answering your phone.” He said softly. “I had to know you were okay.”
Some dreadful, nameless emotion clawed its way up her throat, but she forced it down, surprised to find rage welling beneath it. “I’m fine.” She lifted her chin and tried to breathe normally. It faltered slightly when he stepped towards her into the light. He looked awful. Dark circles smudged his eyes and his face looked haggard, as though he hadn’t slept for days.
“Jax said you dropped.” His hands made helpless shapes in the air between them, wanting to reach out and knowing he no longer had the right.
“Yeah, on Saturday.” And every day since, she added silently, remembering the panic attacks and the tears. When he continued to absorb her presence like a starving man, without movement, she sighed. “Look, it’s cold out here. Do you want a coffee?”
“Please.” He stepped aside as she moved to unlock the door, but she didn’t miss the way he leaned in to inhale the fragrance of her hair as she passed. It made her throat ache with a longing so sharp it felt like her lungs were paralysed. Forcing herself to keep moving, she pushed through the door and hung her coat up, woodenly going through the motions of lighting the fire as he came in behind her.
After a few moments of silence, he retreated to the kitchen and she heard him filling the kettle. For a long moment she contemplated making a run for the door and going back to Jax, but she knew they had to have this out sooner or later.
“I’m sorry.” He said eventually as they sat by the fire with their mugs. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“I know you are.” She replied evenly. “That doesn’t make what you did any less damaging.”
“I know. I’ve never...lost it like that before.”
“Is this where you tell me you’ll never do it again and I have to come back?” Hurt shredded her chest cavity as she tried to swallow down the bitterness.
For a few moments his mouth opened and closed, like a fish gasping for breath, and then he panicked. “You are coming back, aren’t you?”
“No Gabriel. I’m not.” And, like that, it was as though a burden had been lifted from her.
“But I’m sorry! It was an accident! I love you, you know I love you!” He almost fell out of his chair in his mad scramble to get to her side. “I love you Noelle. You have to come back.” He flung his arms around her waist and she stroked his hair as he wept into her side.
“Gabriel, I know you love me. God knows I love you back. It’s just that sometimes love isn’t enough.” She sighed. “Love isn’t enough to fix this. I can’t fix this. The only person that can fix it is you, and I don’t think you’re ready to accept the things you need to learn.”
“Tell me what I need to learn.” He begged. “I’ll do whatever I need to if it makes you come back.”
“We can’t have this conversation with you wrapped around me.” She said helplessly, pulling her hands away.
“Then don’t talk. Feel. If you love me, come back to me.”
“Gabriel stop!” She struggled against his arms until he released her and she fled to stand by the mantel piece. “I’m not coming back. I can’t. I can’t trust you, because you don’t even know why you are the way you are.”
“Of course I know.” Confusion bloomed on his face as he slowly rose to his feet.
“No, you don’t. You’re lying to yourself and everyone around you.” Unable to bear the guilt of that gaze, she began pacing. “Gabriel, it’s not about control. It’s never been about control. If that’s what you think, you’ve missed the whole point of what dominating a submissive is all about. Through all of those times in the playroom, you never had control of me. I had the safe word. I had the power. It was me that was in control all along.” She started to cry. “Whatever you did to me, it was because I let you do those things to me. I wanted them...and I have to live with that.”
“I don’t understand. What are you saying?” He hovered helplessly, less than a metre away.
“I’m saying that this has been about trying to fix yourself. All this time you haven’t been looking for someone to control, you’ve been looking for someone you couldn’t break. You’re still looking for that lost, scared, hurt, damaged little boy. You keep thinking that someone, some day is going to be stronger than you, someone that won’t let you down. But you’ll never find them Gabriel. Everyone breaks eventually. Even me. I can’t be trusted not to let you kill me, and until you can accept that, I’m only going to hurt you.”
“That’s...no...that’s not true.” He backed away slowly, shaking his head and wide-eyed.
“It is Gabriel. You need help. What happened to you was wrong, so wrong, but you’re doing it to other people and that doesn’t make it right.”
“No.” Turning abruptly on his heel, he fled the house and vanished into the night.
Noelle stood on the doorstep and called his name until her voice was hoarse, but he didn’t return.
***
The days that followed were a washed out watercolour of her former life. She haunted her home like a ghost, silent and wan as she moved from space to space, with no purpose other than to re-enact the anguish of her past. She meant what she had said to Gabriel, every word of it, but the finality of it was starting to sink in and the future seemed to yawn before her like a bottomless abyss. She didn’t understand how people say your world ‘crashes down around you’. Hers didn’t. It fell away in echoing silence, sucking the air out of her life. There was no raging maelstrom swirling about her – instead it was as though everything was muted, like she existed in a soundless vacuum.
She knew she was right. The more she thought about it, the more she realised he was trying to find some version of himself in the women he used. Underneath her hurt and sorrow swelled a tidal wave of pity for that beautiful, damaged man up on the hill. All this time he’d been hurting shadows of himself and it broke her heart.
She missed him desperately. When the silence got too much, she listened to music. Where before it had been too painful to hear, now it was a comfort. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine him there...the way his hands absently moved as though he was unable to help himself conducting an invisible orchestra.
The nights were the worst. Climbing into a cold bed alone was chilling to the soul, as well as to the feet, but it was that moment where she drifted in between sleeping and waking and realised that his arms would never curl around her again that hurt the most. She’d become used to exchanging the tales of the day under the cover of darkness, gazing out across the city as their quiet words wove home and family in a blanket around them. It wasn’t until she’d walked away from him that she realised how much they’d talked about the things that mattered. The silence threatened to swallow her whole.
She missed his voice. His clean, fresh fragrance. The way he laughed. The feel of his arms as they curled around her and chased away the winter. If she’d had any doubt that she loved him, the sheer, raw force of her heartache confirmed it. There are some kinds of damage that can be shored up, but never truly repaired. It’s much like the breaking of an ornament – you can glue it together so tightly that the cracks are all but invisible, but the flaws are still there, like fault lines beneath the surface - moments of weakness that could fracture at the slightest pressure. Her heart felt like that ornament - smashed and pieced back together, with fault lines spiderwebbing the facade.
Jax came by to visit a couple of times and they had dinner together. He knew she was hurting, but seemed to understand that it was the natural fall-out from a break-up, rather than a residual effec
t of the incident. After a week he just started calling instead, listening to her outbursts with patient kindness.
Neither of them was particularly surprised when the school called and informed her that her employment had been terminated with immediate effect. Noelle just accepted the news and hung up. In the face of the fact that she’d broken up with Gabriel, maybe forever, it just didn’t seem that important. Her heart was too busy tearing itself to shreds for love to care much about paying the bills.
When there was a knock on the door in the early evening, almost ten days after her talk with Gabriel, Noelle nearly didn’t answer it. She knew it wasn’t Jax, because he’d already texted her that morning, and she wasn’t up to dealing with Gabriel. She wasn’t in the mood for cold-callers or salesmen either, so she sat on the stairs and waited for them to go away.
When they knocked a third time, loudly and persistently, she finally caved and opened the door, astonished to find two police officers standing on her doorstep.
“Miss Winters?” They all looked so young these days. This officer could surely be no more than eighteen, with his clean cut good looks and trendy hair. “Noelle Winters?”
“Yes, that’s me. Is everything okay?” She looked from one to the other as their faces turned grave.
“Miss Winters, may we please come in?”
Chapter seventeen
Gabriel was dead.
It didn’t matter how many times she said it or thought it, she couldn’t make it seem real. Dead? Gabriel? That vibrant man, roaring with life? How could he be dead? It didn’t make sense. She’d seen him just over a week ago.
At first she’d thought the officers were joking, that they were kids trying to prank her, but they showed her their warrant cards and allowed her to call the station. She still wasn’t convinced, right up until they showed her the note. That thick, watermarked paper covered in Gabriel’s elegant, cursive script. She’d seen it a dozen times, watched him jot down lyrics as they passed through his thoughts on this self-same paper.
Kitten,
You were right. I always knew you were the one; I just thought it was for a different reason. I didn’t know you’d be the one that saved me from myself. Please don’t be angry with me that this is how I have to deal with it. Just once, this one time, I wanted to be in absolute control of my destiny. I know you’ll understand. I wish things could have been different. I wish that love was enough. I wish I was a better man, but I’m not. By the time you get this, I’ll be gone. I love you. I always have.
G
And that was it. He had written these few short lines to her and then opened his veins in the bath tub, while soft music had played in the background.
Noelle held the letter, shrouded in cold, anaesthetising plastic, and broke down. She had done this to him. She’d had truths that he wasn’t ready or stable enough to hear, and she’d thrown them in his face because he’d hurt her. She was the lowest of the low. A grade A bitch. She should have known he would take back control of his life in the only way that made sense to him. They’d had a whole damn conversation about it, back when they first got together. How could she have been so stupid that she didn’t see this coming? The thoughts crashed and whirled around in her head like a demented carousel, screaming both in volume and in silence, until she thought she was going crazy.
The officers tried to ask her questions, but she just couldn’t make any sense of what she wanted to say, and in the end they called Jax. He was the only person she could think of to be with her. They needed each other.
When they’d found the note and done the initial enquiries, they’d come straight to Noelle’s house, so Jax arrived with no idea what had happened. The officers broke the news to him and he just fell apart, weeping with a grief that was so raw it shredded every heart in earshot. He and Noelle clung to each other, like life rafts in a tumultuous sea, as the world buzzed and crashed around them.
Realising they were on a losing battle, the officers gently disentangled themselves and left them to their sorrow, promising to call back in the morning. With them gone, all sense of reality seemed to fade. Neither could make sense of a world that didn’t have Gabriel in it. How could they go on, just acknowledging his non-existence as though it was something about which nothing could be done? There had to be some mistake. Any minute now he’d come barrelling through the door with some perverse and subversive joke, and they’d know it had all been a mix-up. This just couldn’t be happening.
Finally, in an exhaustion of grief and disbelief, they sobbed themselves to sleep on the sofa in each others’ arms. It was too much just to face the day.
Noelle woke first the following morning and lay for a moment, wondering what she was doing on the sofa. Her neck hurt and the pale winter sun was stinging her eyes. Why hadn’t she shut the curtains? She made to stand up and the arms around her waist tightened. Just like that it all came crashing back in. Gabriel. The suicide. Jax was here and they’d cried themselves to sleep on the sofa. She remembered now.
Unwilling to disturb Jax, she settled back down and gazed at the fireplace, remembering the way Gabriel’s muscles had rippled beneath his shirt as he’d laid her fire. They’d kissed for the first time on this very sofa. It was a bittersweet memory. It had been the start of both the darkest and brightest time of her life.
She sensed when Jax awoke. His arms tightened almost imperceptibly beneath her fingertips and then he sighed a deep breath across the back of her neck. “Did it really happen?” His voice was cracked and raw, and she shivered.
“Yes. He’s gone.” She still couldn’t make any sense of it herself.
“Oh.” He let out another long, shuddering breath. “I thought...I hoped it was a nightmare.”
“I’m sorry.” She said, helpless to say anything else. She’d had Gabriel for a couple of fiercely joyful, short months. Jax had been his friend for years. She couldn’t imagine how he was feeling.
They got up and made breakfast, moving woodenly through the motions of normality. Noelle felt numb, as though her life had been packed with cotton wool. Everything was muffled and leaden. It seemed a fitting surround. She felt brittle and fragile, like spun glass. Through her puffy, reddened eyes it was as though the world was wrapped in cellophane, each item individually packaged in a weird gloss of newness, now that she was looking at it through eyes that would never be the same again.
Her eggs on toast tasted like ashes on her tongue and when it was her turn to shower, she stood beneath the water and let her tears mingle with the flood. She had done this. She had pushed him into killing himself and there was just no coming back from that.
As the news spread, and people didn’t find Jax at home, her house became the gathering place for those that had loved the enigmatic singer. Away from the prying eyes of the press, they sat around her living room in shaken silence, staring wide eyed at a future without their leader. All the band members were there, along with the manager John. They kept shaking their heads, as though to reaffirm that it wasn’t true, that he wasn’t really dead.
When the Police arrived around eleven, they weren’t really surprised to find everyone there, but it made finding somewhere quiet to speak to Noelle slightly difficult. They ended up in her bedroom. She perched on the bed and they sat on her dressing table stool and window sill, trying to get comfortable. Jax brought them coffee and for the first time they appeared a little star-struck. It shocked Noelle out of her numbness enough to raise the ghost of a smile.
“Surreal isn’t it?” She said. “They behave like normal guys and then it suddenly occurs to you that a megastar, who earns more in an hour than you do in a year, just brought you a coffee and called you ‘mate’.”
The cops laughed, embarrassed, as Jax sat on the bed next to Noelle. “I’m just a regular guy.” He said sadly. “I’m lucky. That’s all.” Noelle took his hand and leaned into his side for comfort.
“Miss Winters, I know this is difficult and it must seem pointless to you, but we need to ask a few q
uestions about the circumstances of Mr Hallow’s apparent suicide.” The older cop, a kind looking woman with soft brown hair, stated.
“You can ask.” Her throat was threatening to close, but she swallowed it down.
“Can you explain the contents of the note to us? It was clearly a private message.”
“Gabriel was...” brilliant...beautiful...sensual...vibrant...inspiring... “...damaged.” She swallowed again, thickly. “He was badly abused as a child. It went on for years. It left him with certain...hangups.”
“We found his...ah...equipment.” The woman said delicately and Noelle nodded, grateful she didn’t have to give details.
“He told me it was all about control. That he had been controlled so absolutely as a child, he couldn’t let go any more until he knew that everything in his world was utterly under his command. It was what broke us up – I didn’t know how to deal with it. Back when we first got together, I asked him about those teenagers...the ones that had committed suicide. I wanted to know why he hadn’t spoken out against suicide. He told me that he understood exactly why they’d done it. He couldn’t blame them for just once wanting to be in control over their lives. It was the last ounce of power they had and no-one could take it away from them. He respected that choice...thought it was brave.”
“So how did it come to this?” The officer asked gently. “Was it the breakdown of your relationship?”
