Ever After (Dirtshine Book 3)

by Roxie Noir

  They’re not. Biscuits are fine, but cookies are amazing, and England is really missing the fuck out.

  And most of all I’m sick of not knowing myself, because I didn’t think I was the kind of girl to jump into bed with a guy she barely knew after breaking off a three-year relationship, but I think we may have set some sort of sex record in the past few days, so here I am.

  Liam’s eyes flutter half-open just then and he looks at me, unfocused.

  “Come back,” he mumbles.

  “I gotta pee,” I say, and that seems to work because he goes back to sleep.

  I duck around the corner and put my hands over my face.

  What am I doing? I think to myself, over and over again.

  This isn’t right, it’s not normal, it’s not what I do.

  The thought leaves a sickly, sticky feeling in my chest. A deep feeling of having done something unnameably wrong.

  I can’t bring myself to get back into his warm, cozy bed. Not in the harsh, excruciatingly sober darkness of nearly-morning, when I feel like everything I’ve done in the past two days has somehow been monstrous and wrong.

  Even though he’s strangely beautiful when he sleeps, the lines of his muscles and tattoos fading softly into the deep shadows of the blankets. Even though this was amazing, and even though the amazing part wasn’t just the sex. I think I might like Liam, for real, but whatever I feel about that right now is overridden by everything else.

  I grab my clothes, dress in his cold hallway, try to convince myself that I’m doing this for Liam. That I’m going to leave because he deserves better than my miserably confused self, that he needs someone nice and tidy who won’t clutter his life like I would.

  Yeah, it’s bullshit, and I know it’s bullshit even as I tell it to myself. I’m leaving because the strongest impulse in the tangle of my heart right now is to go home, go where I feel like I know what I’m doing and I can start from there.

  I want my apartment, my bed, my sewing machine, my friends. I want to drown in work again and see my parents every other week and avoid weirdos on the subway.

  I’m not even telling him goodbye. I don’t know how to explain that this was great but I’m at the end of my rope right now, I don’t even know what I’m doing.

  I slip on my socks and shoes in the kitchen, find my jacket, pull it on quietly. Before I leave I glance one more time at Liam through his door, still sleeping, and it feels like a lead ball rattling around in my heart.

  There was one bright spot here, and I’m leaving him while he sleeps?

  His kitchen’s got a sideboard, and on it there’s an unopened envelope and a marker, so I write him a note. I leave my phone number, and I put it next to the sticky, dried wine that I spilled last night.

  Then I leave Liam’s cottage, the sun not even close to up yet.

  I leave the Toyota in the car park at the Brougham train station, then haul both my huge suitcases onto the first southbound train that’ll be making a stop at Manchester International. In the meantime, I discover that there’s a massive red wine stain on my jeans where I sat in it two nights ago.

  It makes me pause. It makes me consider getting off the train, going back to Brougham, driving back to Liam’s cottage and crawling into bed with him. Maybe he’s not even awake yet.

  I don’t. I remind myself that he has my phone number, and maybe he’ll call.

  Even though he’s kind of an asshole, he’s probably going to be pissed that I didn’t say goodbye, and I’m perfectly aware that our drunk-and-stoned sex bender might have been just that and nothing more, maybe he’ll call.

  I tell myself that over and over — he’ll call, phones work across oceans, if you end up wanting this to work out maybe it will — but I also know how fucking unlikely it is that we’ll be anything other than increasingly distant friends. That’s just what happens, even if he calls in the first place, and my heart sinks just knowing it.

  To distract myself, I pull out my phone, thinking I’ll go ahead and find a flight now, on the way to the airport, but it’s dead. Of course it’s dead, I was way too wasted to remember to charge it at Liam’s, and the train doesn’t have an outlet.

  I wake up a few hours later, when we finally get to Manchester Airport, and it takes me way too long to remember where I am.

  Then I throw up a few more times in the airport bathroom.

  The flight I get has to be the worst possible flight. It changes planes in Frankfurt, Germany, the opposite direction of New York, and then again in Atlanta, but as I pay two thousand dollars I don’t have for the last seat, I don’t even care. I just want to get home and out of this rainy nightmare country.

  I’m somewhere over the Atlantic when I jolt awake in my seat with a realization.

  Once we got high, we forgot to use condoms.

  I throw up in the plane lavatory. It’s the worst place of all.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Liam

  I wake up to the sun through my bedroom window, sheep bleating softly outside, and I reach one hand out to find Frankie. I may be fucking hungover and it may feel as though someone is attempting to play the xylophone on my brain, but I’ve got a crystal fucking clear memory of the important parts of the last two days.

  But there’s nothing. Just cool sheets and empty bed. I stretch further but all I find is the edge of my mattress, my fingers curling around it before I finally open my eyes.

  She’s gone. I’m not exactly Sherlock Fucking Holmes, but between the cold sheets and the silent cottage, she feels quite gone. Bad gone. Final gone.

  I close my eyes again, bury my face in the pillow. Count to ten, then twenty, try to convince myself that when I open my eyes she’ll be strolling in from the bathroom, flopping next to me in the bed.

  Thirty. Forty. No Frankie.

  It’s a long fucking time before I get myself out of bed. It’s late November in north England. The weather is shit, the floor is freezing, and the stone walls of the cheap rental cottage where I live have hardly any insulation at all. The sun is too low in the sky to give any real light, just weak and gray, cutting through the dirty windows like I’m in a jailhouse.

  I pull on trousers, a shirt, a sweater. Head pounding, stomach roiling. The act of getting dressed makes me break out in a cold sweat, and I lurch to the kitchen, grab the bottle of rum, take a couple of long swallows because I’m fucking hungover and Frankie’s gone.

  Maybe she left to get coffee. Americans love that.

  Maybe she wanted bagels or scones or pastries or whatever the fuck she eats in the morning.

  Blood pounds through my ears. Everything’s muffled and painful, so I take another few swallows, wait for it all to dim. I can tell myself what I want about where Frankie is, but I know none of it’s true. If nothing else, I still know enough to know I’m only lying to myself.

  If she were coming back, she’d have said so. If she were going for coffee or scones or something, she’d have said so. There’s only one reason for her to leave without waking me and I don’t have to be sober to know what it is.

  I lean against the counter, sweat still oozing from my pores. A flash of memory: Gavin and me, sunrise, London. Still up from the night before, a greasy diner with a bitchy waitress. Piles of bacon and eggs. Dirtshine had just gotten its first record deal and we’d celebrated properly.

  I latch onto it — the watery eggs, the puddles of grease — because somehow thinking about having lost my best friend is easier than having lost Frankie. It’s the dull pain of the past, not the sharp knife of the immediate.

  It’s because no one wants to be around you, not for long. And can you blame them? Can you really?

  Fucking look at yourself. You couldn’t even keep a bartending job.

  I shake my head, trying to clear it out. When that doesn’t work, I swallow more rum and wish I had something stronger. Even another joint would take the edge off a little, but those are long gone.

  How hard could it be to find something else?

>   This is how I got to be standing on a bridge railing in the first place.

  I never told her. I went home that night thinking of the pretty girl on the bridge. I went back into rehab, again, thinking of the pretty girl on the bridge. I moved to this shithole thinking of the pretty girl on the bridge, and I never told her.

  The fuck are you doing, you pointless waste of space?

  I sit at the table, face in my hands, and that’s when I notice the envelope. Something written on the back.

  It wasn’t there last night. A fresh wave of cold sweat trickles down my back, and I take another drink from the bottle to steady my nerves.

  Liam —

  I had to leave. Sorry.

  Frankie

  (732) 372-5598

  She didn’t. She could have stayed, and I know that and I’m sure she knew that. The phone number is cold fucking comfort, because what am I to do with that? It’s nothing. It’s a consolation prize for her presence is what it is. It’s part of her un-serious apology for leaving without saying goodbye.

  I wish she’d never shown up here. I wish she’d never walked into my pub. I wish she’d have left the first time I was rude to her.

  I slug down more rum. It burns slightly on the way down, but it’s a good pain, a familiar pain. I know what I’m doing when it comes to drinking straight from the bottle, but being heartbroken that a one-night-stand has left? Being upset that I’m unemployed?

  Fucking alien.

  I mean to stop once the table starts wavering in my vision. I really do, but instead I think about the night she got here. Watching the headlights pull up, the way my heart jumped when I heard her voice. Her mouth on mine. The way her freckles are everywhere on her skin, lighter in some places and darker in others.

  The way she tasted. The way she came, the way she felt, the way she moved like liquid. Best fuck of my life, hands down, no competition.

  The way she fell asleep in my arms. Twice.

  Fuck it. I dial the number. I haven’t got a plan, just the need to hear her voice, hear her tell me why she left.

  It rings. And rings. It rings until it goes her voicemail picks up: “Hi, you’ve reached Frankie Strauss, please leave your name...”

  I don’t.

  What the fuck did I think was going to happen, she’d have left and said nothing only to wait breathlessly for me to call her? Of course not. If she really wanted to talk to me she’d have talked to me this morning.

  I uncork the bottle and take another drink.

  Two hours later, the bottle is near-empty. I’ve done nothing in the intervening time except sit on my shit couch and go over a list of everything I’ve ever fucked up, starting with grade school. It’s a one-man pity party, rum next to me.

  Now that I’m good and drunk, ready for another disappointment, I pick up the phone and call her again.

  This time it goes straight to voicemail, and when I hear her recorded voice, I pitch the phone across the room where it hits a stone wall and then crashes to the floor. Probably shattered. I don’t fucking care.

  “I ought to take a fucking hint,” I tell the bottle. “A girl doesn’t answer and then shuttles you off to voicemail, it’s a fucking hint, innit?”

  The bottle answers with a slosh, another quick hit of warmth down my throat and through my veins. A Teflon coating over my mind and over my heart, deflecting everything that’s really wrong.

  “Why’d she even leave the number if she’s not going to answer?” I ask it, reclining my head back onto my shit sofa.

  Everything tilts, spins. My phone is still across the room, silent.

  Another two hours. I think, at least, because the bottle’s empty. It could be the next day for all I fucking know, it could be next week, and that’s the point.

  I’m on the floor, leaning against the cool wall. My phone’s in front of me, the glass shattered, barely usable.

  I call her again. I’ve lost track of the number of times. I’ve still not left her a message because I can’t bear to get through her outgoing one to the beep, but my finger and thumb are bloody from the splintered screen.

  “Hi, you’ve reached Frankie Strauss, please leave...”

  I hang up. I take a drink, leaning against the wall because I don’t think I can stand. Hit her number again.

  “Hi, you’ve reached Frankie...”

  Repeat.

  “Hi, you’ve reached...”

  I got the other bottle and I’ve managed to not piss myself, but the bathroom mirror seems to be broken. Sun’s getting low, maybe about to go down. Whatever day it is, doesn’t fucking matter.

  Just a bottle, maybe a bit more, didn’t used to get me this drunk, but it feels fucking good to be here again. To crawl inside this lovely warm blanket of alcohol where nothing that’s gone wrong can reach me.

  I get back to the floor where my phone is. Hit the button to dial Frankie.

  “Hi, you’ve reached Frankie Strauss, please your name and number after the beep, and when I’m available...”

  I hang up again, too chickenshit to go on. She can’t hear me like this, not again, because what if she suddenly remembers how we really met?

  Maybe it’s why she left — why stay with someone you know will implode someday, when your rich fiancé’s likely to take you back?

  The thought hits me like a brick to the face, and I close my eyes, tilt my head back against the stones. Try desperately to get my scattered thoughts into order for five seconds, just five fucking seconds, I only need five seconds.

  I have to go. That’s what it said, right? Something like that?

  I claw at the wall until I can stand. Put one foot in front of the other, nearly fall over myself, nearly vomit twice but I get to the kitchen. Collapse into a chair, the chair, the one where we fucked one night—

  I can’t.

  I reach out, my head practically on the cool wood of the table, fighting the urge to just lie down right there, but I think I know what happened. I know why she left.

  Finally, I grab the envelope, read the words on it slowly, painfully, as they swim in front of my eyes, her letters curling into themselves, combining, separating until at last I’ve got a handle on it.

  I had to leave. Sorry.

  What was it she said the other night, about how she left him? I close my eyes, hit my head against the table, try to remember.

  I left a note so he couldn’t talk me out of it.

  There it is. There’s the truth itself.

  It’s fucking Alistair. I don’t know what happened and I’ve got no fucking evidence and no cause at all, but in that moment, veins more whiskey than blood, I’m completely fucking certain.

  She went back to him. He made her, somehow, I don’t know. It’s a false fucking phone number, just to make me feel better, though why she bothered is beyond me.

  It’s over and it’s done and I’m some sort of blistering idiot to think that it could have ever been otherwise.

  I put my head down on the table and blissful darkness takes me over.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Liam

  I wake up cold, unforgiving stone beneath my back. I roll over without opening my eyes, hoping to find the wall, but there’s only more floor. I press my face against it, head hammering like I’m being split open. I’m going to vomit, I can tell. Not now but it’s simply a matter of time, my clothing entirely drenched through with sweat, the particular stink of a man who’s drunk everything and eaten nothing.

  “You awake now?” a female voice calls.

  “Fuck off,” I mutter, and the voice doesn’t bother to answer me.

  It takes me a long fucking while. To open my eyes, to lift my head, to wonder why the fuck there’s a strange woman in my house. Maybe I went out last night, somehow got myself to a pub, picked someone up, came back and gave a spectacular sexual performance I’m fucking sure.

  I almost hope I did. Frankie used me before crawling back to the Little Lord, no reason for me to not get my jollies.


  At last I’m sitting up, eyes open. I realize I’m sitting on concrete, leaning against a wooden bench. Take a deep breath, lift my eyes to find concrete walls, a stainless-steel toilet. A wall of bars.

  “Fuck,” I mutter out loud, resting my head against the bench. “Jesus Christ, fucking fuck me blind.”

  “Good morning to you as well,” says the woman’s voice, sounding distracted.

  I take a deep breath. I nearly vomit, but grit my teeth and swallow hard, determined that if I’m to be sick, I’ll at least do it in the toilet. Cold sweat slides from my hairline down my face, down my neck.

  I heave another breath, push myself up using the bench as leverage. I nearly vomit again, hands shaking, my heartbeat so fast I think it might beat straight out of my chest.

  I’m not sure I’d mind. Seems like there are things much worse than death right now. This, for one. I rest my elbows on my knees, breathe, swallow, then push myself to standing.

  Just in time to rush to the steel toilet and be ruinously, violently ill. I vomit until there’s nothing left in my stomach, and then I dry-heave for a good long while, just for good measure.

  Then I sit on the bench again and simply wish for death.

  Instead, after a while, the woman walks over. I couldn’t see her before, but she’s wearing a uniform, middle-aged, bottle-blonde hair, both hands on her hips, large key ring in one hand.

  “Got it all out?” she asks, pityingly.

  My whole body’s shaking, a tremor passing through me when I try to do anything, so I just nod, unable to even muster the energy to tell her to fuck off again.

  “Once we’ve got your paperwork together in a few hours we’ll be releasing you. Anyone I can call?”

  A sudden flash of memory: on the floor of my cottage, shattered phone in front of me. Dialing Frankie’s number, again and again. Her voicemail message.

  I clear my throat, try to force myself to stop sweating, shaking. There’s one person she can call, and to say he’s going to be disappointed is an understatement.