Closing her eyes briefly, she made a wish that it would bring its new owner as much pleasure as it brought her.
Then she handed it away. She would never see it again.
Chapter Six
Shane pauses halfway down the hall as he turns to study a painting hanging in a dark wooden frame. It’s one of my mother’s. She never really held down a steady job when she was alive; however, she managed to keep the household afloat with welfare payments and the money she made selling her paintings on St. Steven’s Green. She loved to paint scenery and sometimes portraits. Often she’d make me sit for her. There are dozens of paintings of me up in the attic. I hate looking at them because I find it weird seeing myself through the eyes of another person.
“Where did you get this?” Shane asks, his gaze roaming over the country scene depicted.
“My mother painted it. She did lots of pictures like this one. Do you like it?”
“Ah,” he says with a sharp breath, as though something has just made sense to him. “It’s very good. Your mother was a talented woman.”
“She was. Come on, everyone’s dying to meet you,” I say, linking my arm through his and leading him into the kitchen.
Clark is the first to greet Shane, thrusting his hand out for a shake and introducing himself. I catch sight of Ben shooting Lara an omg, he’s fucking hot look. Lara gives him an omg, I fucking know look back. I smile to myself a little in satisfaction.
Though to me Shane’s not just hot, he’s beautiful. Man-beautiful.
Dangerous, slippery-slope thoughts I’m having these days.
I put the grape juice in the fridge as Shane says hello to Ben and Lara, taking the seat at the table where I had previously been sitting.
“Oh, Jade, Shane took your chair. Now you’ll have to sit on his lap,” Ben chirps with a saucy wink.
Shane shifts to look at me apologetically. “I’m sorry, I didn’t…”
“Oh, would you stop? I’ll grab a chair from under the stairs,” I say, shaking my head at Ben. If I know my friend, he’s going to go out of his way to try to embarrass me tonight. Ben just has that way about him.
When I return with the chair, I set it down beside Shane, and we watch as Lara has her hair cut. Ben already washed it before Shane arrived. It’s hard to talk once he whips out the hairdryer, but we just about manage to make casual chitchat.
Ben takes me upstairs to wash my hair in the bathroom when he’s done with Lara. We return a few minutes later, and I find with relief that Shane and Clark are deep in conversation, about politics of all things. Lara looks like she’s ready to nod off from boredom.
I can’t help myself when I brush my hand along Shane’s shoulder as I pass him by. He stiffens and then relaxes, turning his head to stare up at me hotly. I shouldn’t be teasing him like this, but every time I see him I feel this overwhelming urge to touch him.
“Clark, will you call for the Indian now? That way it’ll be here once Ben’s finished with my hair.”
“Will do,” says Clark, standing to retrieve his phone.
Shane watches as Ben starts to trim the ends of my hair. I stare right back at him, unable to pay attention to Lara and Ben, who are talking about the latest episode of their favourite soap opera. My body gets all warm as we continue to fuck each other with our eyes. Jesus, I want him so badly.
The eye-fuck Olympics are interrupted only when Clark starts asking everyone what they want to eat. Shane’s voice is gravelly when he speaks. I feel a silly little satisfaction deep in my belly to know I’ve affected him. Immediately afterward I reprimand myself for being so careless. I know I can’t have a relationship with Shane, and yet here I am, leading him on.
The moment he breaks my heart, I’ll be straight back on the vodka, and that just can’t happen. There are too many people who need me sober and functioning.
The food arrives just as Ben has finished blow-drying my newly trimmed hair. Shane bends forward and reaches out to run his hand down it. I watch him curiously. A second later he pulls away and clears his throat, getting up to assist Clark in dishing out the Indian.
“So, tonight’s theme is anger,” Clark announces once everybody’s seated with their food.
Hmm, we’ve never done anger as a theme before.
“Someone care to explain?” says Shane with a bewildered expression.
“Clark’s a counsellor,” I tell him. “Every month he gives us a new theme, and we have to talk about it. The theme is always an emotion. You have to discuss the time in your life you felt the given emotion most intensely.”
“Ah,” he furrows his brow. “Do I have to take part?”
“Of course you do!” exclaims Ben, reaching out to pinch Shane playfully on the arm. “Otherwise it’s just voyeurism, and that’s no fun unless there’s sex involved.”
Shane laughs good-naturedly, and I’m surprisingly relieved at how well he’s getting along with my friends. You are not grooming him to be your boyfriend, Jade, so stop it. I have to scold myself into submission; otherwise, my girl-brain will lose the run of herself.
I like to think that I have two brains. One is my girl brain and the other is my boy brain. They both have their good sides and their bad sides. For instance, my girl brain is great for organising, while my boy brain is good for fixing shit, and when you live in a house like mine, stuff gets broken all the time. My boy brain is crap at counselling night. He doesn’t want to talk about his feelings. My girl brain is ace at counselling night. She loves to talk about her feelings. In fact, sometimes she likes it a little too much.
“There’s no need to be anxious,” Clark reassures him. “What gets said on counselling night stays in counselling night. Or something like that.” He grins and dips some naan bread into his korma.
“Well,” says Lara. “I think I’d like to go first because anger is something I know all about.”
“Here we go,” says Ben, rolling his eyes teasingly. We all know the story Lara’s going to tell. In fact, she’s told it for a number of different themes already: sadness, despair, heartbreak. She eyes Shane, seeming eager to recount it again for new ears.
“Hey! Don’t take the piss. I’ve had a lot to be angry about in my life. The thing that made me most angry, though, was when I came home and found ‘he who shall not be named’ shagging my slut neighbour Leonie McEvoy. Leonie McEvoy lived in the apartment next to mine for two years, and she’d always be hanging around making ‘fuck me’ eyes whenever my boyfriend came to visit, wearing the tightest pair of jeans and the most revealing top she could find. She knew when he was there because she’d recognise his navy Ford Fiesta parked outside.
“‘You’re crazy, Lara,’ he’d say whenever I’d warn him not to go near her. ‘I only have eyes for you,’ he’d declare, the lying toe rag. I swear to God I felt like I was turning into the Hulk when I sauntered in tired after a long day at work, and there he was going to town on that wrote-off walking advertisement for chlamydia.”
We all burst out laughing while she pauses for breath before addressing Shane. She’s been addressing him the whole time because she’s well aware we’ve already heard this story before. “He’d moved in with me at this point, you see, and I was three months pregnant with my little girl, Mia. I didn’t care that I’d have to raise my baby by myself — I wasn’t going to stay with someone who cheated on me. I was so angry I smashed almost every plate I owned before kicking him out and telling him not to show his face ever again.”
“Well, that sounds pretty hardcore,” says Shane with a low whistle when Lara’s finished with her story.
She folds her arms, looking satisfied with his reaction. Ben goes next, detailing how there’d been a boy who’d bullied him brutally at school for being gay. Years later Ben had been standing on the street watching the pride parade go by, and who did he see sitting atop one of the floats wearing a crystal tiara on his he
ad and a pointy Madonna bra? The very same bully who’d made his life a misery. Ben was so angry that he marched straight into the parade, climbed atop the float, and pulled the guy off it by the hair before punching his lights out.
I can see Clark eyeing Shane as Ben’s story comes to a close, and Shane looks sort of uncomfortable at the prospect of having to share a story, so I volunteer to go next.
“Hmmm, do we only get to tell one story?” I ask Clark. “I’ve been equally angry in the extreme about a few things over the years.”
“Just one story, Jade. Pick the one when you were most angry.”
I make a show of scratching at my chin as Ben gives me a sympathetic look. He knows exactly when I was most angry. It’s not something I’m ever going to share, and he knows it. So I select a substitute and lie.
“Well, there’s not much of a story to tell about when I was most angry. It was the day my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. She had a lot of years still left, but that bastard of a disease took her. It’s hard to deal with anger when there isn’t an actual person to focus it on.” I give Ben a sad smile. “You can’t pull cancer down off a gay pride float and beat the shit out of it, no matter how much you might want to.”
They all chuckle, and relief washes over me as I push my true story back down into the recesses of my mind. I can’t think about that. It was one of the main reasons why I began drinking at such a young age. I might have been angry when Mum got her diagnosis, but mostly I was just sad. Sad and determined not to keep living my life in a drunken stupor so that I could block out the guilt and loss I felt for so many years.
Shane leans forward and squeezes my hand comfortingly, his eyes full of empathy. We stare at each other for a long time, and then he excuses himself to go use the bathroom.
My friends get quiet when he leaves. Ben breaks the silence by declaring, “Jade, that man seriously wants to Channing all over your Tatum.”
I let out a burst of laughter. “You watch far too many YouTube videos, Ben.”
“Oh, Channing Tatum,” says Lara with a dreamy sigh. “Now there’s one hot slice of shepherd’s pie.”
“Number one,” says Clark, pointing at Lara. “If you’re going to use the ‘hot slice of pie’ analogy, the pie in question needs to be dessert-based. Apple is always a popular choice. Savoury pies just sound wrong. And number two,” he goes on, giving me a cheeky wink. “I think Jade would much prefer if he Colined all over her Farrell.”
“Oh, my God, would you all shut up! He might hear you,” I exclaim.
“What? I know for a fact you keep a DVD of Alexander the Great hidden under your bed. And let’s face it, you’re not watching that movie for the history.”
I narrow my gaze at him. “You’re evil.”
“I do try.”
At that moment Shane returns to the room, and they all start smiling at him.
“So, Shane, I think it’s your turn to share,” says Ben, clasping his hands together.
“Ah, right,” says Shane, sitting down beside me and grimacing. “Anger. Well, I guess my story is quite similar to Lara’s. I came back to my hotel room in Vienna after returning from a party to find my fiancée of two years in flagrante delicto with my best friend Justin. He was the cellist in my string quartet, and we’d been doing a set of shows there.”
“In flagrante what?” Lara asks, confused.
“He caught them having sex,” Clark explains to her.
“Oh, shit,” she blurts out, and then reaches over to put a comforting hand on Shane’s arm before pulling away again. “That’s awful. Your fiancée and your best friend!”
Shane winces a little when she reiterates the fact, and I can’t stop staring at him. Now I know where the almost tangible sadness comes from when he plays his violin. And now I also know the reason why he left his string quartet.
“Were you in love with her?” Ben asks in a low voice.
Shane gives him a mournful smile. “I should hope so. I’m not in the habit of asking women I’m not in love with to marry me.”
I can’t hold back from reaching to him under the table and taking his hand in mine for a moment. Our fingers intertwine effortlessly, and tingles shoot from his skin into mine when we touch. I don’t keep holding on for long, and when I let go I feel like I’ve lost something vital.
“Well,” Lara chimes in, “once a cheater, always a cheater, that’s what I say. You’re well shot of her, just the same way my Mia and I are better off without her lying man-whore of a father.”
The edges of Shane’s mouth curve up in a grin, and we continue eating our food. We chat for another hour or so, and then everyone begins to say their goodbyes and leave. Shane is still there when my friends have gone. Once I’ve waved off Ben and Clark, I return to the kitchen to find him standing by the sink, rinsing dishes.
“Hey, you don’t need to do that. I’m the hostess,” I say placing a hand on his shoulder.
He turns his head to look at me, and there’s an intensity in his gaze when his eyes wander to my hand on him.
“My grandmother always told me it’s good manners to help with the clean-up when you’ve eaten at somebody’s house. Let me do it — I’ll feel weird if I don’t.”
“Okay, but that means I get to dry,” I reply, grabbing a towel. “Sorry we don’t have a dishwasher.”
I don’t go into the fact that a dishwasher is a luxury I can’t afford right now. Shane only shrugs, and continues rinsing plates and cups. As we quietly clean up together, I’m aware of him watching me, but I’m too self-conscious to make eye contact. I don’t know what it is about being alone in the room with him that makes me get shy.
We’re almost done when the front door opens and shuts, and my sister April struts in. She’s wearing leopard-print leggings and a pink diamante Paul’s Boutique hoodie that’s probably a fake from the markets. God bless the teenagers these days, but they haven’t got a clue about fashion. Although to be honest, neither did I at that age. All I ever wore was baggy jeans and even baggier band T-shirts. My only nod to style was the fact that I used to dye my hair purple and colour my eyes in with copious amounts of black eyeliner, because, you know, I considered myself to be “different.”
April opens the fridge and pulls out a carton of orange juice, taking a long swig before she even notices anyone else is in the room. When her eager eyes land on Shane, a grin shapes her mouth.
“Hey, I’m April, Jade’s sister,” she says, thrusting her hand out for him to shake.
I watch the entire exchange with amusement as Shane turns and takes the dishtowel from me to dry his hands off on it.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, April,” he says.
“Oh, nice accent. Posh,” says April, nodding her head as she sizes him up. “I bet you’re loaded, too. You look like you’re loaded.”
Shane bursts out laughing as April eyes his designer shoes. She might not seem like it, but my sister can spot expensive brands from a mile away. She’s like a baby gold digger in the making, and I can’t really blame her for wanting to improve her circumstances, given her less than lavish upbringing. Still, she can keep her eager little eyes off Shane.
“I’m sorry,” I apologise to Shane while giving April a light slap on the arm. “My sister was too busy donning her leopard print this morning to remember to put on her manners as well.”
“And I’m sorry that my sister talks like a nerd. Seriously, Jade, who uses the word ‘donning’?” she asks, grinning and sticking out her tongue.
“I do,” I reply, guiding Shane from the kitchen and into the empty living room. Alec must be staying with whatever girl he’s shagging this month, because he hasn’t been around this evening, and Pete’s upstairs in his room, playing computer games.
“She’s a character,” says Shane, sitting down on the couch as I turn on the television.
“Mm-hmm, that
’s one way to put it,” I scoff.
It’s just gone half past ten, and I’m kind of wondering what he’s still doing here. It’s not that I don’t enjoy his company (to be honest, I enjoy it slightly too much), but it feels like he’s waiting. Like maybe if he sticks around long enough, something will happen between us.
“Do you want me to call you a cab?” I ask casually, standing and flicking through the stations, afraid that if I sit down beside him I’ll want to do something crazy…like grab him and stick my tongue down his throat.
“I don’t need a cab. I drove here tonight,” he replies, and I turn to look at him with wide eyes. I didn’t know he had a car, since he didn’t drive to the concert hall the other night.
“You drove here? Where did you park?” I ask with just the tiniest hint of urgency.
“Just around the corner. There were no spaces any closer to your house.”
“Right, and what kind of car do you drive?”
“A Range Rover,” he says, and his brow furrows at my panic. “What’s wrong, Jade?”
Great, a flipping Range Rover in this neck of the woods. He’ll be lucky if it hasn’t been stolen and sold on the black market already — and I’m not exaggerating.
Without thinking further, I hurry into the hall, grabbing my boots, coat, and keys on the way. “I should have warned you. You can’t just leave a car like that around here,” I tell him as he follows me out the door.
Chapter Seven
We walk around the corner, and the anxiety that had been building in my chest dissolves when I see his car is still there. That only lasts a moment before I clock two shifty-looking characters hanging around nearby. One of them is leaning up against a wall, looking from side to side — keeping sketch, in other words. The other is craning his neck to look in the window of Shane’s car. I guess he’s thinking the whole rigmarole of selling a stolen vehicle is too much hassle when he could just do a smash and grab, steal something valuable from the glove compartment, and run off.
Rockers After Dark: 6 Book Bundle of Sexy Musicians Page 31
