I look at him, really look at him, because I figure this will be the last time in a long time, possibly even the last time ever that I get to. He looks tired; he has dark circles under his eyes, as if he hasn’t been sleeping. He’s still just as damn gorgeous as he’s always been: tanned skin, pouty lips, stubble-rough jaw. His eyes are glassy, and I feel like shit because I’m the reason Sammy Belle looks like a strung-out junkie. I’m the reason he’s not happy, and that kills me.
“Go home, Sam,” I say again, and I have to fight like hell to hold back my tears. It doesn’t work. They stream down my face anyway.
“I can’t go home. You’re it for me, Little. If I walk away, I lose a piece of me that I’ll never get back.” Sammy stands and pulls me into an embrace. I figure it’s the last time I’ll get to be held by him so I let myself melt into his arms, even if the comfort I feel is only fleeting. When I attempt to move away he squeezes me tighter and slides one hand into my hair, bringing his face down to mine and covering my mouth with his. Sam’s tongue slips inside, I take this last little piece of him into me, knowing it won’t happen again. His cheeks are wet with tears because he sees this for what it is. It’s a bittersweet goodbye, and when I pull away, Sam doesn’t stop me, he just stands in that gazebo and watches me run one last time.
I walk into the room and throw myself down on the bed. The bathroom door is closed, and I stare up at the ceiling the way Clara and I did this morning. I don’t cry. I don’t think I have any more tears in me today. Instead, I find myself doing the breathing exercises Dr Aldous teaches us. It doesn’t feel better, but it doesn’t hurt any more than I already do. I don’t know how I’m supposed to get better when everything around me just gets more difficult.
I don’t know how long I stay staring with eyes wide open at the ceiling, but eventually I call out to Clara to tell her to hurry the fuck up because I need to pee. There’s no answer. I get up and pound on the door. “Hey, did you hear me?”
Nothing. Unease works its way through my gut when I realise I haven’t seen her all day, not since this morning. Not since … I grab the handle and turn. It’s unlocked and I bust into the room in bare feet and slip. My hip hits hard against the slick tiles, my head cracks off the side of the vanity and for a half second I think I’m dreaming because lying opposite me on the floor, floating in a shallow pool of her own blood on the tiles, is Clara. I suck in a sharp breath and cover my mouth with my hands, but they’re sticky and stained with red.
“Clara!” I scream. Glass litters the floor, but if it cuts through the soft flesh of my legs as I crawl over and shake her body, I don’t feel it. Two long slashes decorate her skinny forearms. Beneath the blood I see tendons and muscle, her tiny, frail bones.
“Wake up. Wake up,” I sob, smearing blood over her pale cheeks. She’s ice cold, her body already stiff with rigor mortis. “Wake up.”
But she doesn’t wake up.
She bled out on our bathroom floor. She died alone, with no one, after I called her a raving bitch. She died alone. She ended it, and now she can never come back. She told me there was nothing worse than being alone, and as I sit cradling her lifeless body to mine, I know she’s right. There is nothing worse than being alone.
One month later
I STAND in front of the mirror in my tiny closet/bedroom at Holly’s house. I’d been checked out of Break Free a little more than a week ago. It had been a condition of my release that I not go home to an empty house. Dr Aldous had worried that I might feel the temptation of a blade too keenly. I hadn’t fought anyone on that. I felt confident that as long as I was taking my meds, I wasn’t going to relapse again. But I knew I still wasn’t strong enough to be on my own. Clara’s words had sunk deeper into me than the piece of glass she’d sunk into her flesh and used to slit open her wrists. I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to die alone in the bathroom of a treatment facility because I’d pushed everyone away. She was right; there was nothing worse than being alone, so I’d hopped a plane with my mother and we’d come home to Sugartown.
I’d spent the entire week afraid to step out the front door. Yeah, I was avoiding the residents of this tiny backward town and their judgemental gazes, but there was just one person that I was both avoiding and dying a little more inside from with each day that passed when he didn’t come to the house to find me. I’d told him that I couldn’t forgive him, but that hadn’t been true. Yes, I felt betrayed, but I also saw it for what it was: I’d been sinking, and that hospital was the only way Sam knew how to save me. And it had saved me.
Was I completely recovered? No. I was still riding the crazy train. That shit doesn’t just up and go away, and every time I picked up a knife I thought about sliding it across my flesh. Then I thought about Clara, and the desire to cut got a little less. It wasn’t the same desire that ran through me. I’d never wanted to kill myself, and I genuinely believe that she had wanted that, and her demons overpowered her—they suffocated the girl within. The illness won. I wouldn’t let that happen to me. I wouldn’t be alone.
I touch the note tacked to my dresser. The one that I’d found in my pillow that night, after they’d removed her body and cleaned the room. Stepping back in the space we’d shared had been hard, walking into the bathroom and seeing the white tiles where I’d found her body scrubbed clean and yet still tinged with pink had been harder, but not as hard as finding the note in my pillow. Clara had no one to leave a suicide note to, except me. Her final message, the parting gift that she left the world with before she took her life had been for me.
Don’t be alone.
So as I run my fingers over the indents in the paper I check myself in the mirror one last time. My hair is pulled back in a ponytail and I’m makeup free, a first for me outside of the clinic, but I figure I’ll more than likely cry it off anyway. Sam had said he’d loved me without it. I looked tired, sad, and the suitcases under my eyes sure could do with some primer and a little concealer, but I am about to find out whether he actually meant it. I am stepping outside of the house and going to Sunday lunch, where I’ll endeavour to be “not alone”.
Ana catches me up in a huge hug when we walk in. She squeezes me so tightly that I can’t breathe. I guess hugs that border on suffocation run in the Belle family, because that’s the way Bob used to hug me, and it’s that same full-body envelopment that Sam used to use that always made me feel safe. When Ana pulls back, she cups my cheek with her hand. “We’ve missed you, sweetheart.”
I don’t know if the we encompasses Ana, Elijah and Lil, or if Sammy is included in that. My uncertainty must be written all over my face because she smiles and whispers, “He misses you too.”
“Is he here?”
“No. I’m sorry, honey, he said he couldn’t … make it,” she adds quickly when she sees my hope falter, and then she’s saved from further torture because Elijah swoops in, picking me up and spinning me around in a huge hug.
Setting me on my feet, he ruins my boring-arse ponytail by ruffling my hair. I duck out of reach and he winks at me. “It’s good to have you home, kiddo.”
I smile, but I don’t feel it. My heart was in my throat coming here. The whole way over I’d rehearsed what I was going to say to Sam, only he … couldn’t. I didn’t know whether he couldn’t meant that he couldn’t now, or he couldn’t ever again, or that he couldn’t because he’d moved on, or because he just wouldn’t, because he wouldn’t let himself feel. And I had to know. As much as some of those answers would hurt me, I had to know.
“I have to go.” I back up a little and lock eyes with Ana. It takes her a beat, but then her mouth tips up at the corners. Spinning around, I barrel into Holly and Jack.
Jack’s hands grip my shoulders. “Hey, what’s the rush, darlin’?”
“I have a … thing.”
“What thing?” Holly asks, in her no-nonsense tone—which I’ll admit, still scares the shit out of me. “You’re not supposed to be alone.”
“I know,” I say, and I pre
ss a hurried kiss to her cheek as I breeze past her because for once, my mother and I agree on something.
The second my feet hit the pavement I realise how unfit I am, and not only that, rubber thongs really aren’t the best shoes to run in. Like really not good shoes to run in. I’m so focused on my footwear that I startle when a pair of sneakers attached to large feet and very nicely muscled calves come into my line of vision, and run right by me before my eyes can roam any higher. My head snaps around as I continue to pound the pavement, my gaze following the firm arse in black basketball shorts, the curve of his well-defined triangular back and heavily muscled shoulders—so I don’t notice the giant red post box looming before me until I smack into it. Boob-first.
Another thing I hadn’t noticed until I’d decided to let Australia Post give me a free breast reduction is that I already ran straight past the loft because I’m currently halfway down Main Street hunched over from the pain, gasping for breath, dying from exertion, and I’m holding my boobs as if at any moment they might fall off.
I lean against the post box to catch my breath and stare longingly after the insanely hot guy I just ran past with his tight arse, great calves and his sweaty bulging muscles, and I realise another thing I was too idiotic to see. Hot guy is Sam. And he just breezed right by me as though I didn’t even exist. For a moment I just stand there, gaping up the street at his figure growing smaller. And then I’m completely fucking overcome with rage.
He just ran right by me. Sammy fucking Belle just dismissed me as quickly as he did the first day I’d come back to town.
Oh no he di’int.
With my breath already seesawing through my lungs, I take off after him. I probably look like a crazy person running down the street in thongs after a man who’s very clearly running in the opposite direction, but if the shoe fits then I’m going to damn well wear it.
“Sam!” I shout, and then I put on a burst of speed when he studiously ignores me. By now we’ve run the length of Main Street and he just keeps going, past the Sugar Mill and the houses, and the park where we used to get drunk on Jack’s beer beneath the slippery slide.
My lungs hurt, my legs ache, and I can practically hear the blood whooshing through my head. I really don’t understand people who run. I mean, I’ve been accused of running for years, but it was more the hey-look-over-there-behind-you kind of running, not running in the physical sense, because … ouch.
“Sammy Jay Belle!” I scream, seeing that though he’s still a couple of hundred metres in front of me, he has stopped by the field, and is tucking something into his pocket. Sam checks his wristwatch, no doubt because he’s late to save a baby from a burning building, or an elderly person from falling face first into their soup, or a fucking kitten stuck up a tree, because that’s the kind of nice guy Sam is. And right now I need him to go back to being my nice guy. He could be my cranky guy too, my rough, mince-no-words, pull-no-punches, domineering and possessive-as-hell alpha guy, because holy hot sex, Batman! While I’ve been wasting away to nothing in the treatment clinic, Sam has quite obviously been throwing himself into an even more vigorous exercise regime. And I don’t know if he’s started munching ’roids for breakfast or if I’m just more delusional today than normal, but he is bigger than he was before, and he was a freaking Viking before.
He opens a water bottle and takes a sip and then he tips it over his head. Beads of water fly off in every direction as he shakes his hair. His sweaty, slick body glistens in the sunlight, and I’m rendered fucking breathless. Or, more breathless than I am already.
Goddamn he’s pretty. He’s like a fucking walking Calvin Klein advert. My vagina doesn’t just implode, it clamps down on itself and vanishes into another fucking dimension. It’s so damn turned on by all the pretty that it can’t possibly compete, so it just slips into a wormhole and ceases to exist.
I’m still thinking about my vagina—or thinking with it—when I make my move. I reach the field, only Sam looks as if he’s about to bolt again, and I can’t have that—mostly because I’m exhausted and out of breath, but also because he’s running away from me. Without further consideration for things like falling flat on my face, or breaking my fragile, little misused body, I let out a war cry and careen into Sam, crash tackling him to the ground.
“What the fuck?” he says, as I land on top of him, expelling an “Oooomph” when his big barrel chest knocks the air from my lungs. At the last second, he must have turned and caught me up before we fell because I’m splayed across his body, my hair covers his face, I’m sweaty, he’s sweaty, and I think we’re both physically spent—too bad our clothes are in the way and neither of us are riding a post-orgasmic high.
“Pepper? What are you doing?” he asks incredulously.
I hold my finger up, to let him know I need a minute and then I straddle his waist, shove at his chest and demand, “Why are you running from me?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’ve been back a week, and you haven’t come to see me. I got dressed and left the house for you. I put my hair in a damn ponytail, I even wore no makeup for you, and you don’t show up to Sunday lunch because you can’t?”
He’s staring at me like I really am a crazy person now, and again … shoe fits. “Can we have this conversation while I’m not lying flat on my back in an oval with you straddling me, please?” he asks through clenched teeth.
I stare down at him. “No. Whatever you have to say you can say it with me straddling your hips.”
His brows shoot skyward and he lets out a derisive laugh. “I didn’t come to Sunday lunch because I thought it might be too confronting for you, and as for not seeing you all week, I thought you’d appreciate some space your first week back. I didn’t think it would help you settle in if I was hanging around your doorstep. I didn’t want to pressure you.”
“You ran right by me just now,” I shout, because damn it, it hurt, and I’m angry, and yelling feels kinda awesome, so I punctuate it by shoving my hands on my hips.
“The sun was in my eyes, and I was a little distracted trying not to deviate from my regular route. Can you stop wriggling please?”
I frown. “Why would you deviate from your regular route?”
“Because I knew where you were and I wanted to come see you.”
“So you didn’t ignore me when I called out to you?”
He reaches between us, and for a half second I think he’s going to touch me. My Kitty Fantastico is in full-fledged cougar mode, but when he pokes my inner thigh with his big hands and pulls his phone from his pocket, Kitty is no longer purring with pleasure. She’s a sad, sad Kitty. “I had my head phones in.”
“Oh,” I reply, and a quick perusal of the grass around us shows that he was right, his missing headphones are strewn across the field several metres away. They must have been pulled free when I crash tackled him.
“So, do you still love me?” I throw this in casually. It just kind of rolls right off my tongue the way the rest of this interrogation has gone.
“What kind of question is that?” He’s uppity when he says this.
“What kind of answer is that?” I retort, getting uppity right back.
He shifts his hips, a reminder for me to move my arse far away from his groin, though I’ve never been very good at being told what to do. Instead, I flex my hips, feeling the rigid length of him beneath our clothing. Sam closes his eyes, breathing deeply in through his nose. “You need to get off me now.”
“Well, you need to answer me first,” I say back, feeling as if this is going about as well as my therapy sessions—which, in case you’re wondering, obviously haven’t worked out so well, because I just went all Kathy Bates from Misery on Sam’s arse in the middle of a field.
He shakes his head and says sharply, “You’re an idiot.”
“I’m not an idiot. You’re an idiot,” I yell back.
“You’re both fucking idiots!” Jake shouts. I whirl around to see our entire family; no, n
ot just our family, but several regulars from Belle’s, a few of the guys from the fire station, Dave the publican, a bunch of kids decked out in soccer uniforms, and their very unhappy mothers—so, basically the whole damn town—standing on the sidelines watching us like we both need to be committed. With wide eyes, and feeling a lot more skittish then I did two seconds ago, I turn back to Sam.
“We’re both idiots,” he says, and then grasps the nape of my neck with one hand and pulls me down.
“Yep. One hundred per cent-certifiable,” I whisper, just a hair’s breadth away from his lips.
“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Sam, I’m sorry—”
He works a hand between us and presses a finger to my lips. “Shh, it doesn’t matter.”
“Actually, it does.” I take a deep breath and exhale. “I only said that stuff to push you away.”
He chuckles, and the sound reverberates through my chest. “I know, Pepper.”
“Well, if we do this, it’s going to be really hard.”
“You back on your meds?” Sam asks, and I nod. He gives me a look. “Are you going to stay on your meds?”
“Yes. But I still battle with it every day. I’m trying, though.”
“You gonna run again?” he whispers. His fingers curl in my hair, bringing my head closer to his. His lips brush my own, but he doesn’t kiss me. I realise he’s waiting for an answer. I shake my head. The shift in him is tangible. Those clear blue eyes that have been my salvation for years slide from tender to predator in a nanosecond. Desire clouds his gaze and I’m suddenly not so sure I’m done talking.
“I can’t promise I’m not going to make you crazy,” I blurt out.
Panic seizes my chest because though I want this—I want this really, really bad, like the way you want to consume a whole carton of chocolate chip cookie dough ice-cream after really hot sex, kinda bad—I have to make him understand that I don’t know if I’m going to be okay from one day to the next.
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