by Lily Morton
Promise Me
A Beggar’s Choice Novel
Lily Morton
Text Copyright© Lily Morton
Cover Image PavelNovikov at iStock
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. References to real people, events, organisations, establishments or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organisations, or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Please purchase only authorized editions.
The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following products mentioned in this work of fiction: Nike, Adidas, iPod, Vans, Converse, White Stuff, Marks and Spencer’s, Jackamo, Porsche, Billabong, Kindle, Top Shop, Ralph Lauren, John Lewis, The Sun. Lyrics used – Rihanna’s “Umbrella” written by Terius Nash, Tricky Stewart, Thaddis Harrell, Kuk Harrell and Jay-Z. All songs, song titles and lyrics mentioned in the novel are the property of the respective songwriters and copyright holders
Thank You
To my husband for believing in me far more than I do in myself. Oh, and for also accepting that endless daydreaming can be just as productive as doing the ironing!
To my two boys for patiently coping with my distraction all in the pursuit of writing a book that you will never in a million years want to read. I would apologise for the pizzas but let’s face it you prefer them to my actual cooking!
To my mum and dad for the laptop and the instruction ‘Just go for it!’ Thanks for always being there for me.
To my sister for being the first to read it and being so enthusiastic - I really needed that. I’m so pleased you’re home sweetie.
And lastly to my niece – in the words of Robbie Williams, when you grow up and give your heart to someone make sure that they’re worth it.
Table of Contents
Thank You
Table of Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Epilogue
Split Second Song Playlist
To the Readers
We don’t notice any time pass
We don’t notice anything
We sit side by side in every class
Teacher thinks that I sound funny
But she likes the way you sing
Tonight I’ll dream while I’m in bed
When silly thoughts go through my head
About the bugs and alphabet
And when I wake tomorrow I’ll bet
That you and I will walk together again
I can tell that we are gonna be friends
Yes, I can tell that we are gonna be friends
‘We’re Going to be Friends’
The White Stripes
One
I see him as soon as I turn the corner leading to my flat. His long body is sitting hunched over on my doorstep and his dirty blond hair is tucked away under a concealing black beanie. I know if he looks up I’ll see bright blue eyes shining out of a face that’s saved from being almost too pretty by a sharp blade of a nose and lots of rough stubble. I know that if he stands up I’ll see a lean, muscled body leading to narrow hips and long, long legs. I know this, not because I’m looking at someone who regularly tops the ‘Sexiest Men in Music’ lists, and not because he features in numerous paparazzi photos, usually showing him falling out of night clubs and always accompanied by famous actresses or supermodels. No, I know this because I’m actually looking at my best friend of twenty years and the man I’ve been secretly in love with for most of my life.
“Are you stalking me?” I call out as I get nearer and my heart skips a beat as he gives me the special smile that he reserves for only those closest to him. He jumps to his feet and rushes to sweep me up into one of those hugs that can only be given by him.
“Shit, Mabes,” he exclaims. “Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been sitting on that step for so long my arse has actually gone numb.”
I let myself nestle closer for a precious extra second feeling his hard strength against me, and letting myself inhale his unique scent which is a mixture of Tom Ford aftershave and the faint smell of cigarettes and mint, and then I make myself pull away like always. He’s wearing old faded jeans with a charcoal grey hoody that feels soft under my fingers. I wrinkle my nose at him.
“Too much information Charlie,” I groan and then brighten. “Do you know that you can actually get piles from sitting on cold surfaces?” I tell him gleefully. “Not sure your escort agency will be able to supply you with any more women if that gets out.”
“Mabel,” he says chidingly. “Firstly it’s a world famous modelling agency not my own personal brothel, and secondly I think the piles information is pretty much an old wives tale. Besides that I’m too all round fabulous to ever get piles.”
“Okay, bighead it was worth a try,” I grin as he divests me quickly of my supermarket bags. Breathing a sigh of relief and massaging the feeling back into my fingers I follow him to the door leading to my flat, holding my keys out to him obligingly when he gestures to me for them.
“Not that it isn’t lovely to see you, but aren’t you supposed to be in the recording studio today?”
“Yeah, supposed to be,” he mutters, “But there’s only so much we can do without Sid, and really there’s only so much I want to do without him.” He looks at me and shrugs, standing back to let me enter the flat first. “It’s just not the same without him and it never will be,” he finishes in a soft voice.
“I know that,” I say soothingly and stand aside so that he can dump the bags in my kitchen. This is not really an exhausting maneuver because my flat is about the size of a crisp packet and Charlie in all his 6 feet 4 inches glory makes it look even smaller. “But the songs are the ones that you wrote with him, and all you’re really doing is recording the stuff that you can do without him aren’t you, like your vocals? You‘re not shutting him out by doing that. You do know that he would never think that don‘t you?”
He sighs despondently and I straighten to look at him properly. Underneath the humour I can now see real signs of stress and just like that all my attention is focused on making him feel better. I could never stand to see him unhappy and it works the same for him. We’ve been each other’s comfort blanket for most of our lives and it’s a hard habit to break.
“What’s really wrong Charlie, and don’t fob me off with any bullshit.” A sudden fear catches my breath and I grab onto his arm. “It’s not Sid is it? He’s been doing so well. Oh my god has he relapsed?”
“No, no Mabes,” he says quickly, reaching down and grasping my hands comfortingly. “He’s fine and still clean but it is a bit about him. He comes out of rehab next week and it’s been preying on my mind.”
“I know you’re worried about him starting it all up again. I am too.”
“Yeah. I do know that. There’s only really you and I that totally and utterly understands him, which is why I want to ask you a huge favour.” He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly and then smiles at me coaxingly.
I blink slight
ly against the power of the smile. “Now I’m really worried because usually when you look like that it leads to trouble. The last time you did it, it involved those two strippers, a charge of public indecency and me pulling your backside out of a police cell.”
He shakes his head chidingly at me almost as if I’m making it up which I’m definitely not. We’d only just kept the press out of that one and it had led to the boys in his band calling him Blue Balls for several months.
“It’s nothing like that I swear Mabes.”
“Please don’t call me that. After all these years you do actually know my name.”
“I know, but Mabel belongs to an old woman with a purple rinse and a pug dog. You’re my Mabes and you always will be.”
“Hmm, that’s so suspiciously charming I’m getting worried. Okay, ask me - I can and shall say no of course.”
His mouth quirks up at this and then just as quickly his smile fades. Taking off his beanie he stuffs it in his back pocket, and then pulls his hoody off, revealing a white, long sleeved t-shirt. As he does it, the t-shirt rides up showing off a fine display of his tanned, flat stomach and the tops of his cut hipbones. Feeling a little bit hot I make sure that by the time the hoody clears his head I’m once again looking at his face, rather than other areas. He shoves his hand through his hair while staring at me distractedly, then his hand falls away, leaving it in its usual shaggy mess. “I’m really worried about him,” he says quietly, grabbing my hand and pulling me over to sit with him on my threadbare settee. Once we are seated according to his wishes, which are as usual far too close together for my peace of mind, while he remains totally unaffected, he carries on. “I’m worried, because this time he seems really good and I don’t want anything to spoil it. He’s only going to get so many chances to get clean before he’s in too deep to get out, so this has to work this time.”
“I know sweetie, so what are you going to do about it?” He hesitates and I sigh. “Come on Hudson, let’s be having it. I know you’ve already got a plan.”
He smiles. “I want you to move in with me.”
“What?” I manage to choke out through a suddenly dry throat.
He shuts me up with the simple expedient of putting his fingers over my mouth. I resist the temptation to take a bite out of them, but I moisten my lips and manage to inadvertently lick his fingers like some creepy, stalker puppy.
He gasps and removes his hand quickly and just for a second his eyes seem to darken as he looks at my mouth. Time seems to move slowly and I notice his breathing seems to have picked up, but then he smiles and I dismiss it as my imagination working overtime. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that it had led me in those directions, but I usually restricted those fantasies to my bedroom and not when in general interaction with him.
“You know I bet if I’d asked anyone else to move in with me I would only have had to put my hand over their mouth to silence their ecstatic screams of joy,” he says teasingly, which gets rid of any lingering awkwardness straightaway.
“Ha! Well unfortunately for you I lived with you for five years when we were kids, and knowing what I know about your unpleasant personal habits, it’s not exactly a knicker dampening moment for me,“ I lie valiantly.
He’s sidetracked instantly as I knew he would be. “I do not have unpleasant personal habits, just very good and special ones,” he says indignantly. “Anyway, if I’d shown you any of my really good stuff at that time, mum would have given me a good hiding. Sid and I were given the strictest warning we’d ever had when you moved in. You were to be treated as our sister and any funny business was out.”
“I didn’t know that,” I say curiously. “It must have been the only time in your life you ever did as you were told!”
His smile fades slightly. “Well she was pretty clear that if anything happened you’d have to leave, and the alternative was sufficiently horrible to make me take notice.”
I grimace, thinking about Harry, my mum’s boyfriend when I was fourteen, and the wonderful squat that he’d moved her into at that time. She’d wanted me to go too, which probably seemed like a good idea to someone who was permanently stoned, but luckily Jen - Charlie’s mum, had other ideas, and persuaded her that I’d be better living with them, which I had until I was nineteen.
“Getting back to the subject,” I say sternly. “Why have I got to move in with you and what’s it got to do with Sid?”
“Just hear me out okay,” he says earnestly, and I nod. “Sid can’t be allowed to go back to his own house - not for a bit anyway. I’ve done a lot of reading about addiction, and sending a recently clean person back to live alone in the house where he became an addict is the worst thing to do. You know how bored he gets. If he’s alone it’ll be dead easy for him to relapse and get involved with those fucking arseholes again.”
I nod grimly, thinking about the wild crowd that Sid had fallen in with when the band became famous. They were the worst type of people - grasping, and as Charlie put it, total fame fuckers. However, Sid had never been able to see this. He saw only the fun side and I wonder idly whether he’s seen anything of them while he’s been in rehab.
Charlie looks at me searchingly to make sure that I agree with him and I nod encouragingly and think that it’s this side of him that pulls me to him the most. Ever since I’ve known him he’s had this steadfastness underneath all that wide boy charm. There’s a warm heart and a sweetness to Charlie Hudson that the world rarely sees. Once you’re in with him you’re never out, and he has a loyal and protective streak that’s never ending.
My mum and I moved in next door to them when I was six and I still remember the first day I met him. I was sitting in our overgrown garden taking stock of my new surroundings with a certain cynicism that came from it being our third move that year, when a tousled blond head popped up over the fence and a pair of blue eyes looked at me discerningly.
“Alright ginger, what’s your name?” he shot at me.
“None of your business big nose, and it’s not ginger, it’s auburn,” was my comeback.
He’d blinked at me for a second and then obviously intrigued that I hadn’t fallen at his feet, he slung his wiry body over the fence and perched next to me. Even at that age I remember blinking because he was a beautiful boy, but luckily I was able to dismiss this until I was at least thirteen.
“I’m Charlie,” he said, offering me a stick of liquorice from the packet he was carrying.
I took it and we chewed meditatively for a minute. “I’m Mabel,” I said finally, turning to him and waiting wearily for the usual response.
He gaped at me for a second. “That’s a really awful name,” he said almost reverently. “What were your mum and dad thinking of to name you that?” At that precise moment my mum reeled out of the house, her white sleeveless top slightly askew, and her long, slightly see through skirt trailing the ground and making the bells attached to it jingle. Her face was flushed and I sighed and shrank slightly with both embarrassment and anger. Even from this distance I could tell that she’d been drinking from the green bottle again which usually meant that she’d embarrass me in front of people. She waved enthusiastically at me for a bit which made the bells jingle even more, and set her balance slightly off, and then she lurched back into the house. I sat stiffly for a second and then dared to look at the boy, certain that he’d already be off back over his side of the fence. Instead he was looking after her with an awed curiosity and then he turned his bright gaze back to me.
“Well that answers that question,” he said calmly. For a second we looked at each other and then burst into simultaneous laughter, rolling around on the floor together. When he’d calmed down he sat up and ran his hands through his blond waves. “You can be my friend,” he said assuredly, and looking back on it, rather arrogantly, but then as now I fell into line with him.
“Okay,” I said peacefully, taking some more liquorice from him.
“Come on, you can come over to my house and meet my bro
ther.” I got to my feet using the hand he held out to me. We started to walk off but then he stopped. “Don’t you have to tell her where you’re going?” he said gesturing to the house.
I shrugged. “Nah she’ll never miss me. I can do what I want,” I said airily.
“That’s awesome. Do you have to go to bed early?”
“Nope. I go whenever I want to. Do you?”
He nodded. “My mum’s dead strict, so we have to be in bed by 8’o’clock, no matter how good we’ve been.”
“That’s nice,” I said, and something in my wistful statement must have got through to him, because he smiled at me with a sudden sweetness that touched my six year old heart.
“Well never mind, you’ve got me now,” he said confidently. “Come on. We’ll go and play at being the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”
“Who are they?“
He looked at me, visibly shocked. “They’re only the best band in the world. My mum’s got all their albums - they‘re completely brilliant. Now you’ll have to be the drummer Chad I’m afraid, because Sid’s always John Frusciante, and I’m always the singer, Anthony Kiedis.”
“Is Sid your brother’s name?”
“Yes, but you’ve got to remember that you’re always going to be my friend first, alright?”
I come back from the past with a jolt, looking at Charlie’s quizzical expression. “Yes I totally agree with you,” I say hurriedly. “So what’s your solution?”
“Well first I’m going to move him in with me.”
“Will he agree to that? You do remember that he likes his own space don’t you? I remember all those arguments about the bathroom when we were teenagers, and he’s not just going to do as he’s told.”
“Weeeeelll,” he says, suddenly looking shifty. “There might have been a little problem of a burst water pipe at his house last night which has caved in two ceilings.”
I look at him for a second and then burst out laughing.
“Mick?” I ask, referring to one of his mates, and at his nod I smirk. “Isn’t that slightly against the plumber’s code,” I say mockingly.
“I don’t think he’s ever been sober long enough to have a code,” Charlie says, obviously considering the idea.
