Less Than Three

by Jess Whitecroft

  “Is this really happening?” I said.

  “Yes. I’m afraid it is.”

  I looked back at my mirror image and realised – selfish as always – that he must have had some questions of his own. About me. And Rob. I’d rehearsed so many different ways to tell him about us, but maybe this was the universe’s way of punishing me for my procrastination. It seemed unduly harsh.

  “I was going to tell you,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I do,” he said. “Zener cards, Nathan. You’re not nearly as good at subterfuge as you think you are.”

  “Oh.” I had no idea what else to say. I stared numbly at the fat white teapot and wondered when I would be given permission to pour from it. Simon – as though he could read my mind after all – reached for it and filled my cup. His hands shook.

  “Heavy,” he said, setting it down again. He dropped a lump of brown sugar in my tea, even though I didn’t take it.

  “That’s not an old wives’ tale then?” I said. “Sweet tea for shock?”

  “Adrenaline takes its toll on your blood sugar. Those old wives knew their stuff somehow.”

  “Huh.”

  The sudden silence between us stretched like gum. I wasn’t sure which was worse – talking in complete inconsequentialities or saying nothing at all. I sipped, he sighed and finally spoke.

  “How long?” he said.

  “It was after you broke up,” I said, leaning on one of the many lines I’d rehearsed. “I swear, I would never have laid a finger on him while you two were together. I’m not that much of a scumbag.”

  “So, what? You waited until we’d broken up?” he said.

  “God, no. No. Nothing like that. I didn’t…I didn’t realise I was falling for him until after it was over with you two. I didn’t realise I was falling for him at all. I’m straight, for God’s sake.”

  “Apparently not that straight,” said Simon.

  I tasted the tea. It wasn’t that bad. “How did you know?” I said, jumping in before the silence turned sticky again.

  “Oh, one thing and another,” he said. “I didn’t put it together for a while. Obviously I knew you two got along like a house on fire, but then he dumped me and I was so busy moping that I didn’t realise you two were still hanging out. Might have done things differently if I’d known.”

  “What do you mean? What did you do, Simon?”

  “You know why it ended between us, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t understand the first thing about the creative process.”

  He shook his head. “No. It was because I couldn’t find the guts to tell him what we’d done in the beginning. So it was just easier to push him away, I suppose.” He took a careful sip of hot tea. “But it didn’t make me feel any better, and I knew the only way I could feel better was if I confessed. So that’s what I did.”

  “You told him?” Rob hadn’t said a thing. I was so confused.

  “Everything,” said Simon. “I told him everything. About the bookshop, and the art gallery. And I told him not to hold a grudge against you, because the whole thing had been my fucking stupid idea, and that you hadn’t really wanted to do it in the first place. Also that you’d more or less constantly tried to wriggle out of it by growing beards and taking selfies.”

  “When?” I said, because everything was suddenly making a strange kind of sense. “When did this happen?”

  “I don’t know. One week blurs into the next for me. You know what I’m like.” He frowned in thought. “It was definitely after you got that second degree sunburn. Definitely, because I was texting him and I remember finding a huge strip of your skin on the arm of the couch, and thinking it was like living with one of those enormous imaginary lizards that David Icke keeps raving about. You were sloughing all over the place.”

  After I’d kissed Rob. After I’d told him the truth and he never wanted to see me again. And then he’d texted me and said he’d overreacted. It had felt like divine intervention at the time, and there had been an intervention. Just not divine.

  “He never told me,” I said. “That he’d seen you.”

  “He didn’t. I told you, we texted.”

  “He didn’t tell me that, either.”

  Simon shrugged. “Well, obviously you started seeing each other again after that. I figured that much out, because you cheered up and started talking about those ridiculous films again – the ones with the ball sac exhibitionist. And that’s when I started to put things together, like why you were so suddenly interested in the complete works of Ed Wood, or why you’d been sporting a sunburn that looked as though you’d been lying around on a boat all day. Or why you spent so much time giggling over texts like a schoolboy. You were seeing someone. Someone who loved bad movies, owned a boat and made you laugh a lot.”

  I sat back in my chair. “Fuck me. You don’t need violin lessons to be Sherlock Holmes.”

  He shook his head. “Not quite. I didn’t know you were in love with him. That was the…the nick in the Zener card, if you like. If I’d known that, I would never have been in Chelsea today.”

  “How so?”

  “I was going to ask him,” he said. “If there was another chance for us. Because I missed him, and I knew I’d ruined a good thing. If I’d known you two were together I wouldn’t have bothered. I’d probably have just stayed put, rehearsing the earful I was going to give you when you came home.”

  “But you were there,” I said. Strange how these things happened. Of all the people in the world to be with Rob at that moment, it was Simon. The perfect person. The one with the cool head, the one who knew his way around a spinal injury. On one hand it felt like a miracle, but on the other I was so, so sorry that he’d had to witness that.

  “I’m so glad you were there for him,” I said.

  “Yeah. Well.” He sighed. “I would do anything to be scrubbing in right now.” He held out a shaking hand. “Fortunately they probably wouldn’t let me.”

  “That fucking road. Did they get the driver.”

  He shook his head. “Police are on it. Hit and run.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “It was one of those four wheel monstrosities.”

  I couldn’t think about that. Not right now. “Okay,” I said, starting to feel as though some of the dust had settled. We were still in the throes of an emergency, but at least I could see enough to see what needed to be done. “I’m going to have to call his parents.”

  “Do you want me to do it?”

  “No, it’s okay. You’ve done so much already. I feel as though I should do something.”

  He reached across the table and touched my wrist. “You don’t have to. I can do it, if you want to take a moment.”

  A moment. If only. “Simon, I’m going to need a whole fucking lot more than a moment.”

  *

  I was there when Rob opened his eyes.

  For hours, I’d been sitting there, holding his hand, willing his eyes to open, but when they did eventually flutter open all I wanted was for them to close again, because the second he touched the edge of consciousness I could see that he was in so much pain. His cracked lips parted and a low moan slipped out.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m here. It’s all over. Surgery went well.”

  There was no way I had the stomach to go over the details. Fractured hip, fractured spine. He had six broken ribs and his lung had collapsed twice during surgery. His right thigh was full of metal and pins. His left arm, where he’d fallen, was a mass of road rash and bruising.

  “You’re okay,” I said, because I had to say that. “You came through.”

  He barely heard me. He was lost in the pain. This time the noise that came out of him was more animal than human, an almost bovine sound of hurt and distress. It alerted a nurse – a tall, thin black lady with cornrows and a serious expression – and she came right over.

  “Are you with us now?” she said, and adjusted one o
f the IV pumps at his side. I was guessing morphine, because within seconds Rob exhaled and his scrunched features softened. She placed his hand on a button. “You just squeeze that when you need pain relief. Okay?”

  “Mmm.”

  “You did very well,” she said. “All in one piece. Lots of metalwork. You’ll be setting off airport detectors in no time.” She had a slight, singsong Caribbean accent, and a deep frown notch between her thin, arched eyebrows. I liked that notch. It spoke of someone who cared about what they were doing.

  Rob made a soft, dry clucking noise.

  “You want some water?” she translated. “Here.” She filled a cup, one of those ones with a lid and a straw, and handed it to me. “Let him sip,” she said. “Not gulp. Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”

  “Thank you,” I said, absurdly grateful to her for letting me do something for him, no matter how small. I slipped the straw between his lips and he sucked greedily, wetting his lips and tongue. I wanted to put both arms around him and tell him I’d protect him from every hurt, every evil thing in the world, but I could barely touch him at all. He was plastered, screwed into place, plumbed into various drips.

  “Your parents are on their way,” I said, stroking his forehead. He felt cold and sweaty.

  “Why?” he said. “Am I dying?”

  “No, darling. No.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that he’d come very close in the operating theatre. My heart was still racing from the moment when the surgeon told me that it had been ‘touch and go’ for a minute when his blood pressure had taken a dive.

  His eyes were wet. “But it’s bad?”

  I saw no reason to lie to him. “You’ve had a bad accident, but you’re still here. That’s all that matters.”

  “I can wiggle my toes,” he said, with a dazed, druggy smile. An actual smile. Whatever was in that pump, they were giving him the good shit. “Simon said…because I could wiggle my toes. Am I doing it? Am I wiggling my toes?”

  His voice faded out as he slipped – seemingly between breaths – into a drugged sleep. I looked down, and my stomach did that cold drop thing when I saw that the blankets above his feet were motionless.

  14

  His parents arrived that night. His father was a big, stoic Irishman. “You’ll be all right now,” he said, patting Rob’s pincushion hand. “They’ll fix you up.” Rob’s mother was a little, bird-boned blonde – he clearly took after her – and she cried a lot and talked about suing the driver for damages. His sister was there, too – a dark blonde Instagram beauty named Orla – and naturally the family took precedence over me. They were nice about it, though, and made every effort to include me – “Rob’s young man,” as his dad called me. We had a very strange meal at a restaurant together, because we had to eat, even though none of us really felt much like it. A forced social occasion with strangers, and missing the reason we were together in the first place.

  And then there was the elephant in the room. The unspeakable matter of whether Rob would ever walk again.

  For the first week or two he was too out of it on painkillers to know much about what was going on. The doctors mumbled and hedged, but fortunately I had Simon to translate.

  “He has a small fracture to his lumbar spine,” he said. “There’s a chance that swelling in the area is interrupting the nerve function.”

  “When you say a chance, how big are we talking?”

  “I don’t know,” said Simon. “The fact that he could still move his toes before surgery was a good sign. Unfortunately the fact that he now can’t is…”

  I swallowed. “Not so good.”

  “No.”

  “Do you think something went wrong in surgery?”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “Like I say, I know the consultant and she’s excellent. Personally I think it’s more likely to be post surgical swelling. The only trouble with that is that the longer the nerve function is disrupted—”

  “—the harder it is to resume normally?”

  “Yeah.”

  I don’t know exactly what was said, but I could see the way the bad news was wearing on Rob as time went on. Every time I saw him his eyes got duller and more haunted. I was there at his bedside almost every day, with treats and gifts and new Neil Breen commentaries that I hoped would make him laugh, but the cloud above his head seemed to get larger and blacker by the day.

  Then one day I walked into his room and the atmosphere was immediately strange. He sat stiffly, braced and plastered in place, and barely turned his head when I kissed him on the side of the mouth.

  “How are you?” I said, almost afraid to ask.

  Rob plucked at the blankets. He pulled them up, baring the toes of his good leg. His feet looked very soft, and that was when I realised it was because they were unused. I had a vivid sense memory of the way the hard skin on his toes used to scratch against the backs of my thighs when he was wrapped all the way around me, and I never thought hard skin could hurt me so much.

  “Look,” he said.

  He held his tongue between his teeth at the corner of his mouth. He stared down at his toes with the intense concentration I used to fake when I was pretending to be telepathic, and then I saw his toes curl slightly.

  “Oh,” I said, remembering how to breathe again. “Oh my God.”

  “I can feel them,” he said, and there were tears in his eyes. “Pins and needles, but I can feel them.”

  I kissed his hands and face, frantic with hope and happiness, but he stayed stiff, and kept right on crying.

  “Shh,” I said. “You’re wonderful. Look what you did.”

  He shook his head. “You can’t see it, can you?” he said.

  “See what, baby?”

  “I moved my toe, Nathan. And it took me almost a month.”

  “Well, it’s going to take time. We knew that.”

  Rob gave a sharp sniff and shook his head again. “I don’t want you to come back here,” he said.

  It felt as though someone had sucked all the oxygen out of the room. “What?”

  “Don’t come back,” he said. “I don’t want you.”

  He didn’t look at me. He was lying. He’d rehearsed this, and he was no actor.

  “I still want you,” I said.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do, Rob. I do.”

  He reached for the tissues. “Really?” he said, drying his eyes. “Are you ready for that? Spending the rest of your life literally wiping my arse?”

  “Rob, please,” I said. “Please don’t do this.”

  “No, listen. If I can’t walk or make it to the toilet. If I can’t…can’t make love any more…”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I love you.”

  His expression hardened and it scared me, because it was exactly the same expression I wore when Valmont was forcing himself to be cruel, acting against a better nature he hadn’t even known he had. “I don’t want you to,” he said. “I don’t want you to love me.”

  “So, what? You want to wallow alone? Is that it?”

  Rob’s eyes flashed a warning. “Don’t you fucking dare tell me how to cope with this, Nathan. Don’t you dare.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, chastised. I touched the back of his wrist, but he didn’t respond. He was already closed off to me, and there was nothing I could do. “But you don’t have to do this alone.”

  He took a slow breath. Swallowed hard. “I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m going back to Ireland.”

  Part of me had seen this coming. It was a no-brainer. Of course he was going to go home to his family to heal. The bonds of love were that much deeper than they were with me, a summer fling. This was always going to happen, but it still fucking hurt.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen with my boat,” he said. “It’s not wheelchair accessible. I won’t even be able to live in my own home any more.”

  I was crying and I couldn’t stop. “Please, baby,” I said, but I didn’t know what I was pleading for
any more. For him to say he loved me or for him to stop saying these things – like ‘wheelchair accessible’ – things that hammered home just how hurt and broken he really was. He was right. His big toe was nothing more than a glimmer of hope, and while hope was all very wonderful, it paled in the shadow of the medical mountain he had yet to climb.

  “Please,” I said, again, and he shook his head, tears streaming down his face.

  “No, Nathan. No. Don’t make this any harder than it has to be. That fucking car didn’t just break my bones: It broke my life, and now I don’t know what my life is going to be any more. Please. Just leave me to figure that out. Can’t you do that for me?”

  I had to. All the times I’d told him I’d do anything for him, all the times I’d asked him if there was anything he needed. And now he was telling me what he needed. I had to give it to him, even though my heart was breaking. I wanted to tell him I loved him, but I couldn’t. It would come off like pressure, and he didn’t need that.

  “Okay,” I said, and lifted his hand to my lips. He let me. I kissed the back of it, but he didn’t look at me. He was crying so hard. “Whatever you need.”

  Even Simon knew something was wrong when I got back. He took one look at my red eyes and reached for the Bruichladdich. He even indulged my preference for rocks, despite the fact that anything other than a dash of water in a single malt was sacrilege to him. I sat there in the middle of the couch, trying not to cry again and listening to him hammering away at the ice cube tray in the kitchen. My world felt hopelessly broken, but I knew it was nothing compared to the way Rob must be feeling right now.

  “There,” Simon said, handing me the drink. “Get that down your neck. I don’t even mind if you don’t taste it.”

  I swallowed it too fast. He topped it up immediately.

  “He broke up with me,” I said, as I felt the burn of the whisky all the way down into my stomach. Settling into my veins. That was better. Still awful, but slightly better. Maybe I could become a professional drunk.

  “Yeah,” said Simon. “I know.”

  I stared into my glass. “And how did you figure it out this time, Holmes?”