I didn’t change my expression. She didn’t need me to tell her I’d guessed something was going on with her. It was fairly obvious, anyway.
“The dress kept changing. Then last night, I couldn’t see it properly at all. Then it disappeared. And the church sort of crumbled.”
It was hard to gauge her emotions as her tone was so flat.
“What do you think it means?” I prompted her.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. I felt lost. And now I’m so confused!”
“What about?”
She ran her hands through her hair and when she looked up at me, there were tears in her eyes. “If I loved Adam, how could I move on so quickly?”
The anguish in her voice was apparent. Had she been holding onto this through all the things we had done together? Did she regret her decision to be with Andy, Ben and I?
“Did you move on, though?” I asked her gently.
Her eyes widened and tears spilled down her cheeks. “I don’t know,” she whispered.
“To me, the church crumbling and the dress disappearing seems to mean you’re ready to move on,” I told her.
“How can I move on? I feel like I’m living two lives. One where I’m with you three and everything is fine, and one where I’m cheating on Adam’s memory.”
Okay, so we were getting to the crux of the issue.
“How long have you felt like that?”
She closed her eyes. “Ever since I realised stuff might happen between the three of us.”
Oh. Shit. “Why didn’t you say anything before now?”
“It’s my problem, not yours. I know that. I just need to get over him. Somehow.”
I sighed. “You’re not going to do that by denying you have a problem and burying your head in the sand. Today was supposed to be the happiest day of your life. Maybe you should do something fun to try and feel better? Cheer yourself up a bit?”
She glared at me.
“I thought you understood,” she snapped, then she got up and stormed out, slamming the kitchen door behind her.
* * *
Ben
When I heard the kitchen door slam downstairs, followed by the stomp-stomp-stomp of Bex coming upstairs, I stepped out of my room. I caught her in my arms as she tried to get to her own room.
“Let me go!” she growled.
I pulled her close and held her tight.
“Shh. Come into my room.” When she tried to dig her heels into the carpet, I lifted her and pulled her into my room. I kicked the door closed and we stood in the middle of the room while I held her.
“You’re wearing the dress you had on at Adam’s funeral,” I noted. “And you look like you didn’t sleep so good. Talk to me.”
“Don’t you know what day it is?”
I knew the best way to get her to open up was not to assume anything. Anyway, I had no clue what day it was.
“Saturday. What does it mean to you?” I asked her.
She hissed through her teeth. “It was supposed to be my wedding,” she spat.
Her whole face was scrunched up. I groaned. Clearly, she thought I should have remembered. I’d done my best to forget.
“Shit. I’m sorry, Bex. Matt hid away the save-the-dates when you moved in, so there weren’t any constant reminders for you. I don’t have a great mental calendar.”
“Matt can fuck a glass cactus dildo.”
I raised my eyebrows and tried not to laugh because I sometimes felt that way about Matt, too, but I would never undermine his authority by telling her the reasons he annoyed me, sometimes. She had to look up to him and respect him.
“What did he ever do to you?” I asked.
“He told me I needed to do something fun. That it was wrong for me to feel like I’m betraying Adam.”
I sighed and shook my head. “I’ll buy you the dildo.”
That made her giggle. Good.
“Ben, how do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Get over a profound loss?”
I’d been avoiding this conversation for a reason. She knew I had lost my dad at a young age, but I didn’t want grief to be the only thing we had in common. It would be too easy to wallow in it. Anyway, when she was grieving, telling her about my own experience wasn’t going to make her feel any better. But today, maybe this was something we needed to share.
“Honestly? I hate to tell you this, but you never do. If someone left a mark on your heart, that mark doesn’t disappear when they die. It would be criminal if it did.”
“I can’t feel like this forever. I don’t feel like this all the time. It comes in—”
“Waves,” I finished her sentence for her to show her I knew how she felt. “Sometimes it’s fine and you can go for five minutes without thinking about them. Then it leaps out of nowhere, like a tiger that’s been stalking you.” Even now, years later, I still got caught out by it sometimes. Less often, now. When I’d first lost my dad, the hurt had been too big. My mum gave up on life and went to bed. I’d gone off the rails. I’d joined a local crew of youths, spray painting graffiti anywhere we could, and fighting amongst ourselves. It was a bit pathetic, looking back, but at the time, I’d thought I had found my true friends and that we’d have each other’s backs forever.
“Sometimes I think I’m going to suffocate under the weight of it. But it’s been months. I should be okay now.”
Did she really believe that there was a time limit on grief?
“Of course you shouldn’t. And you have plenty of good days, don’t you?”
“Yeah. More good than bad. Today is... an exception. I just felt like shit from the moment I woke up.”
“It would be weird if you hadn’t. It was supposed to be your wedding.”
“I didn’t want to forget him. My dream seemed to imply I should let go. But I’m not ready.”
“Then don’t.”
She frowned. “But we’ve done... stuff. How can I square that with how I feel about Adam?”
“You can’t.” There was no magic wand to fix her emotions.
“Did I just do stuff with you, Matt and Andy because I needed the closeness? What if I don’t really have feelings for any of you?”
“Then we all move on.” It seemed simple enough to me. “Listen, today is the hardest day because of what it represents. You were going to be married today. That was a lifelong commitment that would have come with love, monogamy and maybe even children?”
“I never really wanted kids, to be honest.” She blushed a little as she said it, and I got the impression Adam had wanted children.
“Andy, Matt and I can never marry you. I think you know that. So right now you’re feeling all the differences between what you have and what you lost. No one can fix any of this. I’m sorry. It is what it is.”
“Am I just with you three because you’re safe? I feel like I’ll never love again. I don’t think I want to. Is it just easier to be with you three because it will never be anything more than an arrangement?”
She searched my eyes as if they held answers I hadn’t given her.
“Life’s complicated. People are complicated. Grief makes you do some bloody weird stuff.” I thought back to the months after my dad had died. My behaviour had become increasingly reckless. I was out of control and no one seemed to care enough to stop me. My graffiti became increasingly flamboyant. I didn’t care if I got caught.
The first time I had ended up in front of the local magistrate, I got off without a custodial sentence. My mum had sent me to live with an aunt and uncle. They had tolerated no nonsense, and showed me I was worth more than that. They had encouraged me to join the forces. I had applied, thinking it was a waste of time, that no one would ever let me join, but they did, and I’d turned my life around.
Looking back, I realised now that my mum had been grieving, too, and hadn’t had anything left inside her to take care of me with. I’d been angry at her for a long time. Maybe I should phone her later in the week. But not
right now. Bex was my priority, not wallowing in relics from the past.
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel anymore,” she whispered.
“I bet I know what will soothe your heart a little. I recorded all of this week’s Cash In The Basement episodes, since it’s not on at the weekends. Want to binge watch it with a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and some home-made chocolate chip Danish pastries? I invented my own recipe and I need some feedback before I serve it to Lord Falconer, the Air Chief Marshal, on Tuesday.”
She nodded. “I can’t think of anything I’d like to do more, right now.”
We sat side-by-side on the sofa. I fed her pastries and wine. Holding her hand, I sat through five episodes of the dreariest programme on television. Matt must have told Andy to keep his distance because neither of them disturbed us. At the end, she rested her head on my shoulder and fell asleep.
When it was time to make dinner, I repositioned her onto the sofa and covered her with a blanket, then tiptoed out to start prepping the veg.
“She all right?” Matt asked when I emerged from the living room.
“She will be.”
“I upset her. I was trying to help.”
“That’s usually when people manage to upset each other,” I remarked. “Look, you didn’t do anything wrong. You know that, don’t you?”
“Not really.”
“She’s got a lot of feels today. Tomorrow will be different. She might want to do something fun tomorrow. But today, she needs to flop. I know it’s hard to step back when you’re used to being in control, but grief isn’t straightforward.”
“Should I punish her for her outburst? I really want to,” Matt said.
I frowned and shook my head. “It would be twattish. Just let it go. Because right now, she can’t let go of how she feels about anything. She needs us to be strong. She needs to be safe to break. And punishing her for breaking... I know you are trying to be dominant, but that would make you look weak.”
“So we’re just letting her get away with things, now?”
I rolled my eyes. “Fucksake, Matt, if you can’t help, just get out of the way until she’s less prickly.”
I pushed past him to go and sort out dinner, leaving him standing in the hallway. When I looked over my shoulder, he had a disappointed expression on his face. That was his shit to deal with, I had enough on my hands with Bex, today.
“Why can’t you go and play Call of Duty or something?”
“Wait... the X-Box is free?” His eyes lit up. I nodded then closed the kitchen door to try and make it clear this conversation was over.
* * *
Bex
Being with Ben was so easy, today. He hadn’t made any demands of me. He had just been there for me. And provided snacks. By the evening, after my nap, I was feeling a lot less like a zombie. Actually, I felt embarrassed for how much of a wet blanket I’d been, today. Where had all that angst and drama come from?
The day was almost over. I looked at my engagement ring. Maybe it was time to take it off. After all, it was supposed to be a symbol of the fact I was loved, and that I had promised to marry someone. That wasn’t happening, now, so keeping the ring on was largely pointless.
I could put it with the empty perfume bottle. A reminder of the past. Because I couldn’t put the last few years into a bottle and save them to go back to, later. I couldn’t save every day to cherish. Adam should have been forever. Maybe in some alternative universe, we were happily married, now, and ready to spend eternity together. But here, in this one, our forever was gone. Our clock had stopped, and I couldn’t repair it by looking at it.
My thoughts had gotten a bit weird. I pulled the engagement ring off and peeled myself off the sofa. I trudged upstairs and put the ring in my top drawer. I could always change my mind. While I was there, I took the dress off and changed into my weekend clothes—a t-shirt and leggings. I took the dress downstairs and dropped it in the laundry basket.
It was time to wash it.
I took a deep breath. Let it out. Took another one.
I would be okay.
On my way to bed, I paused at Matt’s room and tapped on the door. The sound of gunfire stopped and the door opened.
“Yeah?” He looked past me, presumably trying to work out if Ben was nearby.
“I just wanted to apologise.” It was hard to say the words. Why was it always so hard to say sorry, even when I knew I was wrong?
“What for?”
Oh, great, it was going to be one of those kinds of apologies.
“Snapping at you earlier. Stomping off. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry if I was acting like a twat. You had a bad day. Hot chocolate?”
“All right. Yeah. I think I’d like that.” We hugged and went to the kitchen for a late-night hot chocolate, and I felt like everything was square with us again.
Chapter 10
Bex
“I can’t believe I’m doing this.” I pulled on my cargo trousers and looked at myself in the mirror. It was the weekend after what would have been my wedding day and we were doing what Matt referred to as a team-building exercise. By which he meant, we would need to put the burglar alarm on because we would be out all day.
“Two minutes to departure!” Andy yelled up the stairs. I dragged my jumper over my head and hurried down the stairs.
“What’s that on your feet?” Ben asked. I didn’t need to look down.
“My trainers.” I’d just bought them two days earlier and they were the comfiest pair I’d ever owned. Like walking on clouds.
“Don’t you have any boots?” Matt asked.
I shook my head. “Of course, not. I work in an office. What’s wrong with these?”
“Paintballing is very muddy. And you could also get paint on them,” Andy explained. “I thought we’d already discussed it.”
“We did. And I decided to wear these,” I said.
“Fair enough. We don’t have time to argue. Let’s go, go, go!” Ben said.
We piled into Andy’s Land Rover and set off for the paintballing place. It wasn’t far, so I don’t know why but when we got out, I looked up at the sky, expecting it to somehow be different weather to the clouds that had loomed over our house.
Obviously, it was the same clouds. I didn’t tell the boys about my snafu.
We walked down a dirt track into a wooded area where there was a small group of other people standing around a picnic table by a shed.
“Did you get lost on the way, mate?” one of them asked.
Andy shook his head. “We’re on time.”
“What teams are we going to have?” Ben asked.
“We’ll split everyone.” One of the other guys walked around pointing to everyone. “One, two, one, two...”
When he was done, everyone who had been assigned the same number as each other was on the same team.
Andy and Matt were on one team. Ben and I were on the other.
Crap.
Ben was so good at all this running and shooting stuff, I knew I would slow him down. If I’d been on the same team as all three of them, they could have taken it in turns to walk me through how to be good at paintball.
Ben’s face was closed, but I suspected he was disappointed and trying not to show it.
“We’re doing capture the flag, first. Get your paint guns and vests, then assemble at the tower for a strategy plan.” One of the others seemed to have decided he was in charge. We all went to a shed and I was handed a paintball gun, some paintballs and a vest.
Ben talked me through how to use it while the others were getting kitted out.
“Put the ammo in here. Shoot from here. Don’t get shot. It’s pretty simple. If you get stuck, ask me.”
Fifteen minutes later, Ben and I were stuck in a small shed, surrounded by the other team.
“Do we have enough paintballs to get out of this?” I asked him, as a hailstorm of red shots studded the floor behind the open doorway. There was no way to barricade
it.
“Probably not,” he conceded.
He had his back against the wall beside the doorway, and was occasionally pointing his gun out and shooting before quickly retreating. I was further from the door. Just above our heads was an open place where a window ought to have been.
“Do you think you can cover me?” he asked, glancing at my gun.
I frowned and looked around our empty shed. “Cover you in what?” Was he hoping to camouflage himself in a big pile of leaves?
“I meant covering fire. You shoot out at them so they have to take cover while I get into a better position to take them out.”
That was a thing? I was amazed.
“How do you come up with things like that?” I asked.
“It’s fairly standard. Are you up for it?”
The question appealed to my pride.
“I can do that.”
Ben nodded. “Give it your best shot.”
I crouched close to the ground and looked out. We were truly screwed.
“How do I know where to shoot?”
Ben followed my gaze.
“There will be most effective.” He grabbed the barrel of my gun and pointed it to show me where he meant. Immediately, I began shooting, trying to keep myself out of the firing line by staying behind cover as much as possible.
While I shot, Ben exploded out of the shed and fired several rounds at the other team before jumping back into the shed and rolling. A few shots of paint hit the ground where he’d been a moment before, but nothing hit him.
“You’re so good at this,” I murmured in amazement. It was like being up close in a real action movie.
“It’s just paintball,” he said, in his usual self-deprecating way. “You should see me during airsoft.”
There was a silence inside the shed. We both knew we were outnumbered, outgunned, and in my case, lacking in the ability to hit things.
From outside, I heard shouting and shots fired. A couple of splats of paint hit the shed.
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?” I couldn’t see any way out of this situation.
“Probably.” We sat in silence for several more seconds. Rain began to fall, muffling the sound of the people outside.
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