Innocence (21 page)

I feel light-headed.

Pixie’s words have made me bold, but not bold enough. The age difference between us paralyzes me from making any move because I have no idea what I’m doing, what he expects, how not to be clumsy and inept. Finn took the lead with me, and although I wanted to be more in control, I’ve not quite got the courage….

The paralysis grips me until it’s too late.

“I should make a move,” he says suddenly, taking a deep breath and rolling away from me to get up.

I reach out and grasp his hand, the gesture belated—I should have reached out for him thirty seconds ago—and he stops, his back to me still, gripping my hand hard for a second, his posture tensing up all of a sudden.

“You don’t have to go,” I whisper.

I want him to stay, but I can’t say it so explicitly. Even if nothing happens, I want him to stay. I want to sleep curled round him. I want him to hold me in the dark.

“I need to tell you something,” he says.

“What?” I pull myself up until I’m sitting next to him on the edge of the bed, the bedside lamp casting us in gold.

“I don’t want to keep any more secrets.” His voice is strained. He looks at his hands, at our hands, the way my hand fits tightly against his. “That day, after I told you everything, it was all so fucked and I wanted to make it right somehow.”

“Make what right?” I say tremulously, a deep knot of dread unspooling like a length of tangled wire inside me.

“I don’t want to keep anything else from you.” He turns and touches my cheek, his finger warm and trembling. “I found her, Christopher. I had an idea where to start, but I didn’t think it would be so easy. I know where Isabella is.”

My throat tightens. I don’t know how to feel, all I can think about is Jay. Jay wanting to find her all this time, all these years, and Malachi does it in a single day.

“Did you know all along? Did you know where she might be
all along
?”

He shakes his head and looks at me.

“No… I swear. I just know some things about her past, that’s all—her real name, the county her family are from, stuff she lied to your dad about.” He stops as if he’s unsure how to proceed. “You need to understand, your dad let himself be blinded because he loved her. She was like that, she could do that—” He carries on eventually. “So I knew where to start looking. It’s a few hours away. I’ll bring the address tomorrow…. I’ll take you there, if you want….”

He still has hold of my hand. If he didn’t, I might just drift away out the window and into the night.

“You can tell me the address now,” I say softly. I know he will have memorized it.

But he shakes his head. “I don’t want you to go alone. I don’t want you to take off in the middle of the night to do something… stupid….”

“So why did you tell me in the middle of the fucking night?” I’m not angry, I’m just… I don’t know.

“Because I’m so tired of these secrets!” He lets go of my hand and runs his palms down his face, then gets up. “Because… because you have every right to hate me for keeping them.”

“How can I hate you?” I wonder if he’s blind. Can’t he see?

“I should go.” He picks up his guitar.

It hurts because he’s running from
me
now.

“Kia.” I sob. It’s such a relief to say his name again… the name I knew him as all those years ago.

It stops him dead.

Stay.

But I can’t say it. I can’t beg him when he’s just going to turn me down.

“Don’t shut me out again. Don’t be weird with me tomorrow. Be like this,” I say instead.

“I don’t mean to be weird with you,” he whispers, his voice different, choked up, his back to me still. “I’m just so fucking terrified of feeling like this.”

I swallow, shocked. The possible implications of his words make my head spin.

At the door he gives me a look that I know means he’s silently pleading with me not to want to talk about this ever again. Absurdly, through my tears, I feel like laughing. He can’t say something like that and expect me just to forget it.

But he does, closing the door quietly and leaving me cold without him.

I pick up the guitar and play awhile, just quietly, just the one chord I can remember over and over again. It helps me not to think.

The only reason to go find her is for Jay, because she should know what has happened to the boy she abandoned. She should be there with him. She
owes
it to him to be there for him.

But when I think about seeing her, about what I would say to her, I start to feel so sick, so mixed up inside.

I
T
’
S
ONE
o’clock in the morning when I leave. The road next to the hotel is a busy one. I’ve been sitting in the dark, and once I’m outside, the lights of the cars hurt my eyes. I watch the taxis crawling by and pat the money in my pocket to check it’s still there. I have no idea how much a taxi is going to cost to where I want to go, but before that I want to see Cass and I want to walk awhile.

In the shadows left by broken streetlights, I can see the stars. Most of the streetlights are broken on the estate where Cass lives, and the darkness there almost makes me feel invisible. Out in the dark of the fields, I’m part of nature. Here I’m not part of anything.

Tower blocks rise up blackly behind the tatty row of four-story maisonettes. Cass’s is the last one.

I throw a few stones up at his bedroom window, where they rattle against the thin glass, but I don’t want to break it. In the end I shout his name a couple of times, as I heard other people do when I stayed here.

His light goes on, and I wave my hand when he looks out the window. He comes down to the front door.

“You okay?” he asks, wrapping his arms round himself, half-dressed in tracksuit bottoms and no top, shivering in the doorway. “I was worried about you.”

I have to stop myself staring at his nipples, the faint definition of his slight chest.

“Come up for a bit?” he adds hopefully. It’s as if he can sense my eyes on him.

I shake my head. Music from an upstairs flat swims around us, distorted by the wind. The air smells vaguely of smoke, burning wood, and leaves.

“Cass, I just came to thank you. You looked out for me when I couldn’t look out for myself.”

I step closer and gently cup one side of his face. It hurts the way he leans into my touch. This is all he wanted.

“That guy who came for you, he loves you, right?” His voice is falsely bright.

I shrug. “I don’t know.” Pulling him out of the light of his doorway and into the shadows, I wind my hand around the back of his neck, feeling the soft down of his hair, my eyes drawn to the bright color of it in the dark. “Promise me something, yeah?”

He just looks at me, watches me like Jay does—like Jay did, I think painfully—waiting for whatever I’m going to say, believing the words before they are even out of my mouth.

“Get out of here. Don’t stay here and let anyone hurt you anymore. You’re better than that.”

“Are you leaving?”

“I don’t know.”

His feet are bare, yet he still kicks at the gravel. I don’t want to leave it like this.

“Cass, I’ve never really had friends. I moved around too much.” I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I can’t promise him anything, but a part of me wants to.

“But if you are around, we could hang out sometime, be friends?” He looks at me uncertainly.

“Okay.” I nod. “I’ve got to sort out some stuff, but I’ll let you know when I’m back.”

We smile at each other tentatively.

“Wait. Before we’re official, friends and all that, I… I just want to do something.”

Proving himself much bolder than I am, he steps up to me and, standing on tiptoes, draws my head down and presses his lips against mine, sweetly and chastely. Smiling ruefully, he pulls away.

But before he moves too far, I capture his lips again, holding him to me gently, running my tongue against his scar and dipping deep into his mouth when he gasps. The way he melts against me makes me want to pick him up in my arms, carry him inside, and lay him down on his mattress. Not for the first time, I wonder what it would be like to be sheathed inside someone, their flesh tight around mine.

Breathlessly I pull away, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. I didn’t imagine that would go so far. Cass puts a hand over the hard-on tenting his jogging bottoms.

“That was a one-time-only thing,” I say apologetically.

“I get it.” Thankfully he doesn’t look too upset. “I’m going to think about that when I go back to bed, though. I’m going to think about you.” He smiles wryly. “Come find me when you’re back, okay?”

I nod, and we hug briefly.

T
HE
TOWN
square is all lit up and empty. I kick a can all the way down the high street, imagining everyone else in the world has been wiped out and there’s just me left—until a car passes by.

There are no kids on the bridge tonight. I stand by the railings, all covered in pointless graffiti—what’s the point in scrawling words if you’ve got nothing to say—and stare out across the water until I hear the taxi pull up behind me. I called the taxi from a phone box outside Cass’s. I’ve heard about what happens to people sometimes when they take a cab they see waiting on the street.

The driver, an old Muslim man in a long white tobe that hangs down to the floor of the car, gives me a strange look when I tell him where I want to be dropped. It sounds like the middle of nowhere, but it’s not.

Everything is still and silent as I walk down the lane to the camp. My head is swimming a little. It’s the early hours of the morning, though I’m not sure which hour it is anymore.

I’m worried Maisie is going to bark as I approach the van, but she just wags her tail, knowing it’s me from a mile off. I make a fuss of her for a minute, briefly considering letting myself in with Malachi’s spare key, but then decide that’s just way too creepy and knock softly on the window outside the bathroom instead. The window is near enough to the bedroom to wake him, but not too close to scare the life out of him.

He’s a light sleeper. Almost immediately the light goes on, and I hear him moving around. He opens the door, running a hand through his hair, and squints at me.

“You’re drunk,” he states, sighing wearily.

“I was lonely.”

It’s somewhat truthful. I didn’t down a bottle of cider in the back of the taxi because I wanted to get drunk, I just needed a little Dutch courage to come out here in the middle of the night. But I suddenly realize Malachi might not see it like that. I’ve been drunk a lot around him, and it can’t be easy for him to deal with.

“I didn’t think. I’m sorry.” I wince.

“It’s not catching. Thankfully,” he says tiredly, stepping aside so I can squeeze past him. “Did you walk?”

“Taxi,” I say as he closes the door.

An owl cries out as it swoops through the dark above the caravan somewhere. Malachi leans against the counter, his T-shirt hanging off his shoulder, and I can see there is definitely a tattoo there—letters, a word.

“It’s half three. I’m not usually at my most sociable at half three in the morning.”

He tips his head to the side, studying me. I’m not sure if I should sit down instead of standing awkwardly in the middle of the room. The only light comes from the bedroom down the corridor. I’m grateful he can’t see me properly.

“I don’t want to talk or anything. I just… want to know someone’s there,” I whisper.

My whole life Jay and I have shared a room. The loneliness without him is bleak and utter. The smallest of things are the worst: not seeing the shape of him curled up, still asleep when I wake up in the morning; not listening to him talk in his sleep and trying to guess what his dream is about; not catching him staring in the mirror, trying to pretend he’s not looking at the changes in himself. A thousand tiny absences—the quietness of his voice, the brilliance of his smile.

“I just want my brother back, Kai,” I gasp.

When he moves, all the years that have passed melt away and it’s Kai’s shadow that enfolds me in his arms, holds me out of whatever depths there are in the darkness with his warmth, his beating heart, his words….

“I know. I’ll do anything, I swear. I’m here for you. I’ll always be here.”

W
E
’
RE
LYING
in the dark on Malachi’s warm bed, my head pillowed on his shoulder. Outside, the wind rushes through the trees, a whispery and constant sound broken only by the occasional smattering of rain as it hits the roof. I feel like entire seasons pass as we lie here, not seconds or minutes or hours, but the world spinning around us in some strange eternity, and I am at once removed from myself and deep inside my own skin. It leaves me longing for connection. For touch.

Hesitantly, with trembling fingers, I trace the smooth skin of his inner arm from his elbow to his wrist. I try and make it seem so casual. The first time, he tenses against me, but slowly he begins to relax, and I grow bolder, repeating the movement over and over, the sensation filling me with an overwhelming tenderness, a want to take care of this man lying next to me, inside and out, all his secrets, all his pain.

Letting my fingers drop lower, I circle his palm, and he captures my hand in his for a moment, but he lets go soon enough as if he doesn’t want me to stop the movement.

I wonder what turns him on, if it could ever be me.

On the little bedside table, squashed between the wall and the bed, the photograph album lies closed. I contemplate asking him if I can have another look, but I don’t want to move. How we ended up lying on his bed like this, I don’t really know, but I’m not complaining.

“There are photographs of you up on a stage with your guitar. Were you playing at a concert?” I say quietly after a while, the image of him singing and playing onstage burnt forever into my mind. All those photographs are.