Falling Sky (10 page)

"I think I'll umm... dry my hair."

The world spins again as I leave. Why did Dylan do this? I had enough information - I believed him - but now I have too much I don’t want to know, that I didn’t need to know. I'm trying to reconcile the two Dylans in my mind, as I have since the day I first found out who he was. The reason he and Jem clash is that they're similar. Too similar, and how far those similarities go worries me.

Chapter Twelve

Dylan

The journey to Sky’s flat takes a couple of hours but feels like half a day; the time driving in silence drags by. Following the disastrous conversation with
Jem, Sky closed down and told me she needed to go back to Bristol. I’m scared to ask if she’s leaving. Her demeanour toward me has cooled and although she’s talking to me, there’s a distance between us. Sky hasn’t mentioned the conversation with Jem again. I want to broach the subject, but the roads need more concentration than usual due to the wintery weather. I turn some music on, and focus on the sound rather than the emptiness in the car.

The afternoon threatens snow once again, the winter at odds with the sunshine I could be in if I’d stayed in LA. If this latest revelation has fucked things up with Sky, then I won’t stay around in England.

When we arrive, Sky stares up at the window to her flat and after a few minutes of silence, I open my door and climb out before walking to her side. I open her door and she steps out, not looking at me.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Not looking forward to this.” Sky shifts her thick black jacket around herself, pulling the collar tight.

I fight against sighing with relief that the silence isn’t because of me. “Everything should be how we left it the other night. Steve got the locks sorted too.”

“Yay for Steve,” she mutters.

She climbs the stairs in a slow, weary way and I pass her the key Steve had cut, hating that her hands tremble as she places it in the lock. I wish Sky would let me take her away from everything
; give her somewhere comfortable and happy to live and not a shitty flat trashed by idiots.

The winter afternoon darkens the room and Sky flicks a light-switch. The un-lived in, cold a
tmosphere isn’t helped by the lack of heating. She can’t want to stay here.

“Why did they leave the curtains open?” Sky crosses to the window and yanks them closed.

All she brought with her was a large handbag; I’m clueless as to what she’s doing. Packing? Staying?

She sits on the sofa and looks at me. “I waited and you’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Not explaining yourself. Communicate, Dylan. Or are you going to disappear again?”

“I’m not sure what to say...”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks coldly.

I hover in the doorway and drag a hand through my hair. “Which part?”

“The part about telling
Jem that Lily wanted sex with him, manipulating the situation so you got your chance with her – and all for revenge. That’s fucked up.”

“Now you know why I blame myself,” I say softly.

Sky shifts the glare from me to her hands. How much does this change things? Permanently?

“Why didn’t you tell me when you supposedly told me the story? That’s one hell of a gap.”

“I don’t know,” I mumble. “I should’ve done.”

“Damn right you should!”
Oh, shit, this is over
. “No, what Jem said doesn’t change anything, but I’m bloody upset you left something major out of your story.”

I approach and perch on the sofa next to her. “I’m sorry.”

“And Myf?” she snaps. “Why didn’t you tell me about her?”

Oh, great.
“Fucking Jem… Yeah, we had a thing – when I was seventeen!”

“And that’s all?”

I touch Sky’s face, desperate not to have her close me out. “Yes, a teenage thing that didn’t work out. I was too focused on the band, didn’t give her the attention she deserved, and she found someone who did. Things were better that way; we’d created one of those situations where friends cross the line and screw up the friendship.” I pause. “Plus Jem wanted her. Beginning to see a pattern here?”

“But he can’t make people want him!”

“Not the people he wants to. Well, some of them – I’ve seen him with Liv; she wants him. Maybe if they weren’t both addicted to substances they could switch some of that addiction to each other.”

Sky rubs her face, looking round the room. “I don’t know what to say, Dylan. Every time I think you’ve told me everything, something new comes up. Trust is a huge thing in a relationship.”

“I fucked up again, didn’t I?”

Sky shakes her head. “This burying things and not dealing with them is a part of you that you need to acknowledge. Funny, I remember you saying something odd about me being a mirror the day we met, about how you couldn’t see through me.” For a long moment, she pauses and studies her shoes. I shift uncomfortably, bracing myself for what might come next.

“I learn more about myself the more I get to know you,” she says as if half-talking to herself, then looks at me with confused eyes. “Let’s deal with our crap together.”

I sink back against the sofa in relief. “You did come to collect your stuff?”

“I don’t want to live here. If I can stay with you until I face what I need to change...?”

“Sky, stay with me as long as you want to.” I bite back the desire to say ‘forever’, pushing away the fantasy of her and me and a happily ever after.

As I watch her wander around the flat shoving random items into her bag, I realise this can’t be a happily ever after because in reality our story is just beginning.

****

Sky

The girl on Jem’s lap curls her body around his, blonde head on his shoulder. Jem grips her waist, smoothing the back of her hand with his thumb as they watch TV. This is different to the last girl I saw him with, the groupie at Dylan’s house in the summer who he treated like his servant. The heavy black eye make-up and red lipstick ages her, but her heart-shaped face and smooth skin make her look like a child trying to dress up. There’s a vulnerability about this girl with the skinny legs and big boots.

When we walk into Dylan’s lounge room, she pushes hair from her face, dark roots betraying her natural hair-
colour, and her green eyes watch us from a distance. She’s in the room, but removed and the dilated pupils indicate why.

“Make
yourself at home,” mutters Dylan, walking by. “Thought you’d be gone by now?”

Jem
and Liv remain in the same position and he gestures toward me with his black-painted fingernails. “Moving in, summer Sky?”

I hug the box tighter. “Temporarily.”

“Hmm. Cute.” Jem switches his attention back to the TV.

Liv
scrutinises me further, head still resting on Jem, and his grip on her waist as if he doesn’t want to let go. Aware there’s no introduction coming anytime soon, I follow Dylan into his bedroom. He dumps the rucksack on the floor and holds his hands out for the large cardboard box in my arms.

“Don’t you like them?” I ask him.

“I like my own space, and with what’s happened between the three of us, he’s not my most welcome guest.” He spins around. “Sorry, I’ve no idea why I’m bringing all your gear in here. Habit. Where do you want me to take this?”

“I need to store the boxes somewhere, I guess.”

Liv has detached herself from Jem when we walk back into the lounge, and now she’s standing I can see how painfully skinny she is. Her leather jacket hangs on her small frame and sharp collarbones jut out of the top of her tatty black tank top. Nothing about her says ‘heiress’; she’s ill and lost. Is this Jem’s fault?

As she passes a beer to
Jem, I study him, intrigued by their lack of vocal interaction. The comfort around each other, the way they can hardly take their eyes off each other, are they a couple in love? Although Liv’s eyes are dull, Jem’s are bright, watching her every move. When she places herself back on the sofa, they instantly fit together again, like interlocking pieces of a puzzle no one else could fix. Jem rubs his face into her hair and catches my scrutiny. I shift my look to the floor.

“How long you staying,
Jem?” asks Dylan.

“We’re going soon, just waiting for a ride from
Liv’s mates.”

She smiles, the perfect white straight teeth at odds with her image. “I’m
Liv.”

Jem
smirks. “Yeah, oops. Forgot you’d never met.”

As if. “Hey,
Liv.”

Her phone beeps and she pulls it from her pocket. “They’re downstairs.” Her Home Counties accent contrasts with her image too.

As I watch, I don’t see anything imbalanced in their relationship; the power of the rock star over the innocent girl isn’t in play here. Dylan said they fed off each other, perhaps they do, and that’s where their comfort around each other comes from. Jem’s not high right now; he’s not sober either, but he’s in the room more than Liv is. When I look at Jem and Liv, my heart hurts because what emanates from them isn’t the happy peace of two people in love, but the defensive tension of two people shutting out the world.

Will this girl survive when
Jem’s inevitable explosion happens? I can’t see she’ll be the one to save him.

Chapter Thirteen

Sky

Early afternoon and I’m as exhausted as if I’d been up all night. The onslaught of
Jem and Dylan when I woke up, the trip to Bristol and then returning to the intensity of the atmosphere with Jem and Liv I’m ready to sleep.

After an awkward hour where little is said,
Jem and Liv finally leave, and I go back into Dylan’s room to retrieve the items I left last night. My tired head aches and without thinking, I open drawers in Dylan’s bathroom, looking for painkillers.

Most cupboards and drawers are empty; some have towels folded inside. A drawer next to the sink has a pile of items that must be Dylan’s inside and I pause before closing it.
Razors, half-empty bottles of gels. Packets of something. I pick one up. Condoms. Disappointment grips, and I tell myself he just came back from the States and these have probably been here a long time.

I’m not distracted for long, because next to the packets is a small plastic bottle. Hesitating, I pull the bottle out. Underneath is another rectangular cardboard box. The container rattles and on the side, a printed label reads
Dylan Morgan - Diazepam.
The disappointment trickles away, replaced by worry as I pick up the second box.
Dylan Morgan - Xanax
. Placing both on the counter next to the sink, I push around the drawer. There’s several other boxes, all different medications and all are half-empty. What worries me the most is they’re dated close together, between June and December, but are all by different doctors.

Dylan’s worse than I thought; how long has he been like this? The container in my hand is dated early June, before I met him. No wonder he ran. Now, look at what he went back to.

He’s screwed up, all of this is. He needs to change. Memories of news stories, stars dead before their time through overdoses and suicide, crash into my mind. Not just Dylan, but Jem too. Does Steve know? Or care?

“Everything okay?” asks Dylan from outside, shaking me back to reality.

I begin shoving the boxes away, debating when to talk to him about this.

The door to the bathroom opens and Dylan appears in the doorway. The boxes are spread across the sink and I have one in my hand. Dylan stiffens and I wait for his reaction, unable to read the closed off expression.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“I was looking for something for a headache and I came across these. Sorry.” I shove the box into the drawer. No. Wait. We confront this. I turn back to Dylan. “There are a lot of different things here, are you sure you should be mixing them? Whatever these are doing, they’re not helping. Look at you.”

“Look at what?”

I sigh and lean against the sink. “When I first met you, I knew there was something wrong; and as I got to know you over that week, I heard what was wrong, how trapped and unhappy you were. I thought maybe you’d dealt with some issues and were happy to move on.”

“I don’t sleep, Sky. I need help sleeping. And some days I need help coping with the stress. Isn’t this better than what Jem’s doing to cope?”

He believes that? “Is it, Dylan?”

He turns his blue eyes toward mine, and this is the answer to how distant they’ve been. I ache to hold him and smooth his hair, take away some of the pain because this is killing him. I never saw when we met last time, never realised how fucked up he was.

“What else are you doing to change things?” I ask.

“I’m living day to day at the moment.”

I straighten. “You need out, Dylan, time out and more than a few days at Broadbeach. If my job were doing this to me, I’d leave.”

“Didn’t you hear anything I told you before? I can’t just leave.”

“Says who? Steve? You’re a person, Dylan, not a product.”

His eyes widen and he shakes his head. “No, not just Steve. You don’t get it.”

Tears push into my eyes. “Yes I do! The person I care about more than anyone else in this world is drowning! There’s nothing wrong with using medication to help you get back on your feet, but using this stuff, and making no changes to your life just numbs what’s inside until you can’t remember how to feel. You’re not happy, and this won’t fix the situation!”

For a moment, Dylan’s eyes register what I’m saying, but he turns and walks toward the door. I follow and take his arm before he can leave. This strong man, the guy who turned my life on its head then sent everything spinning out of control isn’t who I thought, not because of his past or the dubious treatment of Lily, but because he’s spiralling down as fast as his friend is.

“Dylan, don’t walk away from this.”

“I don’t want to see you cry,” he says softly without turning.

The words push the barely controlled tears from my eyes. “I don’t want to see you give up.”

“I’m trapped. I don’t know what the fuck to do!” he says hoarsely. “I know I sound like some bullshit star whining about how bad his life is but I can’t do this. And I need to.”

I wrap my arms around his waist, and rest my head against the hard planes of his back. “I’ll help. My life is pretty much screwed now too. Maybe you’re right about us meeting at the right time back in the summer. We can help each other.”

Dylan loosens my arms and turns back to me. “Can we? I pushed you away, and you push me away.”

“If I can sit and listen to you tell me everything you did to that girl three years ago, and still want to give you a chance, doesn’t that say something about how I feel?” I ask, scrubbing at the tears on my face.

The silence in the apartment hovers in the charged space between us, the gap that needs closing after the months apart. Dylan wipes away a tear with his thumb. “You’re crying for me?”

“No, for us.
For the last few months. If I’d known what was happening, if you’d spoken to me before and not gone away…”

“I had to.”

“Don’t say that! You don’t
have
to do anything!”

He seizes my cheeks with both hands. “Every single day of the last four months I’ve thought about you. I held onto the memories of us to get me through until the memories weren’t enough and I went back to the pills.” He drops his hands and walks over to the bed, sitting on the edge. “At the end of another soul-stealing day, I’d sit in the room with one thought: I would give everything to feel nothing.”

“Did it work?” I ask harshly, “Do you feel nothing?”

“Until I saw you again, then everything flooded in. I ache to have you back, Sky.”

I can’t hold this back. I’m unable to cope with this much emotion in just a few days. The stupid sobbing starts again as I’m hit by the depth of feeling I have for Dylan, the man I hardly know who I can’t imagine being without and who’s falling apart. I cover my face with my hands, not wanting Dylan to look at my ugly crying. Then Dylan’s there, arms around me, hugging me close. He presses my head against the hard muscles of his chest and winds his hand into my hair.

“Don’t cry, please. I don’t want to make you unhappy too.” Dylan’s voice is hoarse, heart beating rapidly against my cheek.

I lift my head from the t-shirt I’ve dampened and look into the eyes of the man from the sea. I see the worry and love in the face I remember from before. Standing on tiptoes, I press my mouth against his, knowing we need to reconnect and fight this together.

Dylan responds with
a hesitancy common in his kisses since we reunited, and I'm shaking, the tears dampening his cheeks. Gripping his hair, I push my lips harder against his until he yields and our tongues caress. My breath is snatched away by the intensity of the moment, the understanding behind our unity and the aching need to reconnect as easily as our mouths mould. I close my eyes, savouring the taste and smell of Dylan, a memory I tried to hold onto and lost over the months apart. I want to fall back into us, desperate to be skin on skin with this man. As I move a hand beneath his T-shirt, desperate to touch his warmth, he catches hold and laces his fingers through mine. I pull away and look in alarm at him. Doesn’t he want this? Dylan rests his forehead against mine, breath heavy to match.

“I love you; I don’t ever want to live a life without you in it.”

Controlling the tears fails again. “I thought you said you didn’t want to make me cry.”

“I have to tell you how I feel, Sky.”

I stroke his smooth cheek with the back of my hand, wishing I could say the words but frightened to tell him I love him too. The heavy tension in the room could be solved with losing ourselves in each other, but that gives Dylan another opportunity to deflect things.

“I want you to do something.” I tell him.

Dylan tenses, where his hands are on my hips they grip. "What?"

"I want you to go to St
Davids and see your gran."

Dropping his hands, Dylan steps back. "What makes you say that? Why would I go there?"

I take his hand. “Dylan, to start moving on I think you need to reconnect with the old you; not the one from three years ago, but the one who needs to remember where he once belonged. Go back and remember him.”

When he sits on the bed and stares at his feet, I’m not sure I’ve said the right thing. “But it’s Christmas,” he says quietly.

“And if your Christmas holds demons, let’s go and put them to rest?”

He glances back at me with a glint in his eye. “With the help of an angel?”

I roll my eyes at him. “If you can’t find one, I’ll help instead.” Tipping his head, Dylan watches me quietly. “What?”

“You’re amazing,” he says softly. “I don’t deserve you.”

I cross to him, and he winds his arms around me, burying his face into my side. We stay together, in a silence that cocoons us.