I Need You (30 page)

Whenever he told me something, she’d finish the story.

They were a pair. Completely in tune and together.

The times I’d gone out with him and Lindy, we’d had quiet conversations, this was raucous.

Rachel told me about when she and Jason had gone out for their first night together, and Jason had had a major hangover. He didn’t seem to care that she teased him, and his eyes glowed in the low light of the bar as he looked back at her laughing too. “So does it matter I’m not used to getting as drunk as you?”

She laughed, “No, in fact I think it’s cute.”

He finished his beer as I ordered another. I think he was on his fourth, I was on about my… tenth maybe? Busy drowning my sorrows quietly––I couldn’t get loud sad drunk with Rachel here and in her super-bright mood––so I was aiming for oblivion instead.

I liked them together. I liked her. She was good for him.

I wished Lindy could see it and get that, maybe then she’d move on too.

At ten-thirty I started to think about heading home. My cell went off, vibrating in my pocket––
Clarity by Foxes
.

Shit I had to change that.

I took it out.

Lindy.

Fuck

We hadn’t spoken for three weeks.

Standing up I turned away as I answered, “Lindy,” catching Jason’s gaze and lifting my eyebrows as he stopped talking.

Lindy

“Lindy.” When Billy spoke I took a breath, longing for the right words, but he didn’t wait for them. “I told you, I’m not gonna be your sex toy anymore and I’m not giving in.”

The tears already rolling down my cheeks grew stronger as I tried to catch my breath but couldn’t. A sob came out, on a sound of desperation.

“There’s no need to cry.” The sound of people talking and music made him hard to hear. “Just… don’t call me, okay…” The words slurred a little, like he’d had a drink.

But I had no one else to call! “Billy!” His name came out on another sob. “My mom is dying, she’s in the hospital. Will you come? Please! I need someone here!”

“What?” His pitch changed from irritated and defensive to concern. The Billy who had taken me on vacation to help me escape.

“She has cancer! She’s dying!”

“No, Lind. What? What did you say?”

“Mom has cancer! She’s in the hospital! She’s dying, Billy! I don’t want to be here alone! Will you come?”

A sharp intake of air echoed from my cell. “I’ll come. Oh shit I can’t drive, I’ve been drinking.”

It got quieter, like he’d been in a bar and gone outside. My tears fell in rivers. I couldn’t breathe; every breath became a sob.

“Don’t worry. I’ll get there. Where are you, Portland?”

“Yeah, in the Providence.” I‘d known this moment was gonna come, I’d known for so long––but knowing and living with it…

“I’m sorry, Lindy. I’ll get there.” The slur had gone, and determination burned in his pitch.

The cell went dead, my hand dropped and I slid down the wall. I ended up on the cold, tiled floor, and leaned my forehead on my knees.

The pain I’d lived with for four years bombarded me like a stinging sandstorm, stealing my vision, my senses, and leaving me lost.

Billy

I had a feeling I’d paled as I walked back in the bar. My hand gripped in my hair.

Had Mrs. Martin just discovered she was sick? But that didn’t sound right, not to be rushed in with cancer when it was just diagnosed.

I was sure I looked confused when I got back to the table and grabbed my jacket off the seat.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to go see Lindy?”

I didn’t have chance to reply. Rachel stood up. “I’ll take you. Jason and I can get home to Saint, then.”

I took a breath, shaking my head. “I’m not going to hers. It was Lindy, but she’s at the Providence hospital in Portland––”

Jason stood. “She hasn’t––”

My hand came up. “It’s not Lindy, it’s her mom. Mrs. Martin has cancer. Lindy said she’s dying. Lind is really cut up. I said I’d go there.”

“I’ll drive you.” Rachel was already moving, the keys in her hand.

“Fuck, that’s crazy.” Jason followed. “We’ll get you there.”

“What about Saint?”

Rachel glanced back at me as we walked out. “He’ll be fine with Granny. I’m worried about Lindy. That’s terrible.”

“Yeah…” What the frick… I needed to get there and talk to her. Find out what was going on.

As Rachel drove I sat in the back seat of Jason’s dad’s truck watching the darkness, not seeing a thing. This was mad.

“Surely Miriam must have known…” Jason said, his head turning against the rest, speaking over his shoulder.

“Who knows.” We were all in shock.

“But it’s cancer, that doesn’t just spring up on you.”

I kept thinking about Lindy being so down and upset after the overdose. What if… Shit.

My fingers ran through my hair, then I messed it up to spike it again, before my hand fell on my thigh and started tapping out a beat.

Frick.

Rachel dropped me at the front door of the hospital. “Thanks, bye, I’ll––”

“We’re not going, we’ll come in.”

My eyebrows lifted.

“Billy, she’s not my girlfriend anymore, but I was with her for ages, I still care about her.” He glanced at Rachel. “Rach gets that.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I wanna know she’s okay too.”

But she wasn’t okay, and I didn’t think she’d want them here. “Just stay in the front waiting area then ‘til I find out if she’s alright about you being here.”

“Okay, Rach will go park up, then we’ll meet you in there.”

“Just sit and wait, I’m gonna go find her first. She may not want you around.”

“Okay.” His voice was tight and uncertain. He didn’t want to be shut out. But surely he had to get that he had no right to be here now.

“This is about Lindy, no one else, Jason.”

“I know.”

I shut the truck door. My jaw locked and my hands clenched as I walked into the hospital and up to the reception. “What ward is Mrs. Martin in, Miriam Martin? I’m a friend of the family. My…” I still didn’t know what the frick Lindy was to me. “My girlfriend is there, it’s her mom…”

“Are they expecting you?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll call up and check. What’s your name?”

“Billy Worrall.”

The woman looked away from me as she picked up her phone. “Hey. I have Billy Worrall in reception, he says he’s connected to Miriam Martin through her daughter. Can you check if that’s true before I send him up?”

She glanced at me, smiling a little, as I leaned on the counter watching her. My breath probably stunk of beer. A couple of minutes of silence passed, then she said, “Okay, thanks.”

She looked up at me as she put the phone down. “You can go on up to the ward.”

“Where is it?”

“On the first floor, turn right once you get out of the lift and it’s the first door.”

“Okay.”

I wiped my sweaty hands on my jeans. I’d been mean to Lindy;
I don’t want to be your sex toy
. What the fuck had been going on in reality?

When the lift doors opened on the first floor she was there, and she didn’t wait for me to step out but rushed in lifting to her toes, her arms wrapping about my neck.

I held her too, and shit, there was that thing inside me, that addiction, that clawed and roared at the feel of her. I held her tighter. The familiar smell of her perfume capturing me and saying home. “Lindy.” My fingers stroked through her hair as the lift doors started shutting.

“Shit.” I let her go and pressed the hold button. She moved away from me, her arms crossing over her and gripping either side of her ribs. “Come on,” I gripped her upper arm and led her out. She’d been crying, a lot, her eyes were red-veined and puffy and full of shimmering saline.

A tear escaped.

In the hall outside the lift I wrapped my arms around her. Her forehead pressed against my shoulder as she cried.

For a minute I said nothing, my hands just stroking through her hair and rubbing her back.

When she pulled away, wiping the tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand, I said, “Is your dad here?”

“He’s in with Mom, I had to get out, I can’t stop crying and it’s not fair on her.”

My fingers gripped her upper arms. They were bare, she just had a t-shirt on. “Did you know?”

She nodded, tears flooding her eyes.

“How long for?”

“Years…” The answer came on a sob, and then her arms were about my middle and she clung to me.

I gave her a minute, my heart pounding.

Years?

“Do you want to go somewhere to talk, get a coffee or something?”

She shook her head against my chest.

“What do you need me to do, Lind?”

“Just hold me.”

I did for a minute, but then the hall we stood in rocked. “I’m sorry, I need to sit down. I was out with Jason. I’ve had too much to drink.”

She pulled back and looked at me. Then she nodded. I couldn’t tell what she thought.

She turned to lead me along the corridor to a door she pushed open. “This is the day room, we can use it.”

There were a load of chairs in it, a TV on the wall and a table in the corner with a stack of magazines and secondhand books.

She crossed the room, pulling me after her, and sat down on a chair in the corner. I sat in the one at right-angles to it, leaning forward and resting my forearms on my thighs. My head spun.

She slipped off her chair and instead sat on the floor with her back against it.

“Isn’t the floor cold?”

She shook her head, as her arms crossed, like she was hugging herself.

“How long have you known, exactly?”

She glanced up at me. “Nearly four years. She had breast cancer. When she got diagnosed it had already spread; it was in her lungs, and lymph glands and her spine. She could have had chemo and a ton of invasive operations, but they said it wouldn’t mean she was okay, it would just give her more time. She didn’t want to spend her last years sick or Dad to see her with her hair falling out.”

Was she kidding me?
Or Dad to see her with her hair falling out.
Surely having more time mattered more than that…

I shook my head at her when it clicked. Lindy had inherited her I-need-to-look-perfect gene from her mom. But why not tell anyone? “Why didn’t you say something to me, I mean if not before, why not tell me when we were away?”

“Mom doesn’t want people pitying her. She wanted us to deal with it as a family.”

“While you suffered and fell apart…?” Shit, so many things started clicking into place. “Is that why you took the overdose, not because of Jason?”

Her blue eyes looked up at me, searching my expression for judgment. “Partly, but not because of that particularly… It’s just… This is hard… I don’t want to live without her and I didn’t have Jason to turn to anymore. I got messed up… I know it was wrong now, but at the time, I couldn’t think straight.”

More tears rolled down her cheeks.

I rested a hand on her shoulder, feeling like the douche she’d called me a few weeks ago. I’d cursed her in my head for not getting over Jason. It wasn’t Jason she hadn’t got over.

Her temple fell against my knee as she clutched her legs against her chest. “I don’t want to let her go, but there’s no choice.”

My fingers brushed over her soft hair, releasing the scent of her shampoo. Lindy grounded me. She made me feel real and alive. And her… What was I to her? “I’m sorry.”

Her head tipped back and her eyes met mine. “Me too. Sorry you felt like I was using you, I guess I was. It’s just, it felt good to get out of the house, escape… and sex with you… made me forget everything for a little while.”

I brushed back the strands of her hair that had got stuck on the tear tracks. I probably shouldn’t say what I was about to say, but I was drunk, and I had to get it out… “What am I to you, Lindy? I mean do you like me, think I’m hot… What? ‘Cause I have no idea.”

She didn’t answer.

Fuck it, I was just gonna throw all my cards on the table and leave her to show her hand too. “Lindy, I love you. That’s why I’m asking. I’ve loved you for years. I wanted you before you were even seeing Jason. But you always looked at him not me.” I took a breath. “Now I know you see me, but what do you see?”

Her forehead crunched up. “Since––”

“Since before Jason.”

She looked even more confused. “But we shared an apartment with you at college…”

“I know. Believe me. I spent those years in agony.” My smile twisted, maybe turning bitter.

“But you… We all got on…”

“I only went to the same fricking college as you to stay near you. See how bad I have it for you now?”

She shook her head, her gaze clouding. It didn’t look like she appreciated my confession. Fresh tears dripped from her tinted eyelashes, dropping onto her bent knees.

“Come here.” I pulled her up off the floor, onto my lap and she turned sideways, her arms sliding about my neck as I rubbed her back. “Sorry, I didn’t pick the best moment to tell you, did I?”

She sobbed against my neck, her tears soaking into the collar of my shirt.

“Mom is dying, Billy.”

Yeah, wrong moment. My confession got swept away as she sobbed as hard as she’d done when I first came up here. I held her. That was what she’d asked me to do. Just that.

It was about ten minutes before she pulled away, sitting up and wiping the tears from her cheeks; her eyes redder and puffier. She sniffed. “Sorry.”

“You’re entitled to have a good cry.”

“I ought to go in and talk to Mom and Dad for a moment, then, when I come out, we can go down to the café and get a coffee. You probably need one if you’re drunk.”

My lips twisted in a lopsided smile and I caught her chin in my fingers. “I didn’t say what I said ‘cause I’ve been drinking, it’s the truth.”

Her eyes stared back at me. “I believe you. I just… I need time to get my head around it, and you need to sober up.”

I nodded. Was I slurring my words? I didn’t think so. But I bet I did have beer breath. “Okay.” My heart clenched with a bitter pain. She didn’t feel anything for me. I was an idiot.

She got up. I caught her hand. “Hey, I forgot, Jason and Rachel are downstairs, they drove me in.”