Sliding Down the Sky (18 page)

Aria clambered down from the couch and headed for the bathroom without another word. Watching TV seemed to have calmed her down, and I could tell bedtime wouldn’t be far away.

“You need any help?” I called after her.

“No, I can do it,” Aria said, disappearing down the hall.

Sass poked her head out of the kitchen, then realised who I was talking to.

“I thought you were asking me,” she mumbled in explanation.

“Do
you
need any help?” I smiled, trying to put her at ease.

She rolled her eyes, thankfully seeing the funny side.

“No thanks, I can do it.”

I headed into the kitchen anyway, at a loose end. She was just reaching in to pull dinner out of the oven. I wondered how she was going to manage, but she’d clearly said she didn’t need any help. She was right, she didn’t. She laid a folded up teatowel over her forearm and used another to pick up the dish with, resting it on her forearm and then carefully sliding it onto the counter. Very smooth.

I’d spent a lot of time recently wondering how she managed. I’d watched her at the bar, and she seemed to have things under control, but watching her today made me appreciate just how much planning went into doing things that I’d always taken for granted. Like Ally’s situation, planning was everything. Trying to anticipate problems and counteract them was the key to success. That, and not giving in.

“I hope you’re hungry,” she said, dishing up onto three plates, one smaller than the others.

“Starving,” I said honestly, standing beside her in readiness to take the plates through to the dining table.

I took the smaller one and one of the larger ones, as soon as she’d finished serving them, and just as Aria came into the kitchen.

“Where do these go?” I asked her, feigning ignorance.

She was fun to be around. I could see me being the cool uncle, once Jack and Ally got over their current issues. Maybe Jack needed to spend some more time with Aria, to see how much fun he could have with his own kid.

“On the table, silly!” she grinned, showing me the way.

I kept it up all through dinner.

“What do you do with this?” I asked her, picking up a fork and staring at it as if I’d never seen it before.

“You eat with it!”

“Oh! Okay.”

I turned it upside down and tried to shovel food onto it, but it kept falling off.

“Not like that!” she giggled, reaching over to show me. “Like this!”

She loaded it with food.

“Open up,” she said, opening her own mouth and coming at me with a forkload.

I did as I was told, and she nearly crammed the whole fork down my throat. I choked on it dramatically, taking the fork from her as she giggled at me.

“How come you’re using a spoon, and I’m using a fork?” I asked, still chewing.

She zipped her mouth shut with her fingers, shaking her head.

“Not eat with your mouth full,” she admonished.

Sass chuckled and I glanced over at her. She was sitting with her left arm in her lap, happily eating while Aria and I provided the entertainment.

“Right,” I said, smiling at Sass. “Sorry about that.”

“He needs a little help with his table manners, huh?” she said, winking at Aria.

Aria nodded, grinning.

It went on like that all through dinner, me playing dumb, Aria correcting me, and Sass laughing at us both. Finally, it was Aria’s bedtime, and Sass disappeared into her room to read her a story. While she was gone, I tidied the plates from the table and loaded the dishwasher, then washed and dried the oven dish and left it on the counter.

When she came back into the kitchen after putting Aria to bed, I was just wiping down the counter.

“Wow,” she said, visibly surprised. “You’re well trained. Thanks.”

I hung up the tea towel over the oven handle and turned to her, leaning back on the freshly-dried counter.

“It’s the least I can do.”

I looked around the kitchen, the memories flooding in. Me and Jack and our friendship, his parents, and the reason I spent so much time at his house in the first place – my own parents, and the disaster that was their marriage. Suddenly, it all felt very recent.

“I spent a good part of my life in this house,” I said. “Whenever I came over for dinner, it was always mine and Jack’s job to do the dishes.”

She leant back against the doorframe.

“I didn’t realise that. I mean, I knew this was Jack’s Dad’s place, I just didn’t know you guys were that close. So, you’ve known each other for a long time, then?”

I folded my arms across my chest.

“Since we were about ten. His family was the family I
wished
I had, that’s why I spent so much time here, I guess.”

I clammed up quickly. I hadn’t meant for things to get that personal, but it was too late. I was hoping to keep things light-hearted.

“Do you want a drink?” she asked, right on cue.

It was as if she’d read my mind.

“I’d love a beer.”

I could tell immediately that wasn’t what she had in mind.

“I was thinking coffee, but if you want a beer that’s cool.”

I did want a beer. Pretty desperately actually, but I knew she didn’t drink. For once, it was more important that she was comfortable, not that I had a beer on board, no matter how much I wanted one.

“No, coffee’d be great, thanks.”

She smiled hesitantly, then set about making coffee. She pulled out a couple of mugs from the overhead cabinet.

“Why don’t you go through to the living room? I’ll be through in a minute.”

“Sure, okay.”

Was she trying to get rid of me? Or maybe it was just that I was staring and it made her uncomfortable. The vibe had definitely changed now that it was just the two of us.

I went through to the living room, standing on the other side of the kitchen, wondering what the hell I could do to get back the easy-going, conversational vibe we’d lost. The piano drew my attention, and I went over to it, examining the sheet music that was laid out on the stand.

“Do you read music?”

I turned around to find Sass holding two steaming mugs in one hand, carefully placing them on the coffee table.

“Me? God no. I was just, y’know, reading the words and stuff.”

I got up and went over to the couch, sitting down beside her. She sat back with her coffee, tucking one knee underneath her, then resting her mug on her thigh. She looked pretty relaxed again, so I took a chance. A big one.

“Did you play?” I asked, addressing the elephant in the room. “I know you played guitar. I’m not sure about piano.”

“I… yeah, I did.”

“I’m sorry – is that a really shitty thing to ask? It probably is. I have this knack of opening my mouth and putting my foot in it.”

She smiled, but I saw the hint of sadness there, just beneath the surface.

“No, it’s okay. I’m not used to… this, that’s all.”

“Not used to what?”

She shrugged, glancing briefly at the mug then back at me. I saw the fear in her eyes. I didn’t want to push her into anything she wasn’t ready for.

“Talking about it.”

“We don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” I assured her gently.

I expected her to politely tell me that she’d prefer it if we talked about something else, but she didn’t. I sensed the battle within her though, as if she was trying to decide if she was ready. From what I’d seen, she tended to teeter on the edge a lot of the time.

“It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it,” she murmured, her eyes finding mine again. “It’s just that I never really know what to say.”

I could understand that. On some level, I could definitely relate.

“Why didn’t you tell me that you knew who I was?” she asked. “And when did you figure it out?”

It was a fair question, but the truth was blunt and I wanted to spare her that. I tossed around words in my head, taking a sip of my coffee to buy some time.

“Was it the night that guy grabbed me?” she asked, watching me closely.

“Yeah.”

It was the truth. I wondered briefly if I should’ve lied. She smiled, but it was a humourless smile. I could see her putting the pieces together in her head.

“Guess it was pretty easy after that,” she said. “Even with my hair being different. Can’t really hide this, can I?”

She held up her left arm, then she tucked it down beside her thigh, away from me.

“Why do you think you’re a coward?”

“What?”

“Outside, earlier, you said you were a coward.”

She breathed out slowly, then shrugged, her shoulders barely lifting before they dropped again.

“I’m scared. That reporter showing up, digging everything up again. I’m not ready for that.”

She lifted her mug to her lips, and her hand trembled as she held it there, taking a sip before lowering it again.

“After the accident, they wouldn’t leave me alone,” she went on, her voice low, her gaze fixed on the mug she now rested on her thigh. “They hounded me – coming out of the hospital, rehab, my apartment. I couldn’t get away from them. I tried to just carry on as normal, even after everything, but I made a real mess of it, and they were right there the whole time, taking photos, posting about it online. There was no privacy, no peace. The fans were great, for the most part – they understood. But the press – they didn’t give me any space to… grieve, I guess. They wanted news, they wanted an exclusive, they wanted me to open up to someone I’d never even met, for God’s sake. I couldn’t even open up to my own family.”

She took a shuddering breath, before finally looking up at me.

“I don’t think I could go through all that again. I just want them to leave me alone.”

Was she trying to tell me to back off? I wanted to, but I couldn’t, not entirely at least. I’d come too far for that, but I wanted her to be able to trust me, too. The line I was walking was getting thinner by the second.

“You’re not a coward,” I said. “Not for wanting to keep your private life private. I can’t say I’ve ever really known that kind of fame, but I don’t think you sign away your rights as a human being when you get labelled as a celebrity. If you don’t want to talk to reporters, they should understand that.”

“Yeah,” she said, huffing out a breath. “Well, reporters aren’t known for their humanitarianism. Misery sells.”

That pissed me off. She shouldn’t have to be subjected to this bullshit.

“Y’know what?” she continued. “Fame is an illusion. It’s fleeting, like a flame – it changes and shifts, subject to wind and light and who’s watching. It’s fickle – it means nothing. I chased fame my whole career – I wanted it so badly, to stand out, to be noticed. Now, I can’t think of anything worse than standing up on stage, people looking at me. I just want to blend into the background again, I want to be just like everyone else, but I can’t even do that. I don’t miss the fame, at all. If I could play and no one could hear me, I wouldn’t care.”

She glanced over at the piano, and for a fleeting moment, I thought I could hear everything she didn’t say. It was like she’d just shoved a red-hot poker into my chest.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, staring at the carpet. “I don’t know where that came from.”

“You don’t have to apologise.”

“No?” she smiled tightly, glancing up at me. “I just took a perfectly nice day and ruined it by complaining about shit I can’t do anything about. Seems to me that apologising is the least I should be doing.”

I held my hand up.

“You think you’re the only one with problems? Please. I could talk your ear off, believe me.”

“I dare you,” she said, testing the water.

Shit.

“A dare? Are you serious? Well, that’s not even fair. You know that any red-blooded male can’t refuse a dare. It’s in the handbook – page one, rule one.”

“Really? I wasn’t aware.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Some of the light came back into her eyes.

“Stop beating around the bush. Prove it.”

“You’ll be sorry,” I said, hedging.

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Tell me about you,” she said. “Tell me something, anything, I don’t care. I just don’t want to be the only one talking.”

“Anything?”

I wanted to be as honest with her as she had been with me, but that was a can of worms I wasn’t sure I wanted to open.

Part of me wanted to tell her the truth, in all its miserable glory, just to prove my point.

Another part of me wanted to lie to her, pull her closer, reassure her that she was in safe hands, that I was a good bet even if I wasn’t sure of that myself. One thing I was sure of, and that was that she was changing me. Slowly, surely, I could feel it happening.

The two sides warred silently with each other, until my mouth decided to go for it. I didn’t even know what I was going to say until it came tumbling out.

“You’re lucky to have family around you, who care about you.”

She cocked her head slightly to one side, quietly evaluating me. Inside, I was cringing. Where the hell had that come from?

“Tell me about yours,” she said, as I suspected she would.

I had opened the door, hadn’t I? I rolled my eyes and set my coffee mug down on the table in front of the couch. I wished it was beer, or maybe even whisky. But it was too late, I’d said it and now she wanted details. My instinct was to skip over the details – always. No good ever came from rehashing that shit, which was why I never did. I’d been trying to bury it for so long that talking about it felt dirty somehow. Like I was breaking a promise I’d made to myself a long time ago. I blew out a ragged breath, slowly, to give myself time to think.

“Okay,” I began. “It’s such a long, sordid, miserable story, so I’ll give you the cliff notes. My Dad was an alcoholic who spent most of his time either drinking, yelling at me and my Mom, or breaking shit. When I was sixteen and finally bigger than him, physically, I threw him out. Mom moved out of town a few years later, leaving all the bad memories behind, I guess. I stayed, because to be honest, I felt more at home with Jack’s family than I did with her. I mean, I love her and everything, but my home – such as it was – was here. I spent more time here than I did with her. To her credit, she never pushed the issue.”