Chapter Twenty-One
Dylan had slept for three hours, showered and eaten, and had stepped out of the door with a new zeal, intent on seeing Scarlett, even if he had to beg her to take him back. First stop was the corner shop, where he bought a supersized box of painkillers, a bottle of water, and a very expensive, albeit almost wilting, bunch of red roses.
He popped the pills and drank the water, feeling better immediately. He had banished his self-pitying thoughts and was on the up again. He just needed Scarlett back in his life to make it all perfect.
He set off in the vague direction that he remembered from his one time at Scarlett’s, but didn’t have much luck, wandering around the small block of flats where she lived, peering into windows and clutching his flowers. Growing desperate, he worried he just might have to start singing in the hope she’d hear him and throw open her window rapturously, like Juliet. He did rather hope that he could enter through the door though, rather than having to climb up the side of the house in lieu of a balcony.
He ran through the quotes of Romeo and Juliet he’d learned at school, even considered yelling,But, soft,what light through yonderwindow breaks?up at a random window, ortwo. Or was that a piss-takelinefrom Shrek?
He worried at his forehead in confusion. His quest was starting to feel hopeless. He could wander around for hours, and Scarlett could be high above the ocean, serving disgusting caviar to people with more money than sense, while he was making more of a prat of himself than normal.
As he meandered in and out of patches of green grass and around sapling trees and vandalised waste bins, losing the will, a movement caught his eye.
It was little more than a lucky break that he recognised the man standing on the step in front of the main entrance to the apartments.
However, his relief turned to wariness when it sank in that it was the obnoxious Captain Carrington he’d spotted. He was even more perturbed, when the guy leaned towards Scarlett, who stood on the top step of her apartment, and he watched in horror as Scarlett put her hands flat on his chest, seemingly enjoying the kiss.
Hardly able to believe his eyes, Dylan’s jaw fell open as he lost hold of the flowers and they tumbled to the ground.
As Captain Carrington bounced jauntily down the steps, Dylan moved forward, ready to smack him in his stupid, self-satisfied face, but he stopped himself, clenching and unclenching his hands into fists, as realisation hit.
Scarlett was a grown woman who could make her own choices and if that man was her choice then he could do nothing about it, although smacking him one in his smug face would probably improve his own mood. Instead he watched him walk to some posh car and drive away glancing over at Scarlett’s flat, with a self-satisfied leer as he passed by.
Dylan wanted to be sick. The hangover he thought he’d recovered from returned with a vengeance, his stomach roiling in revulsion. He lowered himself to the ground on a grassy hillock until he’d recovered enough to haul himself upright. In shock he simply stared at the door that kept Scarlett away from him. She was probably doing a happy little dance of love, or perhaps sliding down the door in ecstasy as she relived the wonderful sex she’d shared with her new man — memories that only someone truly in love could appreciate. It was a love that, of course, excluded him and Dylan wasn’t sure he could deal with it.
He bit his lip, trying to make it hurt more than the pain that reached into the core of his soul, making him retch, but the heartache won, big time, rendering him incapable of movement. He felt as if he’d been felled, like a tree, losing the stability he thought he took for granted.
Staring helplessly towards Scarlett’s apartment, he hugged his arms around himself, knowing he should try and be stronger, more stoic, about it, accept it as part of life. But even as he willed the pain to disappear, he knew it was only just getting started.
Scarlett had managed to swap him with ease, ironically to a man who she’d said she didn’t even like. They had both misjudged each other, by the look of it.
Dylan eventually turned away in disgust. At least he’d had the honesty to stay true to what he wanted — although, in truth, he couldn’t imagine why Scarlett would choose such a man as Captain Creepy Carrington. And it hurt, more than he would ever have thought possible.
After one last glance towards her front door, he picked up the roses and threw them one by one into a trickle of a stream that ran at the end of the road, watching as they floated away, taking his dreams with them.