Chapter 19 Galen #2
Means I wind up on Moonberry Crescent instead, heading for Figgy Mount, and honestly, how?
How? These bad decisions keep coming, and as I find myself in the exact spot where I first kissed Sab, the pull to him is unbearable.
It hurts and I rub my chest, tipping my face to the sky as it starts to snow, like I could roar at the fecking moon.
Like I would, if I thought it would help.
I make a phone call instead. And despite yearning for my best friend too, it’s not him I dial.
Nash picks up on the third ring. “Bad shift?”
I’m staring at the sky to avoid losing myself to the horizon. “What makes you say that?”
“You always check up on me when you’ve seen someone else get squashed.”
“Do I?” I’m asking myself more than Nash, and he chuckles, letting me find the answer, and of course he’s right.
I didn’t know Nash that well when I came upon him trapped under an HGV a few years ago, but watching him live such a full and happy life ever since has been better than fecking therapy. “Eh. I haven’t been at work today.”
“Still hung up on your love life then?”
“Go on with you.”
The line crackles, and I hear the rumble of motorbikes before Nash comes back to me. “What’s up, brother? He break your heart?”
“Who?”
“The fella who had you moping last time I saw you.”
“You know him,” I blurt as fragments of conversations I’ve had with Sab come together. “His brother was one of yours back in the day.”
Nash pauses. Thinking, no doubt, finding his way to the same conclusion as me. “The Dubois boys are good people.”
It’s not lost on me that Nash is echoing Sab’s words about him. That the mutual respect goes both ways. “Hot feckers and all.”
Comes out grumpier than I intend, and this time, Nash laughs for real. “That they are, it’s true. And the younger one, eh? Filled out since I first met him. Grown into them big brown eyes.”
I groan. “Stop.”
Nash laughs some more. “What? You think I don’t know what it’s like to lose your mind to that shit? I have a woman with eyes like that, and a fella who makes me weak at the knees just existing. It’s a cursed life, to be sure.”
“Aye, you sound miserable as sin, you jammy bastard.”
“If you say so. What’s really going on with you, though? You don’t call me in the middle of the night for nothing.”
“It’s not the middle of the night…” I realise how wrong I am as I pull my phone from my ear to glance at the time. Goddamn. It’s gone midnight and I’m still up on Figgy Mount, choking on pouring my heart out. “Fuck.”
Nash waits.
And waits some more.
Then he sighs. “You’ve got it all mixed up, haven’t you?”
“Don’t know what you mean.”
Nash snorts. “It means you’ve got the sex part of your identity down so well you forgot about the rest of it.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you never had the same issues fucking fellas that I did, but the idea of loving one blows your tiny mind.”
Hearing someone else say it doesn’t unpick the catastrophe I’ve created for myself, and the fecking absurd urge to argue with Nash surges up my throat so hard I have to swallow it down. “I don’t know that I love him.”
“No, but you feel like you could.”
I exhale in lieu of answering.
Nash cracks on regardless. “How does he feel?”
“About me?”
“Yeah.”
“Probably that I’m a weapons-grade twat.”
“What did you do?”
I can’t find the words to confess that I ran out on Sab when all I wanted was to fuck him on his living room floor. Can’t admit, to myself or to Nash, that fucking him didn’t even come close to how I felt in that moment.
I wanted to make love to him under his Christmas lights.
With him.
However you’re supposed to say it, and it’s tearing me apart knowing he probably wanted that too.
You don’t know that.
It’s true.
I don’t.
Not for sure.
But Christ, I feel like I do.
I’m not on Figgy Mount anymore. While I’ve led Nash into conversational no-man’s land, I’ve taken myself halfway home. Except, it’s Cosmic Avenue ahead of me instead of Cinnamon Row, and for the fecking life of me I can’t make myself alter my course. “Why am I suddenly so shite at communicating?”
I haven’t spoken for a while. Neither has Nash, and I get the feeling it’s deliberate. As if he’s waiting for me to have some kind of epiphany.
Not happening.
Not tonight. But silence from Nash isn’t all that quiet.
He’s not speaking, but I still hear his life unfolding as the bike engines simmer down, then cut off completely, and I hear him go inside to his people.
Hear the woman he loves so much murmur something obscene and his fella laugh that deep Halliwell laugh.
I hear love.
The real stuff.
And though it hurts as much as missing Sab, that stubborn weight inside me…it starts to move.
“You’re shite at verbalising how you’re feeling,” Nash says eventually.
“Because whatever you’ve found means the world to you and you’re scared witless of losing it.
So you’re hiding from it. And you know the problem with that, my brother?
” I do, but he’s going to tell me anyway, and maybe I need to hear it.
“You lose it anyway,” he concludes. “And then you have to live with the fact you never even tried.”
That smarts. I sit with it and I feel like weeping.
Force myself to keep walking, getting closer and closer to Sab’s house on Cosmic Avenue.
“You’re a mean agony aunt, McGovern. Makes me think you’ve been spending too much time with Logan.
” A horrid thought occurs to me far too late. “He’s not there, is he?”
“Not tonight. You want to talk to Locke?”
“Nah, you can fill him in on my feckery. I’m going home to chew on some rocks.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I won’t, I’m joking. I’m gonna go, though. Thanks for that chat.”
“You’re welcome. And hey, Gale?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s fucking Christmas. Take a chance, boyo.”
Nash hangs up before I can even think of a response. Leaves me with silence for real, and it happens upon me as I draw level with Sab’s house, and that shift inside me…it widens, like maybe Nash’s gentle advice has broken something inside me wide open.
Take a chance, boyo.
Advice that could’ve come from my own fat Irish mouth.
And it’s good advice, I know it is. I feel it as hope warms my belly and I drag my gaze from the frosty pavement to face Sab’s work van, and the cute as hell wreath tethered to his front door.
But as my scratchy eyes find focus, the senseless pit in my stomach reopens.
The wreath isn’t there.
Neither is the van. And while I’m not expecting the lights to be on at crack o’clock in the morning, the dark shadowing Sab’s house is so yawningly empty I trip over my feet, drifting to a halting stop, breath fogging in the brittle night air.
He’s not here.
They’re not here, him and Esme. I know it even as logic tells me they could be inside and sound asleep. My life has taught me what an empty house looks like, what it means, and the hush that descends on me carries the same bite as that long-ago winter.
It’s hard to remember it’s not quite the same—that I’m late, not left—when the sting of snow and silence cuts so deep.
That maybe the ache in my chest was there before I met Sab.
Before that flashover stole two years of my life.
Christ, it’s hard to remember anything except how much I already miss him.
And the brutal truth that if he’s gone from my life forever, it’s my own fecking fault.
I stand there too long, the sharp wind needling my lungs, my battered shoulder joining in for fun, breath rattling through my ribs with an instinct deeper than reason until I have to look away.
Until I force my feet to move and trudge home with snow pelting my face hard enough to warn me how the next few days are going to pan out.
Back in my own house, I find myself on the couch that’s now starting to feel like it’s laughing at me—like it knew all along—clutching my phone with freezing fingers, staring at the blank screen as if it holds answers that are so fecking obvious to everyone else.
Take a chance.
Take a chance.
Take a chance.
I fumble my phone to life with a graceless touch. Open FlingIt before I can overthink it.
Just to see.
To prove my stupid gut wrong.
I tap and swipe, searching for the only message thread I’ve engaged with since Sab found me on this cursed fecking app. Frowning as it eludes me.
It’s not there.
Blinking hard, I look again. Scroll too fast to make sense of the blurred screen. Then too slow as reality hooks its claws into me, and I find nothing but stark white space where Sab should be.
I type LeLionDuBois96 into the search bar, dread blooming in my veins, my pulse a drumbeat of slow-dawning horror. I wait, as if God might take pity on me and magic Sab back onto my phone screen.
Nothing happens.
The screen stays blank and merciless, and the bottom drops out of me, my entire existence narrowing to a hollow void I can’t crawl out of.
Sab’s account is gone, taking every word we’ve traded with it.
Every flirty joke.
Every loaded message and accidental endearment.
It’s all gone, wiped clean from the ether as if none of it was ever real, and the panic knotting my chest becomes something I can’t endure.