Chapter 22 Sab
Sab
I haven’t been sick since I was a kid. Withdrawal flu, sure. But until now, I’ve been lucky every winter. The nasties have passed me by. And maybe that’s why I find myself so floored by the lurgy Esme brings home from nursery.
It’s the only explanation I can find for sleeping twelve hours straight for the first time…like, ever. And for the message I’ve woken up to that’s so close to the yearning in my heart it has to be a fucking fever dream.
Unknown: Hey. I nicked your number off your van when I chased you out of the shop.
It’s mad, but I don’t have time to…fuck.
I’m sorry for being such a shite communicator.
I’ve never felt like this before and it scares me.
I don’t want the hookup thing. Not with you, and I haven’t with anyone since we met.
Sab, I want more. Maybe after Christmas if you don’t hate me too much we could get a drink and talk? I miss you. I think I love—
Galen.
Merde.
I mean, it doesn’t say it’s him. Or finish the sentence that has my pulse roaring in my ears like an incoming train.
But every part of me knows it is. From my achy limbs to my fuzzy head, it’s him, and fuck, I’m not ready for how his words heal me, and yet somehow flay me open in a thousand new ways.
I sit on the edge of my bed, Esme behind me, right as rain after a good night’s sleep, already bored of English cartoons.
I have minutes, if that, before she remembers it’s Christmas Eve and wants to go to Uncle Tam’s right now to raid the box of treats he’s been teasing her with all winter.
Minutes before almost everything I’ve ever wanted for her plays out in real time.
Cake for breakfast. Chocolate for lunch.
Love all day long.
But three words—Galen’s words—they sit on my chest above everything else, and my thumbs don’t know what to do with themselves.
I want more.
So do I.
But what does that mean? And what if he was drunk when he sent it? Or as delirious as I’ve been with the same fucking flu?
I check the stamp on the message.
5 a.m.
Check the time now and see it’s nearly seven. That it really is twelve hours since I rolled in from work and face-planted on my bed and I don’t remember Tam standing down from babysitting duty.
He’s sent me a message too. It’s rude and involves a picture of the giant capon I left on his doorstep before I came home last night. There’s a voice note too, but I’m not awake enough for that.
“Papa?” Tiny hands smack my cheeks, Esme climbing my back from behind. “Is it Christmas today?”
“Demain, mon petit c?ur.” Tomorrow. I speak around a fat yawn. “But we can go to Uncle Tam’s in a bit if you have a bath without hurling water everywhere.”
She agrees, though her word is slippery as hell until she’s distracted by the teeny fire truck she’s barely let go of since Galen gave it to her in the supermarket.
Until this morning, the sight of it has made me want to puke, but the combination of the lurgy passing and Galen’s message simmering on my phone has changed everything, and I watch her run the toy along the edge of the bath with new eyes.
Esme doesn’t need another dad.
More fun uncles.
But what about friends? Galen could be that for her…couldn’t he?
My soul screams yes, but the responsible parent I’ve learned to be takes more persuading. And whatever Galen’s message means, the fear of getting ahead of myself is so visceral I nearly choke on it.
Stop.
Believe him and go from there.
I’m on the floor in the bathroom doorway while Esme flings bubbles around. Some hit my phone screen. I wipe it on my leg as a news notification pops up, but I swipe it away without reading it and open Galen’s message instead, studying it with more concentration than I ever did our FlingIt thread.
I feel like I wrote it. Like he plucked the words from my soul and fired them back at me.
It makes me wonder again if I’m reaching too hard, but I’m pulled out of that spiral by the front door opening and my brother’s heavy boots on the stairs.
Tam breaches the landing, his face folded in an expression I don’t recognise.
I frown. “Qu’est-ce qui ne va pas?”
What’s wrong?
My brother runs his gaze over me, through me—into me, the way only he can. “How long have you been up?”
“A while. Why? And what are you doing here, anyway?”
“What do you think I’m doing here? I’m not fitting a four-kilo capon in my oven and you know it.”
“So…?”
“So we’re having Christmas on Cosmic Avenue this year. I already told Rudy he can sleep on your stupid head.”
As Tam speaks, the canine demon blasts through his legs and tears into the bathroom like a cartoon handbag with twigs for legs.
Esme laughs and laughs and laughs, and I suppose it’s worth it for having to cook Christmas dinner in my own kitchen when it’s far more fun to mess up Tam’s.
I give my phone screen one last stare and shut it down, abandoning it to heave myself from the floor. “Watch her while I get dressed?”
Tam eyes my phone. “Who were you talking to?”
“No one.”
“You had WhatsApp open.”
“I was reading an old message.”
“From who?”
I’m halfway to my bedroom. I stop on the landing and rotate to face my brother. “Why are you all up in my business? You think I’m tapping up a dealer?”
Tam’s frown turns to a glower he doesn’t mean. “No. You’ve just been so fucking emo lately I don’t know what’s going on with you.”
“Nothing’s going on with me that you don’t already know about.”
I’ve told him some stuff about me and Galen.
Not everything. Just that we were close, and then we suddenly weren’t, and I fucking hate it.
It’s hard to hide from Tam when I’ve needed him enough to spend five nights out of the last seven kipping on his couch.
He doesn’t know I saw Galen in ASDA, though. And I’m happy to keep it that way.
I retreat to my bedroom, grateful Tam went through my shit while I was working so much and washed my clothes. Grateful I have him when I so very nearly lost him forever.
With that on my mind as much as Galen and his earth-tilting message, I go back to the bathroom and watch Tam lift Esme from the bath and wrap her in a fluffy towel I’ve never seen before. “Is that from the magic box?”
Tam glances over his shoulder. “Figured she should have at least one thing she can’t eat. Hey, did you have the TV on yet today?”
“Only YouTube Kids. Why?”
“No reason. Did you eat?”
“No—”
Tam moves past me with Esme and I’m cut off by her flicking a last handful of fig-scented bubbles in my face.
She’s dressed by the time I get to her room, and Tam’s in motion again, carrying her downstairs.
Bemused, I follow and discover he really has brought Christmas to my house.
Produce and presents fill every surface of the kitchen, and smack bang in the middle lie a thousand croissants from the bakery and the obnoxiously huge chicken I’d banked on making his life difficult, not mine.
Honestly, I’m not sure it’ll fit in my oven either.
Or how three blokes and Esme will get anywhere close to eating the whole thing.
Which puts Galen on my mind again.
I know he likes chicken and that he’s not going home to Kerry to spend Christmas with his family. That he’s working. Like Bhodi.
Do they have Christmas dinner at fire stations?
I have no clue, and I regret a lot of things about the last few months, but perhaps what gnaws at me most is that I spent so much time just gazing at him like he wasn’t real when I could’ve been learning more about him.
Tam’s scowling into my fridge as if it stubbed his toe.
I tell myself avoiding whatever that’s about is why I retrace my steps and sneak back upstairs to fetch my phone.
Why I open Galen’s message again, study those words, and try and find some of my own.
Should it matter he hasn’t been online since last night?
That the time stamp makes me think of FlingIt and every night I lay there and wondered if he was gone for good or busy fucking other people?
My heart knows none of those things have been true for as long as I’ve known him. I don’t need a message to tell me that. But that 5 a.m. time stamp…it bothers me, a weird foreboding flickering in my gut, and it’s abruptly so fucking clear to me what I need to say to him.
I tap out a message, second-guessing every word a thing of the past.
Sab: You were never just a hookup to me. And I miss you too. Come find me when you’re ready x
I hit send, and it should feel strange that I’m the one offering him reassurance—I don’t even know why I’m doing it.
But it feels right to parrot the words he whispered to me in the aftermath of the fryer fire at Hollymist Hall, and for the first time since I met him, the part of me I’ve never truly accepted… it settles.
It finds a home.
I pocket my phone and go downstairs. Tam has Esme sitting on the counter and wrapping bacon round chestnuts, something sticky already smeared on her face.
I swear I hear the radio, but it cuts out as I venture into the kitchen and Tam looks shifty enough for me to assume he got spooked by some metal-head shit.
Years ago, we kept the CDs our parents left behind when they relocated to France.
I move around Tam and slip one into the old contraption that’s made its way to the kitchen since Galen was here.
It’s old jazz music, which I could do without any day of the year, but Esme likes it, and Tam used to once upon a time.
I flick a stray piece of bacon at him. “What’s up with you? Slayer creep out of the radio and get you?”
The bacon hits Tam’s chest and falls to the floor. Rudy hoovers it up and my brother doesn’t look up from his phone.
“That Bhodi?” I try again. “When’s he back?”
Tam finally gives me his attention. “He was supposed to be done by twelve, but that’s not happening.”
“Everyone off sick again?”
Tam’s phone buzzes. He glances at it, a divot growing between his brows. Then he looks at me—really looks at me. “Are you and Galen really done?”
Fuck. I keep forgetting I haven’t kept him entirely in the loop. “Um…I thought so, but then I saw him the other day, and he messaged me last night, so I think we might—what? Why is your face doing that?”
Tam takes a breath, all the while his phone keeps buzzing, and scoops Esme from the counter.
He carries her into the living room, searching for the TV remote while I trail after him, consternation threatening the fragile hope I woke up to, my patience evaporating.
“Why are you being so fucking weird?”
Tam finds the remote and sets Esme on her favourite beanbag to eat the mini apple pie he’s snuck her.
Then he comes to me, his expression as serious as I’ve ever seen it. “Was Galen working when you spoke to him last night?”
“I didn’t speak to him. I was asleep.”
“So…what? He messaged you in the night?”
“This morning, I guess. Five or some shit. Why are you asking me?”
“A coach went off Whitefen Bridge this morning. Straight in the river. It’s a mass casualty incident.”
“Okay.” His dark mood is starting to make sense. Bhodi’s a critical care nurse. If there’s a drama at the hospital, he’s not coming home anytime soon. “But he’s okay, though, right? Bhodi? He’ll just be knackered when he gets—”
“Bhodi’s fine. Sab, it’s not that.”
“Then what the fuck is it?”
I raise my voice by accident. Esme startles, dropping her pie, and I step around Tam to correct my mistake.
He clamps a hand around my arm. “Sab. Some of the casualties are emergency workers—firefighters. And it’s bad, brother. I’m so fucking sorry.”
Tam’s right next to me, but I hear him speak as if we’re a thousand miles apart. None of what he’s saying makes sense. The words, they don’t line up in my head, and my brain can’t catch a thought except his name.
Galen.
I pull my arm free and cross the room to where Esme sits, scooping her up to sit her on my hip, angling her away from the TV. “Put it on.”
Tam hesitates.
I snatch the remote and do it myself, and the TV clicks on to the local news—a drone shot of a coach lying mangled in the black water, twisted and broken, the white of the snow on the banks cast blue by a horde of emergency vehicles.
Ambulances.
Police cars.
Fire engines.
My pulse scrapes a dull thud, gaze caught on a pump that looks just like any other, and yet somehow, I know it’s not.
I know it’s his.
Galen’s.
Even before the headlines rolling across the bottom of the screen hit home.
RESCUE WORKERS MISSING AFTER CATASTROPHIC brIDGE CRASH.