Chapter 3
THREE
LIAM
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
My feet hit the treadmill until my thighs ache, metal music screaming in my ears to urge me on. The bass rattles loud enough to drown out the thump of my pulse and most of the weightlifters’ groans.
It had taken nearly three weeks for the bruises to heal up enough to get back to the gym. One of the few regularities in my week. In between fights, at least.
My adopted sister sends through a bundle of day passes every week, giving me free access to the university gym.
Albeit, I don’t exactly fit in.
Most of the students here are wholesome. They look like the worst thing they’ve ever seen is the bottom of the toilet bowl after too many cheap shots. Squeaky clean. Unblemished.
Skin that hasn’t been split open and stitched back together.
Most of my scars are covered with the loose zip-up top I wear over my gym vest, and I tend to stick to tracksuit bottoms rather than shorts. The network of ivy I’ve had tattooed over the worst of my scars doesn’t exactly blend in either.
Ivy reminds me of her.
I’d only glimpsed her house once as a child, before her nanny hit me with a broom and drove me off, but it was covered on one side in ivy of the deepest green. The leaves had crawled up the white stone, twisting and turning, looking like an extra wall to keep me from Kat.
Only later had I learned that ivy symbolises lasting bonds.
Every time I go under the needle, I imagine it to be another tie back to her. A symbol etched in permanence. Something that no one can take from me.
Not without a sharp knife and a great deal of pain, anyway.
A woman takes the treadmill next to me, even though there are plenty of others free, and gives me a dirty look. As if I’m grubbying up the place.
I am, I guess.
Slamming the button, I increase my speed until my lungs burn, and there’s no time to worry about the woman beside me with her wrinkled nose.
My muscles begin to scream in protest as I push myself to breaking point, letting the ache light a fire in my veins. I may have spent so many years hiding from pain that it knocked me sideways to find that pushing myself to the brink is one of the few ways I could feel anything at all.
A reminder that I’m still alive.
That my body belongs to me. Now.
The treadmills look out the floor-to-ceiling windows across the university shopping square.
Students mill from the coffee shop to the subsidised art shop, and from the campus grocery store to the pizza place. Worn benches cover the space in between, with somewhat withered ferns sprouting from a series of oversized buckets.
The whole place has that worn-in look. Once new, shiny, and full of promise, now a little tired around the edges.
I spot my sister, Ellie, exiting the coffee shop, chatting to someone still inside.
Slowing the treadmill to a stop, I wipe my wet forehead with a towel and watch as she laughs.
My final foster home was a good one.
If only I’d found it when I was younger, maybe I’d have ended up a little less fucked in the head. I might have been trying for a degree instead of risking my life to eat. Other than occasionally meeting with Ellie to grab some gym passes, I never really saw her on campus.
The university is big enough that I can usually get to the gym and back without being accosted.
She moves from the door…
…and my arse all but falls out of my joggers.
Behind her, in a tumble of the palest blonde, is a woman I swear I know.
My brain refuses to make the jump at first. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d tripped over myself only to find it’s someone else.
For a split second, my brain shows me the version of her I once knew.
Pink cheeks, tangled hair, dirt on her dress.
The girl who looked at a half-starved kid in the woods and saw an instant best friend.
Then the image snaps back to the woman standing beside Ellie.
Kat.
Just like that, she’s there in the flesh. My chest aches, like fate has punched straight through my ribs.
Despite the fourteen years since the last time I saw her, scraped and muddy, I have no doubts it’s her.
While she’s taller now, she still has that elfin quality that made me mistake her for a forest sprite. Delicate features and light movements. As if she might vanish between blinks. As hard to hold onto as a will o’ the wisp.
Even from here, I recognise the tilt of her upper lip as she grins. She always had the most wicked smile.
My fingers dig into the roughened plastic arms of the treadmill as I struggle to breathe.
It’s like she’s ignited all the oxygen within me in a blaze of agony.
Fuck.
The years between us collapse in a moment, stacking up on top of me. Her giggles rippled among the trees. The kindness of a child who had no reason to give it.
I’m heading for the door before I can think straight, abandoning my gym bag with nothing but talking to her on my mind.
All those years ago, I’d been too scared to ever talk to her. Worried she would see how broken I was if I said the wrong thing.
Blood rushes in my ears as I make it to the door, catching sight of myself in a wall mirror.
Dripping with sweat.
My dark hair is plastered to my forehead.
A sea of yellowing bruises and old scars.
Eyes as feral as an abused dog’s.
My lip is still split from the fight, and my knuckles are only just beginning to return to being knuckle-shaped after the amount of swelling I had.
A mess.
The kind of man women run from, not towards.
Is this how I want her to see me?
Just as ruined as I was all those years ago?
No.
Dropping my hand from the doorknob, I watch as Ellie and Kat walk across the square, easy chatter flowing.
They must know each other well.
I ache to go to her. To grasp her hand. To remind her I exist. To tell her that I’ve never forgotten her. Or what she did. To ask if she remembers me at all.
What I need is time to think. Time to figure out a game plan.
They disappear out of view, and I run to grab my bag, following after them like a rat in the gutters.
Because I need to know where to find Kat when I’m ready.
I trail behind them at a safe distance.
Not too hard amongst bustling students. Heads down and phones out. Far too wrapped up in social media to notice me tailing the two women.
Ellie and Kat bump shoulders as they walk, chatting between sips from their takeaway coffee cups. I stare into Kat’s blonde hair, willing her to turn around.
Notice me. I scream in my head. Please.
She laughs. Tipping her head a little. Just like she used to.
The sound hits me right in the face. Warm. Sunny and unguarded.
Older and throatier. But the same sparkly noise that I used to follow through the trees until my dad would call me home. Or her nanny.
We leave the campus, heading into a rougher side street, filled with vape and betting shops.
I prickle. Thinking of Kat in her pretty castle-esque house in the woods is one thing; seeing her here is another.
Why would she choose this area? As far as I can find out, her family didn’t lose their money.
From what I know about her family, they’d shit razor blades to see her roughing it.
They soon turn down a narrow alley, disappearing in an instant. My pulse quickens as I lose sight of her, desperate to have her back in view.
I peer down the brick-lined alley before ducking back to the street.
It’s narrow. Two bins and a stack of broken pallets are shoved against one wall. There’s little light, and a whole lot of grime.
Their voices echo down the lane, not loud enough for me to hear. Both stop at a door halfway along, Ellie fishing keys from her bag and handing her coffee to Kat while she unlocks the door.
If only I’d tried to visit Ellie, she’s asked me often enough. I could have stumbled back into Kat’s life months ago. Hell, maybe years ago. How long have they been friends?
They head into the building, the door closing behind them with a finality that makes me ache.
I wait.
Ten seconds.
Twenty.
Longer. Long enough for them to be well in. If either comes back out, it would be awkward to explain why I’m skulking outside, even if my foster-sister lives here.
Eventually, I brave getting closer.
The windows sit low against the brick wall, curtains pulled across them, but poorly drawn. There’s enough of a gap to let me peer inside. I feel like a creep, but if that’s what it takes to see more of Kat, then a creep I’ll be.
I crouch beside the first window, trying to minimise myself.
A bedroom sits on the other side of the glass. Filled with cushions and books and bric-a-brac. Soft and feminine. A stark contrast to anything in my life.
Clothes flung over the back of a chair, far too pink and girly to be my Ellie’s. Unlit candles and more bottles of perfume than I thought imaginable cluttered the shelf.
Empty. My chest tightens anyway.
Kat’s room.
I shift a little, careful not to scrape my boots against the brick. Beyond the open bedroom doorway, I can see a small sitting room and kitchen. Well, a little of it.
A tiny kitchen-come-living space. It looks tidy, but full. Stacked tubs of pasta and rice. Boxes of cereal and bottles of wine.
A flash of blonde dances across the doorway.
She reaches up to the top cupboard, and her shirt slips further off her shoulder, and the light catches something at her throat.
I freeze.
A cord. Thin and worn smooth with age. And hanging from it, sitting in the hollow of her collarbone, a small pale stone.
Heart-shaped.
The world around me shifts. The kitchen, the window, the brick against my palms, it all goes distant and muffled, because I know that stone. I know it the way I know the stream and the woods and her perfect face. I held it in the water, then held it out to her, and watched her face as she grinned.
She kept it.
For fourteen years.
I press my forehead against the cold glass and close my eyes. A mixture of relief and pleasure winds through me. She kept the stone.
All this time.
She was never not looking for me.
My lungs cease to inflate. Of all my visions of what it would be like to see Kat again, I never really considered that she’d be hot. That her skirt would inch up, showing me far more leg than I was used to seeing.
Guilt hits first. I kept sex at the end of a distant wall, having little interest in it. It’s been years since anyone touched me, and I vowed never to let anyone get near me again. Not like that.
I’ve never seen the attraction in it.
But Kat? She stirs… something. And I hate the way it makes my blood bubble in my veins. It’s not about that. It’s about finding my friend. The only friend I ever really had.
She pours water into a kettle and flicks the switch. Her mouth moves as she chats to Ellie, who must be out of sight, but I can’t hear what she says.
She’s close enough that I could knock on the door.
Close enough that I could call her name through the glass and hope that she sees me.
My fingers curl against the brick windowsill.
She slides two slices of bread into a toaster and leans against the counter while she waits. Ellie wanders past her, grabbing a bag of crisps and picking up the cup of tea that Kat made.
Kat smiles with that same crooked lift of her lip that I recognised from across the square.
She hasn’t changed. Well, she has. But there’s still that same vivaciousness running under the surface.
Still bright.
Still everything I’m not.
The toaster pops, and Kat jumps, laughing at herself before pulling the toast free and spreading it.
It’s like watching a ghost. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. Either way, I’m mesmerised.
I watch as she carries her toast and mug toward the sitting area.
For a second, she turns toward the bedroom, as if she can sense that I’m watching her. As much as I want to be noticed by her, not like this.
I flatten against the brick wall and daren’t even breathe. My heart hammers so loud I have to close my eyes to focus.
Too fucking close.
Through the wall, I hear the faint scrape of a distant chair. Carefully, I lean back to the gap in the curtain. She’s gone. Out of view.
Relief washes through me as I take a ragged breath.
Dragging a hand over my still-sweaty face, I groan. This is stupid.
Standing in an alley like some creep, watching a woman I haven’t seen in years make toast. But I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to go back to my empty flat and picture her here.
I could come back.
Just to make sure she’s safe, and until I figure out how the hell to reintroduce myself to her.
I glance through the window one last time. Empty.
Pushing myself back, I step into the shadow of the alley.
When I come back, I need to be smarter. To be less rash and ignore the way I crave her attention.
Quieter.
Harder to recognise. Maybe a cap or something over my face. Just until I figure things out. Until I decide whether the girl who once saved me deserves to see what I’ve become.
Or whether she’s better off believing the boy from the woods stayed gone.