Chapter 16 #2
“No.” It pains me that he’d think so, but I can’t find the words, so I twist on the fallen tree and grab the hand that’s not rubbing his thigh. I bring his fingers to my lips and kiss them gently. “But I’m not very good at having normal relationships, so I don’t know what to do with it.”
“Normal relationships.” Aidan echoes me with a bemused expression. “The fuck even are they?”
For the second time today, I laugh without care, and it feels so good that for a moment, I can’t stop. “I don’t know,” I say when I’ve composed myself. “Does it matter?”
“Not to me. I couldn’t give a shit what’s normal, mate.”
I like it when he calls me mate. It makes me think of wolves and foxes and swans and an entirely different kind of mate to what he probably means.
It’s primal and so fucking normal in a way most humans don’t think anymore.
“I want to kiss you again. Like, properly, you know? Without one of us leaving.”
Aidan makes a sound low in his throat. “I could get on board with that.”
A white-hot thrill licks through my body. It scares and excites me in equal measure and I make no move to put my money where my mouth desperately wants to go.
“I got a new job,” Aidan blurts.
I blink and realise I’m still clutching his hand. “Wow. That’s awesome.”
“It ain’t. Bernard wants me to work in his office with his missus and sister-in-law. You better kiss me quick cos I might not make it through Monday.”
I can’t tell if he’s using humour to deflect from something he can see in my face. My mum once told me the whole world knew I was a mess before I did. I squeeze Aidan’s fingers and try and picture him in the office. I can’t do that either.
Aidan shifts on his log. “Look,” he says quietly. “Just because we want to do things doesn’t mean we have to do them any time soon. I’m good with hanging out, and if you want to kiss me again . . . well, fuck, I’m not gonna stop you.”
“I want to.”
“I know.”
I take a deep breath, letting it rattle through my ribs and into my limbs. In my head, I kiss him now, and it’s the perfect footnote to a fairy tale I don’t quite understand.
Back in the real world, I stand and tug on his hand. “Let’s go to the shop.”
Aidan
“Do you like meatballs?”
I glance up from the rosemary bush I’m planting at the bottom of his overgrown garden.
I’ve cleared most of the dead shrubs away already, and the herb patch he wants will be awesome if I can get it done before the summer heat fades.
“How are you going to make meatballs when all you bought was sausages and an onion?”
“Sausages are meat. I’m going to roll them up like my nonna used to.”
He disappears back into the house. I watch him go, transfixed by the elegant sway of his body. He’s put on a bit of weight since we met in the hospital, his limbs no longer delicate. They are capable, and I want him to come and dig in the earth with me.
I want a lot of things, but I settle for continuing my quest to give him a garden that excites him.
You see, Ludo is going to make my home more like his, and I’m going to make his garden more like mine.
In between, I’m trying not to touch him too much or stare at him too long, because I don’t want to scare him.
It scares me how much I want to kiss him.
How I drown in it when we’re not together, more than anything else that keeps me from a peaceful sleep.
Kissing has never meant much to me. Scratch that.
Before him it’s never meant anything, and waiting for him to break the stalemate between us is killing me.
Not that I can complain about spending the last four days on the trot with him.
We have a routine. A morning walk in the woods, a trip to the shop, then he either cooks enough food to load my fridge-freezer for a month or leads me to his house where he cooks enough for just the two of us while I destroy his garden enough to rebuild it.
No kissing.
Absolutely no kissing.
Ludo comes outside again. He crouches by my side, frowning. “I have to work tomorrow.”
My heart sinks, but I’ve been expecting this, the pinprick in the bubble around us. “You never told me what you do for work.”
“It’s not very interesting.”
“I’m interested.” I keep my gaze on the sandy soil—I’ve learnt that Ludo doesn’t like me looking too closely when he’s talking about himself. “In fact, I went to bed last night thinking about it. I’m thinking you’re probably, like, a web designer or some shit. You’re creative, right?”
Ludo snorts, and it’s so derisive I drop my trowel. “I’m not creative.” Bitterness laces his tone. “I’m chaotic. Don’t confuse the two.”
I open my mouth to speak, but he cuts me off with a minute shake of his head.
“I am chaotic, and it’s where the colour in my life comes from—yellow and black remember? So I need a beige and grey job to keep me grounded. It would be mayhem otherwise.”
It takes me a moment to decipher his code, and even then, it’s far from an exact translation. “Are you saying you have to do a boring job because you can’t handle anything that excites you?”
“Something like that.” He sits back on his heels. “And don’t start asking me what my hopes and dreams were when I was a kid, because I didn’t have any.”
“Ludo—”
“Aidan.”
There’s a warning in the way he says my name, but the horse has bolted, leaving the stable door swinging in the wind. “There must’ve been something you wanted to do.”
“There really wasn’t. I spent my childhood watching my cousin dance like a fucking swan and my teenage years wishing life stayed that simple.”
I flinch. Can’t help it. I’ve got a mouth like a drunk sailor, but Ludo is cleverer than me and uses words that mean something. I can count on one hand the occasions I’ve heard him swear. “So what do you do for work?”
“Software testing. It’s nothing like what you do, but it gives me structure when I’m struggling to focus, and I can duck out when I need to. It suits me.”
I disagree, but what the fuck do I know? Despite endless rounds of late night googling, Ludo’s illness remains a mystery to me, and it’s absolutely not my place to have an opinion on how he lives his life. “Working on the trees made me as happy as I let myself be. I wish you had that too.”
He grunts again, and I can’t fucking deal with it. I get to my feet like I’m eighty-five years old and limp inside to use the bog.
Ludo’s bathroom doesn’t make me feel any better.
It’s spotlessly clean and by far the only tidy room in the house, but it’s still a riot of colour.
Yellow walls, a pink suite from the seventies, topped off with zebra print towels.
Chaotic or not, it’s still him. It doesn’t seem fair that he can’t be like this all the time.
That the brightness in him that’s so addictive to me could do him any harm.
He’s waiting for me on the half landing of his curved staircase, anxiety rolling off him in jagged waves of tension. “You don’t understand.”
I sit on the top step, back to the wall. “Do I need to?”
“I don’t know.”
Measuring words has never come easily to me.
Before Ludo I’ve rarely tried, but I make a valiant attempt now.
“Look, I don’t care what you do for a living, and I never even said you should be doing something else.
I think maybe . . . uh, you’ve had this conversation with other people and they didn’t let you speak? ”
Ludo tilts his head sideways. Sitting on the carpet that’s the only beige thing about him, knees hugged to his chest, he seems so young that I have to revisit his lips on mine to remember he’s a fucking adult.
And then, of course, my ability to think clearly is pretty much obliterated. I swear, having girlfriends in school when all I wanted was to snog the captain of the football team was way easier than this.
“You’re right,” Ludo says eventually. “No one listens to me. I mean, Rita does, but she’s paid to, and even she doesn’t really take me seriously.”
“The soup woman?”
“Yeah.” Ludo laughs. “She’s my CPN.”
“Your what?”
“Community psychiatric nurse. My babysitter, basically, though it’s probably down to her that I don’t get sectioned much any more.”
Disquiet flares in my gut. “When did you last get sectioned?”
“A few years ago. I stopped taking my medication and I thought I could fly. I get delusional, see, if my manic episodes go on too long.”
“And then you come down? Like . . . uh, crash? Is that the right word?”
Ludo shrugs. “It works. And yeah, what goes up always has to come down, and sometimes it’s so fast no one can catch me, not even myself. But I’m getting better at recognising when I need help, so I’m hoping it won’t happen again, at least, not that badly.”
I think about what he said in hospital about falling a lot and the gruesome list of injuries he listed as though they meant nothing.
Are they connected? If they are, I shudder to think how, but this is as open as Ludo has ever been about his bipolar, and I need to learn as much as I can for as long as he’s willing to talk. “What medication do you take?”
“Lithium to stabilise my moods, and an anti-depressant. I used to take an anti-psychotic too, but it didn’t work like it had on other people.”
The masochist in me is curious, and I can’t help raising a questioning eyebrow.
“It made my delusions normal,” Ludo says. “Like, I’d still have them, but I’d be less bothered by them, which actually made them more dangerous. If I’m frightened, I don’t come out of my house.”
I swallow hard. The fact that he has to be frightened to feel safe is so fucking unfair that I want to punch a hole in his funky coloured walls.
My knuckles contract.
Fingernails dig into my palm, and I grit my teeth.
“It’s not always like that, though,” Ludo continues when I don’t speak.
“Sometimes I’m not scared of anything regardless of what meds I’m on, and that’s magic.
It’s what makes me not resent being bipolar .
. . the perfect balance of mania and reality.
It doesn’t happen often, but it’s pretty fucking special. ”
“Stop swearing. You’re freaking me out.”
“Sorry.”
I shake my head. “That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean then?”
“That it doesn’t seem like my perception of you when you speak in a way I’m not used to.”
Ludo snorts. “That sentence doesn’t sound like you.”
He has a point, but being around him has broadened my vocabulary. What can I say? Wordsmith, innit? “Whatever. I need to get that rosemary in the ground before it dries out. Are we cool?”
“Aidan, I’ve never been cool.”
I don’t agree with that either, but I bite my tongue as I tug him to his feet and follow him downstairs. Talking isn’t my bag at the best of times, and I’ve said enough for one day.
Later, I wash our dinner pots and put them away. Then I rinse the plates and stack them in the dishwasher. Ludo, pissed off because I won’t let him wait on me, has disappeared.
It takes me a while to find him, mainly because my knee, sore from a day in the garden, can’t handle the stairs at a pace faster than a slow death.
I ease myself onto the landing and glance around.
His bedroom door is closed and he’s not in the bathroom, so I poke my head round the door to the spare room.
It’s small, just big enough for a two-seater couch and some shelves and, unlike the rest of the house, is plainly decorated.
Ludo is curled up with a book clutched to his chest, completely and wonderfully asleep.
The sight of him takes my breath away. I’ve watched him sleep a dozen times, but it was different in the hospital. That place was a hellhole. Here, now I know he has good food in his belly and no surgeon’s stitches holding him together, a quiet peace steals over me.
He’s resting, and he’s beautiful.
Ignoring the searing protest in my knee, I kneel and push silky dark hair back from Ludo’s face for no other reason than I want to. My lips burn with the desire to kiss him goodbye, but I swallow it and squeeze his hand instead.
He doesn’t stir. I find a scrap of paper and a pencil. My handwriting is shite, but I persevere and scrawl him a note. Then, with a yearning in my heart that fucking drowns me, I lock up his house and leave.