41. Bash
41
BAS H
“What?” The weight of Faye’s head lifted from his shoulder.
Bash’s pulse was so loud, he almost didn’t hear himself explain, “We should get married. It was your idea for the marriage pact, and now that we’re … ” He trailed his fingers up the inner of her thigh, insinuating the implied. Though he hadn’t officially asked her to be his girlfriend or exclusive, he thought that was a given by this point. “I think that we should.”
The look on Faye’s face, how her body had gone rigid in his arms … it wasn’t the reaction Bash hoped for. He might’ve wished a little too hard that she would jump into his arms and cry happy tears about how long and how much she’d been waiting for this. Clouds would part and sunshine and rainbows would shower down on them as Faye said “ yes, I’ll marry you!”
But right then she only looked … scared.
“Bash … ‘Relationship’ us is not the same as ‘friendship’ us . Things are different.” A tremble in Faye’s breaths shook up her voice.
She slipped off of his lap just as swiftly as she’d descended and the sudden coldness of her absence hit Bash like a glacier. Those nerves in his pulse thrummed with new meaning as he watched her step back once and then twice away from him.
Things were different; they were as they always should’ve been. Him and her, together . Why was she?—?
“The marriage thing was just a joke.” Faye ran her hands together and pulled on the front of her blouse as if it was too tight against her skin. “You can’t ask me to do it after only a few days of being together.”
A few days? It wasn’t as if they’d only met last week; their relationship was a decade old and better than he could ever have dreamt of.
Bash’s brows drew in confusion. “I already know that I want to spend my life with you.” More than anything. “I was going to as friends anyway, so why wait?”
“Why wait?”
The desk came like a wall of cold steel between them, their distance getting wider and wider and Bash was helpless as to why. What had he done wrong?
Pinching the bridge of her nose in the way which meant she was getting a headache, Faye calmed that frazzled shake in her voice. “Bash, is this about what you said to me? After our last jazz night at Samuel’s ?” When he drew a blank, she added, “About how you wished your life was ‘further along’ than it is now?”
“I …”
Bash realised then that yes, it was.
His life was almost exactly where he wanted it to be.
So many of his hopes and wishes had fallen into place this Christmas. He was Faye’s and she was his – his best friend and the love of his life he’d yearned fo r . He was a whole person, nothing was missing from him; he’d learned that lesson now. All of the additional material things he thought he should want in his life didn’t matter so much now that he had Faye completely .
But he wasn’t just himself now, was he? His completed puzzle had doubled in size with possibility for those additional things – a wife, his own little family – to not be extra anymore, but the core of something that he was now only a fraction of. And Bash wanted them all with Faye.
Like he’d told Freddy to do, he’d made his plate bigger.
But that conversation as he’d walked with Faye beneath Christmas lights, dodging merry-goers, hadn’t crossed his mind before asking her to marry him seconds ago.
“I wasn’t thinking in that way,” he said, feeling like this inexplicable connection he had to her was being pulled out from between his fingers and he couldn’t keep ahold of the threads. The sickening sourness in his stomach loomed like dark clouds before a storm.
He’d expressed to Faye directly how much he yearned for a family, and how time felt to be running away from him, leaving him behind by himself. She’d known all of this before their relationship had changed. She’d said that she wanted a family too with the right man.
Well Bash was right here in front of her, waving his heart in the air for her to notice him.
He was physically fit and healthy, saw his therapist regularly, was more than financially stable, capable and ready to provide for his own little family. The space in his heart waiting to be a husband and a father sat hollow.
Faye would back him up on all of this; she’d say “ What woman wouldn’t choose all of that? ”
And he’d think: you.
The molten middle of Bash’s chest was thick and heavy as his gaze fell to his knees, unmoved from his seat.
“I know that you want those things in the future.” The regret in Faye’s tone was clear, the shuffling of her feet more so. “But we’re not there yet. ”
Yet.
If the time was right, and Faye was ready for it, Bash wouldn’t have needed to be nervous about speaking of marriage at all. He wouldn’t have to ask her if it was what she wanted because he’d already know.
She made her way back to him and stroked her fingers through his hair, the soothing motions like the waves of a constant, gentle tide.
The air was too fragile. The quiet disappointment in Bash’s throat, too stodgy.
The bleak, grey linoleum of the floor mocked him as Faye, composed, said, “I’d want a few years of dating – living together. Maybe one year of being married before anything resembling babies happens.”
Bash hadn’t even mentioned children tonight. He knew he wanted his to be Faye’s, but he guessed she’d factored them into “those things” that she’d noted ten seconds ago. Despite his new sedateness, he couldn’t stop the bolt of excitement at the implication she wanted to have his children, too.
Years, she’d told him.
“That process is for new couples. Couples who haven’t already known each other for their whole lives.” He lifted his gaze to find conviction and weariness warring on Faye’s face.
“We haven’t.”
“Their whole adult lives then.” Bash’s patience for being battled with began to dwindle. “It feels like we have, though.”
Maybe that was just his opinion but could Faye honestly say she didn't believe it too?
His chair rolled backwards when Bash stood and knocked against cardboard packing boxes behind him – an annoying reminder of what was to come soon.
He wiped strands of hair away from Faye’s face and cupped her cheek into his palm, thumb stroking at the corner of her lip. Feeling her lean into his touch, he sighed.
“We’re good together, Peanut, so why don’t we just skip to the next part?” Bash held his tongue on reminding her that she’d already said she would marry him, even if it was just for a pact.
Faye took a fortifying breath, making him worry even more that she was trying to let him down gently. “Bash, my parents divorced after they rushed into being married too quickly. I was there and it was so … messy . I won’t rush in the same way. It’s too much to risk.”
Wasn’t this thing between them worth that chance though?
Bash should’ve known that fact about her life – he did know it. He just … hadn’t equated that situation to theirs . He still cupped her cheek as if his palm was soldered to her skin, her remorse for something that wasn’t her fault chipping away at him.
“If this is how hot headed you’re feeling then maybe …” She took another deeper breath and Bash’s taut body hung on that hesitation. “Maybe we should cool things for a little while.”
Splinters of the office cracked around them. Maybe it was his ribs breaking as Faye plunged her hand between them to grab him by his aching heart. Bash knew he’d pushed the boat out too far in mentioning marriage a minute ago and he was reeling it back in to moor, but this little mistake didn’t mean that?—
“Cool things?” Numbness crawled down his spine. “How cool are you thinking?”
A shard of ice fragmented into his voice on accident as his chest quickened its rise and fall. This was too much to hear all at once, and if the bulb of uncomfortable weight in his throat meant anything, this conversation felt suspiciously like heading towards breaking up.
Faye’s teeth left red marks upon her lip. “Like … not quite ice, but not quite a January morning either?”
“I’m going to need that in non-metaphorical terms, Peanut.”
“Casual?” Faye ventured as if she forced herself to say the word which punched Bash in the gut. “I can’t change the fact that I’m leaving in two weeks, and I don’t want to be serious with you just yet if I can’t quite fill the realities of that. ”
Deep down, Bash understood where she came from. He did. But it didn’t stop her reasons from hurting. Ripping. Seizing . He’d barely had enough time to come to terms with Faye leaving as it was.
She was the one who had been so terrified of things between them changing, that the distance would make her mean less to him, and yet this step down in who they were to one another was her idea?
Bash tried to make it make sense.
“This next year is going to be all hands on deck for me,” Faye said, “and I’ve only got two hands.”
“ Four , Faye. Because you’ve got mine too. And Maisie’s and Freddy’s and Sienna’s.”
Her lips parted and yet … all that came was a wisp of an anguished sigh.
Bash exhaled too. Still holding her cheek and caressing his thumb across her skin, until he agonisingly lowered his hand. Their bodies were close; close enough that he could map the outline of faded wintry freckles on her nose and pick out the flecks of caramel in her eyes.
How had they gotten here?
This was his own fault, of course, most things usually were in his life. He’d pushed her for too much too soon. Maybe if she wasn’t leaving, like she’d said, they’d spend the next year on the same page and a marriage proposal wouldn’t have had the same response. Where Bash wanted these grand plans that he’d cooked up for months on end, Faye just wanted to have him .
He didn’t think. And that was his downfall which blustered in and blew them off course.
Bash swallowed over the lump in his throat, clearing it. “So … a few dates and the odd sleepover, that’s what you want?”
Faye shrank like the shell she protected herself with was too big for her. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up, Bash. I’m sorry.”
Passing his hand across his mouth and over his jaw, his eyes turned from her, l anding on the box of jumbled, forgotten things of people’s lives.
She’d never be apologising like that if he’d just kept his mouth shut.
“No, it’s my fault,” he said tersely, pulling on his ear. “I should’ve … ”
Faye shifted, burning a hole into his skin with her gaze. “Should have what?”
Bash’s chest twisted with an ugly old feeling.
“I should have stayed quiet.”
Silence hung for a beat.
Then Faye reached for him, pity lining her whisper of his name, but Bash slipped back and knocked the chair again into the packing boxes with a clatter. His impending spiral struck a warning in his sternum and he tried to keep a hold of it before it unspooled too large.
“Always rushing into things, me. Too impulsive.” His eyes bounced around the office, fingers digging into his hips.
“I like that you go for what you want and don’t hold back.”
“I held back from you .” Bash silenced Faye with his clipped tone. Thinking of how many happy years they could already have shared together as more than friends.
Her lips parted, eyes alert and devastating, her voice like holding her hands up to a raging bull. His chainsaw. “And now you have me.”
He didn’t though, did he? Not if she was putting this wedge between them.
“Yeah. And I know you inside and out.” Emotion clogged like peanut butter in Bash’s throat. “We’ve lived together, we’ve shared beds. You’ve let me inside. We’ve been the most intimate I have ever been with someone.
“I know the exact colours of your eyes on a paint swatch. I know exactly when you’re going to get your period because you start craving dark chocolate the day before, when you normally hate it. I know yo u like jazz because your teacher at primary school used to play it in class, and that her classroom was the one place where you didn’t have to worry about guarding what you said when you talked about your parents to someone else. I’ve memorised a million things about you.” Faye’s eyes softened on him and Bash shrugged. “What else is there to get to know?”
“Who we are as a couple .”
Rain slashed heavier upon the windows outside.
That last word whipped like lightning through the room. Faye appeared just as stunned into silence by herself as Bash was. Maybe he was delusional about how close they’d been for a third of their lives, because when they’d gotten together the only thing that had changed for him was that he could kiss her and touch her and hold her at night like she should be held.
He hadn’t slowed down to think of Faye. Of her vulnerabilities about marriage she'd shared with him over the years. Bash liked her parents but he hated how they’d left her with the mindset that something good was destined to fail. She’d been four – too young to be broken in two.
A couple of Faye’s comparatively tiny strides brought her to him as he looked at her, really looked at her. Through her words to feel them sink and settle within him.
Oh god. He’d been an idiot to ignore how she would feel about this. He didn’t deserve how forgivingly she looked up at him. How she peeled his hand away from rubbing at his chest and helped him mellow at the warmth of her touch.
Her voice slowed like taming a wild animal, “I’m not breaking up with you, Bash. I do want the rest of my life with you, pact or no pact.”
Bash’s mind went round in circles.
“But you just sprang marriage upon me,” Faye said evenly, “and I’m not ready for that yet.”
He held his tongue on saying it wasn’t as if they’d be married by this time tomorrow. Engagements could take a year, two, three, more. Maybe just b eing engaged was enough of a promise to suit them both and they wouldn’t ever get married; they could still have all of the things they wanted together.
Snarky remarks weren’t going to help and he’d already put his foot in it enough for one night. Bash knew all too well how much the barbs and thorns of words could sting, and if he carried on being the impulsive arse he’d emphasised himself to be tonight, he risked saying something that he truly didn’t mean.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” Faye’s voice warbled with her uncertainty over what he was agreeing to.
“Okay, I’ll slow down.”
He’d go at Faye’s pace, because if he didn’t then Bash knew he’d inevitably push her too far and then away for good.
This next year being so far apart for so long would be hard on them both enough as it was. He could handle video calls and texts all of the time, but never getting to hold her hand or kiss her lips would tear him apart if he let it.
Bash couldn’t let it.
Faye’s shoulders loosened and she squeezed his hand. “Thank you.”
One last gamble pulsed within him.
“But I can’t simply be casual with you, Faye. Not when how I feel is so intense.” His voice was rough and raw. “In my heart for all these years, I have belonged to you, Peanut. Call me a fool for fighting for it.”
Maybe if they went home, ate, bathed, and slept, this conversation would be clearer in the morning? Maybe Faye would realise she was making a mistake?
Her eyes fell closed. “You’re not a fool, Sébastien. It’s not how I wish for things to go, but a long distance, more relaxed relationship is all that I can offer right now.”
Bash was three seconds short of getting down to his knees and pleading with her not to let him go like this. What if he went to Manchester too? He couldn’t ask Bennet to move, not after disappointing him regarding America, and nearly all of their clients were based from London, but he could make his job remote. He could make it work, he could?—
“If what we feel for each other is so strong” – Faye swallowed hard, her fingers twined with his giving another gentle squeeze – “then I know that we can make it work. Didn’t you say that this – us – was too good a thing to let distance stop us?”
He had. Right after they’d been with one another for the first time. Bash’s succession of nods showed he remembered.
Faye placed her hands delicately on his chest and he wondered how hard she could feel his heart beating beneath them. She looked up at him with eyes he was too ardently in love with to deny.
“Then please have faith in us?”
Bash exhaled heavily. “I do.” But was this – them – not worth the risk? Faye’s parents’ story wasn’t their own. Her parents’ divorce wasn’t their future. “I’m sorry for everything.”
Raising up on her toes, Faye enveloped him in her arms. “I think it’s me who should apologise. You just proposed to me and I turned you down.”
Bash dipped and bent to be as close to her as he could, their bodies flush. His hands tightened upon her back and swept around her waist, holding back tears in his eyes that he couldn’t pretend didn’t exist.
He wanted to feel as if he was overreacting, as if he’d blown this whole thing out of proportion … but he couldn’t.
“I believe you meant ‘not yet’,” he said, attempting to sound lighter than he was.
Faye held onto him tighter. “That doesn’t mean I would say no a year from now. Two years. Three. In fact, I would probably say?—”
“Don’t. ”
They unfolded from one another, Faye drawing back first to look him in the eye cautiously at his gravelled, clipped tone.
“Don’t say it. I’ll hear it when the time is right.”
It took her a second to understand what he’d said, but when she did, she pressed a lingering kiss to his jaw then slowly moved to the corner of his lips.
A fresh wave of tiredness overtook Bash – the kind that made him dizzy and his limbs weak. He drew his palms to Faye’s waist and slightly moved himself away from her before their lips could touch completely. Even if he wanted to kiss her just then, he needed a little time to calm himself down, first.
“I think we need to go home now.” Even his tiredness was tired. His knees ached, his stomach gnawed. Taking Faye home would help her, and he’d certainly feel better if he did.
She stared up at him, but agreed with a nod.
Bash moved to grab his backpack from the locker he’d left it in all day, thinking that Faye would begin to close up the safe and collect her things.
“I think I’m just going to go back to my flat tonight.”
Bash stilled, fingers wrapped around the strap of his backpack.
He didn’t demand to know why – Faye didn’t need to explain that she wanted space. And yet over his shoulder she looked as torn as he felt he’d become too. Like pieces of tissue paper floating off in the wind.
A night in their own company might be good for them, he told himself, after the week they’d had of being glued to each other’s sides.
One night.
“Okay.” Bash pretended he wasn’t as impacted by the punch of her request in his gut as he was, pulling his coat from the rack. “I’ll take you home.”
Faye twisted her hands in front of her. “I’ll be okay on my own.” It was a thin veil of an attempt to sound confident .
Again, Bash didn’t push, though it killed him inside to bite his tongue.
Don’t push me away.
“If that’s what you want … okay. Text me when you get there so I know you’re safe.” It was pitch black outside, below freezing, and though he knew Faye had made the journey to her flat hundreds of times at night, he wouldn’t ever stop worrying about her. To the point where he felt sick and furious at the thought of anything happening to her.
“I will,” she said.
Bash paused in the darkened doorway, looking back at her amongst the paperwork, cardboard boxes, and crisp sticky notes upon the cork board. “I love you, Faye.”
Her mouth curved in a soft smile that made him question his decision to leave without her. “I love you more.”
He shook his head. “Not possible. You’re my moon, remember?”
On his way out, Bash’s gaze snagged on the model he’d made for her on the shelf where it now lived behind the main counter, beneath one of only a couple of spot lamps still turned on. He’d memorised the surprise and joy upon her face when she’d unwrapped the box he’d presented it in. What he wouldn’t give to have her standing in front of him with that same grin and bright eyes right then.
Christmas morning felt like it was an entire world away now.
Chairs were all neatly tucked up to their tables. Display cabinets were empty for the night. A perpetual chill hung in the air and travelled deeper into Bash’s bones the closer he drew to the shuttered glass windows.
A puddle had gathered in the dip of the pavement right outside Baked ’s door. A chocolate wrapper floated in the water, and others ending evening shifts dashed by him under Christmas lights still garnishing the street towards the tube station. The decorations twinkled as water dripped off of them, but there was no cheeriness in the bleakness at all.
Bash stepped outside into the rain and lingered by the door. Pulling up his collar against the whistle of wind, he stifled and urged away the thickness of sadness creeping up his throat and surging in his eyes.
Sometimes loving someone was hard.
Sometimes agreeing to do what was best for them was harder.
Even if that meant walking away.