Chapter 15
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
GEORGIA
“I’m so fucking proud of you,” he says against my ear at the same moment I smell him, sense his presence, feel the brush of his skin against mine.
“Yeah? Well, I’m beyond pissed off with you.”
He chuckles. Fucking chuckles!
“Thought you might be.”
“It’s not funny. How could you keep something like that from me?”
He sighs, long and slow. The exhale caresses the skin at the side of my face and neck. I reach for his hair, comb my fingers through to the tips, where I know it’ll be curling up.
“Because I didn’t want to give them the power to hurt you any more than they already had.”
“But what about you? You’re hurt?”
“They took you away from me for four years. Nothing they did after that could hurt me more.”
“They assaulted you, violated you. You should’ve brought charges. Had them nicked for being the fucking predators they were.”
“G, baby. It was the eighties. Things were different. Imagine the stigma that would’ve remained with me.
The amount of people who might’ve thrown it in your face.
I wasn’t having that. I wasn’t giving them that power.
They took enough from us. I wasn’t letting them take any more.
That’s why I swore Len to secrecy, for you, for me, and for Marley, who was still eaten alive with guilt at what had happened at the time. ”
“But we weren’t even together when you made that call.”
“I knew one day we would be.”
I let his words wash over me, blanket me in warmth.
I want to open my eyes, look into his beautiful brown ones, with their flecks of gold, but if I do that, if I open my eyes and he’s here, it will mean my life was different.
And as much as it hurts, I know that life, a life where I grow old with Sean, isn’t the life that was planned for me.
“Did you?” I ask, my eyes still firmly closed.
“Always. I never gave up hope. There were times I had to let you go. Times where I just needed to breathe and live without the weight of missing you, but they didn’t last long.”
There’s a drawn-out silence, but I know he’s still here. Like I know when he’s not around, I know when he is.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “Thanks for never giving up on me, on us.”
“Sean and Georgia, G. Georgia and Sean, the way it’s meant to be.”
That’s when the tears come, tracking from my eyes back to my ears.
“I’m so sorry, so fucking sorry life didn’t happen that way for us,” I tell him.
“But it did. For as long as it could, it did. Apart from the four years they stole, it was you and me, G. Like someone said yesterday, it was you and me against the world.”
“Someone said that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Or they thought it, and I picked it up.”
“You can hear my thoughts? Everyone’s thoughts?”
“No, not usually, but occasionally, if something resonates, I’ll pick it up. I don’t always know where it’s coming from, but I hear the words.”
I let out a long sigh. It’s weighted with the knowledge that I have my own confession to make.
“I know,” he says before I can speak a word. “I never knew for sure back when it happened, but I always thought there was more. That there was still something between you.”
Realising he’d lived with those thoughts makes my heart, all of my insides, physically hurt.
“I’m so sorry, Sean. You deserved so much more, so much better than me.”
“I’m more pissed off you lied. I asked you, G. That time we saw him at the restaurant, when I found out about the house? That’s the angriest I’ve ever been with you, by the way. I asked you then.”
“You didn’t ask, you accused!” I snap.
“Was I wrong?”
We both sigh this time.
“Well, why we’re all about confessing, you should know Carla got her hands in my pants. We didn’t fuck, not while we, me and you I mean, were together, but she did get her hands in my pants.”
It feels like my insides have turned to liquid and are being churned continuously. I also know it serves me right and I just need to suck it up.
“After we lost Baby M?” I ask. “I know about the time she came to the house, and the abortion.”
“Yeah, thanks for that, Marls. Your brothers are shit at keeping secrets, you know that?”
I shrug.
“I’m gonna go and haunt the fuckers. Scare the shit out of them.”
I snort a laugh, imagining Len trying to reason with Sean’s ghost. And Marley? Well, it could go either way. He’ll either shit himself and wake Ash to fight Sean off, or spark up a joint, offer Sean a toke, and start talking about the good ol’ days.
“Before she came to the house, we’d had a little moment in the studio. I was a mess. You’d shut me out, and I had absolutely nowhere to go with my feelings, my grief.”
Guilt is added to whatever other emotions are already sloshing around in my stomach. Guilt at the truly awful way I dealt with my own grief at that time, and the way I couldn’t bear to be around him. I needed someone to blame, and he was, completely unfairly, my only option.
“I’d been rerecording something I’d not been happy with earlier in the day, so I was the only one from the band there. I was in no hurry. No rush to head inside our empty home, to our empty bed.” His fingertips brush gently across my cheek. “It was a shit time for both of us.”
“I treated you appallingly. I’d never experienced grief. I just didn’t know how to navigate my emotions, and being with you just seemed to magnify them. I’m so fucking sorry. I was such a shit wife. Please forgive me,” I whisper, barely able to get the words out around the sob that wants to escape.
“No, we were both flailing in the dark. Neither of us knew how to handle things, but it’s still no excuse for what I did.”
“Tell me. I need to know. In the grand scheme of things, Sean, does it really matter? It all seems so trivial now, every single argument feels like a waste of precious words.”
“We were the only ones left in the studio—the one at our Hampstead place. She had the keys to lock up. She asked if I wanted to share a joint before I left. We sat on the sofa, smoked, talked about shit, how we were doing. I told her I wasn’t good, and I cried.
I didn’t want to, tried hard not to. I wanted to save my tears, share them with you, but you didn’t want me.
She held me, let me cry, and it felt good.
Felt good to be held. Then she started kissing my hair and the tears on my cheeks.
I turned my head. I didn’t want her mouth on mine.
That was yours, and I didn’t want her there, but when she started to undo my jeans, I let her.
When she slid her hands inside my boxers, I let her.
I raised my arms above my head so I didn’t touch her.
I closed my eyes, leant back into the sofa, tipped my face to the ceiling, and I let her go down on me. ”
“So, your mouth was mine, but your dick wasn’t?”
“Fucked, I know. But kissing her seemed more personal, more intimate than letting her suck my cock.”
I don’t know what to say or how to feel.
I say nothing. Feel everything.
“I came in her mouth, got up and left without a word. I couldn’t look at her for the next couple of days with the guilt eating me alive, but then she caught me on my own and started chatting shit about making plans to meet up, to do it again, like we were having an affair.
I told her no, she’d caught me in a moment of weakness, and I was sorry, but it wouldn’t ever be happening again. ”
“But it did.”
“Not really. She turned up at the front door with coke and weed. I shouldn’t have let her in, but I wanted to make sure she got the message. What happened was a one-off and wouldn’t happen again. She tried to kiss me, put her hand down my jeans…”
“And Marley caught you.”
“He did, and I’ll forever be grateful that he fucked her off in a way I was too nice to do, but…”
I brace.
“But?”
“I lied to Marley. Told him nothing else had happened. Never told him about what happened in the studio. Hated myself for it. Hated myself for what I’d done to you.”
“I did worse,” I admit.
“We gonna have a pissing contest over who’s the biggest fuck up? Like you said, in the grand scheme of things, does any of that matter? Only we know what we had and how fucking good it was.”
“I never didn’t love you. I’ve never not loved you,” I tell him.
“I know,” he says against my ear. “I feel it. I think I even felt a bit of something from the big fella today.”
That makes me smile. “You protected me from any more hurt. He respects that.”
“And I respect him for protecting you from Rocco Taylor doing more damage, even if he did fuck my wife.”
I cringe at his words. “I can’t believe we’re having such a civil conversation about this.”
“George, I am in no way feeling civil about any of this. I’m pissed off with all of you right now.” His energy shifts.
“You’re going?”
“Got to. Need to pay your big-mouthed brothers a visit.”
“Don’t scare them too much.”
“Done with being the nice bloke, G. I’m gonna scare the shit out of them.”
I giggle at the prospect. “I love you. Tell Beau and Baby M I love them, too,” I rush to say, panicked he won’t hear my words.
“We know, G. We know,” a voice says from far, far away.
A noise from somewhere in the house wakes me. I open my eyes, then instantly close them in the hope that the action will send my brain back to sleep.
It doesn’t.
I think my system is still completely overloaded with all of yesterday’s revelations, and I don’t even know where or how to start processing them.
If Cam hadn’t fucked me into unconsciousness, I probably would’ve laid here all night staring at the ceiling, attempting to bring some order back to my erratic thoughts.
Instead, I slept soundly. A dream I may or may not have had knocks at my consciousness, but it’s gone in an instant thanks to too many other thoughts and feelings fighting for space inside my brain.
Turning my head, I take in the broad back of my husband sleeping half on his belly, half on his side, his arms tucked under his pillow.