Chapter 33
?l-ofal - After Care
Lucy
The city is dark by the time we get to my apartment building. Bryn drove us here. Rhys had to call him after my body locked up at the sight of the taxi.
‘Cheers, mate,’ Rhys says as he shuts the passenger door and waves goodbye. It’s the first time he’s spoken since we left the hospital.
I peer up at the seven floors of concrete now looming over us and find my windows in the penultimate row. They’re dark. Odd shapes fill my balcony. The shadows moving behind curtains in the surrounding flats are all Aled, lying in wait for my guard to slip.
Fingers graze against the side of my hand. I snap it to my side. My muscles scream. I don’t want him to touch me. My t-shirt is caked in blood and dried vomit. It sticks to my skin, itching with every move. I’m disgusting.
He sighs and leads me to the sixth floor and along the corridor to my front door, keeping a respectful distance between us. He unlocks the door with the key I gave him before everything happened, then waits for me to enter.
My first breath inside my sanctuary doesn’t hit like it usually does.
I’m not greeted with a noseful of indian rose, because the diffuser on the side table ran dry weeks ago.
The air is stale. I used to have a routine; a way of resetting after getting home from tour.
I can’t remember the first task on the list. My mind is empty of anything I used to do.
I take two steps in and stop. Rhys flicks the light on, but the warm yellow glow doesn’t coax me in any further.
All it does is highlight the space down the side of the fridge where someone could hide.
The light bounces off the glossy hallway cupboard door that’s just the right size for someone to wait inside.
My eyes flit from corner to corner of my open-plan living space, my shoulders tightening until I’m standing as straight as a guitar neck.
Paper crumples as I squeeze the paper bag full of painkillers. Rhys lingers at the light switch, his hands flexing at his sides. I wish he’d say something.
‘I’ll go check the flat.’
It’s a start, I guess. My gaze continues to dart around the room. I shift my weight slowly from one foot to the other, trying to ease my heavy limbs. It’s like my exhaustion has sunk deep into my bones, making every move ten times harder.
The noisy neighbour upstairs stomps across her kitchen. The face of the man I almost bludgeoned to death flashes into my head and stays there. Glassy eyes stare back at me. The pool of blood grows from his crushed temple, his jagged nose. My wrist throbs.
‘S’all clear.’
Rhys reappears, snapping me back to the flat.
He keeps a good five feet away from me. His eyes narrow as he studies me the way he would a rowdy crowd of fans.
He skips over my face completely. Not that I blame him.
I wouldn’t want to look at that either. My cheek has swollen so badly it’s forcing my left eye half-shut.
A cut pierces my top lip. I lick at it and get rewarded with the tang of copper.
I’m so far from the Lucy he knows, and I’m not sure I’ll ever find her again.
‘I’m okay,’ I tell him. ‘A bit shaken up, but I’ll be all right.’
He takes a step towards me. My back meets the door and he stops. His lips move, as if he’s chewing on words, but nothing comes out.
The paper bag tears.
His gaze hits the floor and darkens. There’s a tear in the linoleum, and he observes it like it'll grow.
‘You should shower,’ he says.
‘Because I smell?’
His head shoots up. ‘No. Figured you’d feel a bit better if you were clean.’
What would he know about it? He’s been safe at the stadium with plenty of people around him, with access to a proper bathroom and water, with his team of bodyguards that do exactly what he says.
He didn’t have to pee in a corner, in front of someone else.
He wasn’t fed stale crackers so dry a mere bite was enough to make me choke.
Being clean isn’t enough. I have to scrub my skin so hard it removes the constant feel of Aled’s fingers around my arm.
I need water so hot it melts away the scratch of the mattress.
I want the flat filled with noise to drown out the curl of Aled’s accent, the wicked way he spoke about Rhys and me and Bethan.
There’s no energy left in me to tell Rhys any of this, though, so I duck my head and traipse through to the bathroom, giving him a wide berth so I don’t subject him to how awful I smell.
I stop at every alcove to make sure nobody’s hiding there, check every now-opened door. I want to trust that he did a good job, but I have to see it for myself.
My legs give out as soon as my toes touch the cold tiles, and I sag onto the toilet seat.
My brain wills my arms to move, just a little, so they can pull the top over my head and my body can finally breathe. But they won’t. The cast anchors my freshly injured arm in my lap, and every time I try to engage the muscles in the other, they cry out.
This is pathetic. I can’t even muster enough fight to kick my legs about how stupid this all is. There’s no outward manifestation of all my frustration. I escaped, all by myself, only to be held captive by my damn clothes.
‘Thought I’d check in and see—’ He stops in the doorway.
He pities me.
I shut my eyes tight and try harder to pull my damn blasted top off.
‘Lucy.’ He lingers. If this is all I’m going to get from him, he can get lost. I open my mouth, about to shout at him exactly that, when he takes a step closer. ‘Let me help you.’
I really don’t want him to. I don’t need a man to save me. Not now. But if I don’t get out of these clothes soon, I’m going to claw them off and my skin too. Perhaps once I reach bone I’ll stop feeling this way.
So I nod, and he replies with his own. He pulls a pair of towels out of the cupboard and drapes them over the heated rail. Then he gets the shower running. When he moves closer this time I let him. He stretches his hand out, slowly, and pushes a greasy strand of hair out of my face.
‘None of your clothes look salvageable. Do you want to keep them?’
‘I never want to see them again. There’s a pair of scissors in the top drawer.’
He finds them and sucks in a breath. ‘Hold still.’
He peels the top away from me to protect me from the cold blade, then cuts with a slowness I didn’t think he was capable of.
It’s too gentle and I wish he wouldn’t draw it out but I swallow the thought.
I don’t want to scare him away. We’re both one wrong word, one too-quick action from withdrawing from each other, and I’m worried that if we don’t push past that, we’ll grow too far apart.
When he’s done, he balls the material up and throws it into the corner. My bra soon joins it, and I’m finally free. I suck in a big breath.
He helps me to my feet, places my uninjured hand on his shoulder for support then eases my jeans down my legs, taking my underwear with them. He works silently, concentrating on his task so he doesn’t have to talk to me. Probably so he doesn’t have to address what happened.
With all my clothes now gone, he finally gets the chance to see all my injuries. His mouth twists as he inspects the rope burn on my wrist and ankles, the road rash that scrapes up my torso from my left hip to my ribs.
My entire body burns, and I fight the urge to turn my back on him, to climb into the tub and get on with showering.
Instead, I keep my eyes on him, my pulse pounding harder at the twist of his mouth, the way his hands are back to clenching and unclenching, the words that still show on his face but he’s too afraid to say out loud.
He closes his eyes. Swallows hard. ‘This was all my fault.’
It comes as a whisper, barely audible over the beat of the water into the tub, but it pulls my spine straight.
‘No, i…’ I stop.
A niggle in the back of my head agrees with him.
He was the one who introduced me to Aled.
He was the closest to him; he should have known what Aled was.
Logically, it’s not true that this is his fault.
Of course, it’s not true. That I’d even consider it makes me want to vomit.
I scratch the edge of my cast against my forearm to make the itch of my disloyalty disappear.
‘How is this your fault?’
‘Because I let him get close to you. It’s my job to protect you.’
‘You get paid to look after Cai, not me.’
‘It’s my fucking job as your boyfriend!’
‘There’s nothing you could have done!’ I shout back, even though it stirs the headache that’s been hiding under the painkiller-numb. ‘You didn’t ask Aled to kidnap me and Beth, did you?’
‘Of course I didn’t. But he was my mate. If I knew what he would do… I would have… I wouldn’t have been his friend. Wouldn’t have hired him. And now because of me he’s beaten you to an inch of your life.’
‘So what? You’re going to punish yourself and me because your friend hurt me? Not touch me or speak to me properly, and drive a massive wedge between us because you made a bad decision?’
He swears under his breath, something in Welsh he’s yet to teach me, then storms away from me.
The back of his head is worse than anything else that’s happened because it means we lost and Aled won and everything is over and I’m not sure I can get through this all by myself.
Without Rhys. He makes it to the bathroom door, and I blurt,
‘I’m going to be okay,’ I blurt. ‘We’re going to be okay.
None of this was your fault. Yes, I hurt, and yes, it’s going to be difficult catching a cab or trusting strangers.
It’s going to take a lot of therapy before I stop believing that Aled is hiding in every shadow, that not every man is him in one of his stupid disguises. But if I’m going to heal, I need…’
His shoulders are pulled right up to his ears and he grips the doorframe so tight the wood creaks. My neighbour stomps down her hallway to her bedroom, but the noise doesn’t block out the heavy huff of Rhys’ breaths.
‘I need you,’ I tell him.
He swivels on his heel. ‘I’m bloody here, aren’t I?’
He doesn’t soften until I raise my eyebrows at him. He gets my meaning then. I need him to talk to me about this. I need us to find a way through this Aled-shaped wedge between us.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and I’m surprised at how wavering his voice is.
I reach out for him, my arm stronger and steadier than it has the right to be. He eyes it. I gesture harder for him to come to me, and his final resolve breaks. He steps towards me, gathering me up in his arms so I can bury into his chest.
‘I love you,’ he tells me. ‘So much. I’ll do whatever it takes to make you feel better.’
My limbs go boneless, giving in to that deep exhaustion again. ‘I love you too.’
We stand together like this for ages. Never mind the fact that I’m naked, that the steam from the shower starts a battle with the cold from the rest of the flat. We hold each other for as long as we need. If I wasn’t aching so much, I might drift off in his arms, still upright.
When my chin drops to my chest for a second time, I force myself out of his grip.
‘Now, please will you help me shower?’ I ask, wiping the last of the tears from my eyes.
‘Yeah. Yeah, I will. C’mon.’
He wraps my cast to keep it dry then helps me into the tub.
I close my eyes the moment the spray hits my body.
He’s got the temperature just right, the pressure strong enough to wash away all of the grime, the awfulness of the past couple of days.
He joins me, pouring way too much shower gel into my hand, but he doesn’t touch me until I ask him to wash my hair.
When we're done and both wrapped in towels, he leads me to the bedroom to sit me on the edge of the bed.
‘What do we do about your hair?’ he asks, scooping my brush off the side.
‘We should probably dry it or it’ll be a mess in the morning, but…’ The thought of digging the hair dryer out of the bottom of my suitcase right now makes my head hurt.
‘Want a secret about me?’ He climbs onto the mattress until he’s sitting behind me, legs either side of my hips. He pulls the brush through my damp hair, working carefully around the egg growing on the side of my head.
‘Yes.’ Always.
‘Mam used to braid Beth’s hair, but Cai’s mam didn’t have time to learn. So I did. I plaited Beth’s hair every morning before school.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yep. Been a while, but reckon it won’t take me too long to remember how. You can’t tell Cai, though. Managed to last our whole lives so far without him finding out.’
‘Why can’t he know?’
‘Cos he’ll want me to do his hair every day. He’ll grow it out just so he can have pigtails too. And Cai with long hair ain’t a pretty sight. He tried it once and looked terrible. I can’t go through that era again.’
I laugh, and although it’s a thin, over-stretched sound, at least I can still manage it. ‘Cai already needs a lot of looking after.’
‘You’re telling me.’ He ties the scrunchie at the end of my plait then wraps his arms around me. With his lips on the shell of my ear, he whispers. ‘From now on, my biggest priority is looking after you.’
I like that idea.
His work’s not completely done yet. After yanking on fresh boxers, he dresses me in fleecy pyjamas and then tucks me into bed. ‘I’m gonna do one last lap of the flat and make sure we’re locked up tight, okay?’
Even though I’m doing okay by myself, he narrates his entire journey through the apartment, telling me what he’s checking and what he’s found. He tries the balcony doors – though they’re still locked – and pulls the safety chain tight across the front door.
I don’t relax completely until he’s in bed next to me.
He slides up to my back, curling his body around me and sliding one arm around my waist to pull me tight to his chest. And it feels so safe now, with his radiator-heat easing the aches in my muscles, the beat of his heart steady, his weight pressing into me.
I sink against him and into the mattress and finally close my eyes.