Chapter Thirty-One
Friday
Ruby:
“Do you think you’d like me if I was a worm?”
“Don’t start that girly shit, Ruby. I’m in no mood for it.”
I glance over at Josh, using my spare hand to change gear. “That’s a no, then.”
“No. I wouldn’t like you as a worm.”
“What?” I’m scandalised. “Not at all?”
“No.”
“But I’d still be me.”
“You’d be a worm.”
“I’d be me in a worm’s body.”
“Then I’d feel bad for you.”
My mouth drops open as a lorry in the right lane blows past us. “You wouldn’t even think to carry me around in a little box? Keep me in your back pocket?”
“No. I’d set you free in some grass and let you live out your worm dreams.”
“I’d get eaten by a bird, Josh!”
He turns his whole body towards me in Oscar’s tiny Ford Fiesta. “Have you ever been tested?”
“For what?”
“I dunno, Rubes. Insanity?”
“I have actually.” I promptly inform him. “But I’ve got a touch of depression and a bit of anxiety. Nothing too sinister.”
Josh stares at me, his face going blank. “Actually?”
I shrug, unnerved by the way his eyes have focused on me. “Yeah.”
“No. Seriously, Ruby?”
Well, no time like the present to give a bit of honesty in my brother’s tiny car.
“I’m being serious. I went through a rough patch a few years ago.
It was a bit of an ordeal.” I automatically glance down at my wrists, even though my sleeves are covering the scars, and when I look back at Josh his eyes have followed mine, dropping slowly to where my hands are wrapped around the steering wheel before coming back to my face.
“What do you mean an ordeal? What happened?”
I can feel sweat starting to bead on my forehead, so I turn the aircon up. “It was nothing. But I should probably also tell you that I’m not a part of the uni newspaper.”
Josh gapes at me. “What?”
I wince. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“What do you mean you’re not a part of it?”
“I mean I’m not a part of it.”
“You’ve been telling me for months that you are.”
“I know.”
His whole face twists, green eyes astute. “Why?”
“Because I needed to give you a reason for why I couldn’t do Quidditch.”
“Where the fuck do you go every Wednesday?”
I keep my eyes fixed on the road. “Um… therapy?”
“Therapy?” Josh explodes. “You go to therapy every week?”
“Yes.” I nod, gripping the steering wheel tightly. “Every Wednesday at six.”
“And you never told me?”
“No.” I try and keep my tone steady. “If it helps, I’m telling you now.”
“Ruby!” He turns away from me and slams his hand up, reaching for the handle above the passenger door, roughly grabbing it. “What the fuck?”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“If it wasn’t a big deal why would you lie about it?”
“I didn’t want people knowing, and we’d just met.”
He blows out a long breath. “I can’t believe this.”
Irritation starts to prickle beneath my skin, as if I’ve done something to him instead of keeping something private about myself when we barely knew each other. “Why are you acting like I planned some great deception?”
“Because you did. You made up going to an entire society.”
I shoot him a glare. “And you’re always completely honest with me, are you?”
He wags a finger in warning. “Don’t twist this around on me.”
“I’m not twisting anything.”
“You are.”
“Josh,” I plead. “You are still very much keeping things from me.”
“Like what?” He hotly demands.
“Like why you literally can’t breathe around your ex for a start.” I see him open his mouth to interrupt but I push on. “And that’s fine, you have things you’re not ready to tell me or whatever, but it’s the same for me.”
“How has me not talking about Bonnie got to do with you lying about joining the newspaper?”
“Will you shut up and listen?”
He gives me a long, hard stare before he breathes sharply and spreads his hands. “Alright. Explain.”
“Okay, look.” I wiggle straighter, my back like a rod and heart thundering. I’ve no idea how this is going to come out, but I know there are things I’m not ready to tell him yet. “I had a really shit year when I was sixteen. Like, the worst year ever.”
Josh studies me. “How so?”
“It was just a lot of horrific family stuff. And I’ve moved past it now but some of it is still… I don’t know, it’s still there.”
“Right?”
I can do this. I can tell him. It will be okay. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just that the world can be nasty, and when I was sixteen, I realised it doesn’t care about happy endings the way I do. Or how things should be. And for a while that really fucked me up.”
“Rubes, I’m sorry but I still don’t fully understand?”
I draw in a breath, trying to untangle my thoughts in a way that sounds logical.
“It’s sort of like… I don’t know. I guess I used to think if you were good enough, or careful enough, or loved people hard enough, then things would work themselves out.
Like there was some invisible rule that meant awful things only happened when somebody had done something to deserve them, which is obviously so stupid because that isn’t how life works at all.
” I automatically change gear, watching the backlights of the car in front of me blur a little.
“People lie. People leave. People can look you in the face and make you believe one thing while doing something completely different behind your back. You can think you know someone and then find out you never really did. And I really struggle to understand that. I don’t get how people go through life just smashing into things and not caring about the destruction they leave behind. ”
“Okay,” He moves his hand on to my thigh. Nodding slowly. “I kind of get it.”
“I hope so. I’m trying to explain it as best as I can.”
“You’re doing fine.”
“Thanks.” I shift my hand on the steering wheel and wipe my palm against my jeans before putting it back, feeling achingly exposed.
“The therapy isn’t because I’m secretly falling apart every Wednesday and nobody knows.
Half the time I go in there and talk shit for an hour.
Sometimes it’s uni, sometimes Mum, sometimes Oscar being overbearing.
Once we spoke about the fact I used to make my barbies scissor. ”
Josh rears away from me so violently you’d think I’d just confessed to murder. “You used to what?”
“Make my barbies have sex.” I roll my eyes to him, then regret it. He looks downright horrified. “Don’t be so freaked out, everyone used to do it.”
“I really doubt that.” He shakes his head and tries to wrap his tiny little mind around what I’ve just said. “What the fuck did your therapist say to that?”
“He said everything is relative.”
Josh stares at me like I’ve grown a second head. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
“God, you’re so weird.”
“Hey! I’m trying to tell you my darkest secrets here.”
“Sorry, sorry.” He drags his face into an exaggeratedly sombre expression and waves his free hand. “Continue.”
“Are you going to take it seriously?”
“I am.” He raises a solemn fist between us. “Talk your truth.”
“Josh!”
He laughs. “I mean it!”
I reach across and slap him his arm with the back of my hand, to which he laughs again and pushes my arm away.
“Focus on the road before you kill us and tell me the rest of it.”
The humour has saved me from saying anything else, and I’m taking the escape while I’ve got it. “No.” I frown, all disgruntled and hot. “It’s your turn.”
His eyes narrow. “My turn to what?”
“Tell me some horrifying secret so I don’t feel mortified.”
The laughter drains out of him. “There’s nothing to be embarrassed about, you know that right?”
“Great. Then you won’t mind opening yourself up, will you?”
“Jesus, string me up by the balls, why don’t you?”
“Come on, Josh. A secret for a secret. It’s only fair.”
He shakes his head muttering something that sounds like, this girl can get me to do anything. “You get one question.”
“I do?” I squeak, clamping down on the excitement sparking.
“Yeah. One.”
“Alright.” There’s so many things I could ask, so many things I want to ask, like why he has such a strong reaction to Bonnie?
Is he excited to go home? Does he talk to his parents much?
How did James die? But they all feel too risky, and after the day we’ve had I don’t want to cause him to slam those shutters down.
I hover over all of them until another question barges its way to the front, one that feels nosy but not catastrophic.
“When you think about your future, am I in it? Even as a friend?”
Josh shakes his head, disappointed. “You little chicken.”
“What?”
“You can’t ask me a question you already know the answer to.”
“I don’t know the answer to that.”
He crosses his arms to his chest. “Yes, you do.”
“How?”
“Easy. When you imagine your future do you see me in it?”
“Well, yeah.” I answer quickly. “Obviously.”
“Exactly, there’s your answer.” He unfolds his arm and pokes me in my cheek. “This is your one shot, Rubes. Ask me a good one.”
“Okay,” I mumble, feeling flustered. “Fine. Give me a second.”
“You’ve got ten.”
“Please don’t rush me. I’ll panic.”
“Nine.”
“Josh!”
“Eight.”
“Alright!” I shout, the question bursting out of me. “Why do you act like your ex completely wrecks you?”
All the amusement vanishes from him straight away, and he falls back into his seat, turning his head to look out of the window and going scarily still.
I instantly want to tell him he doesn’t have to answer even though that defeats the point of the whole game.
He sighs. “That’s what you want to know?”
“I think so?”
A few cars move past in the opposite direction, headlights flashing across the windscreen, and I can practically feel him retreating beside me even though he hasn’t moved an inch. Crystalised by The xx is softly wafting from the radio, and it feels oddly apt.
There’s a really long time before he whispers, “Because she did wreck me.”
I glance his way, heart beginning to thump in my chest. “By leaving you?”
He shakes his head. “By cheating on me. In a really fucking brutal, life-altering way.”
I keep my eyes on the road. “Can I ask one tiny follow-up that isn’t really a follow-up?”
“No.”
“Josh.”
“You had one question.”
“I know, but your answer created more.”
“Sorry, it’s all you’re getting.”
I can’t help myself. “Do you want to get back with her? If she hadn’t of cheated, would you still be with her? Do you miss her?”
“Rubes,” he breathes my name out in one long exhale, looking pissed off but not closed off. “If I’m really honest with you, are you going to hear me out?”
“Yeah.”
“You won’t get all neurotic and upset?”
I worry my lip. “I can try?”
He chews it over before rolling his eyes and giving me the truth. “I do not want my ex-girlfriend back. I don’t think we’d still be together now even if none of that shit had happened. And I miss the girl who was my friend before she ever became my girlfriend.”
I slowly start to smile, he might not have said much but opened up. He told me of his own free will. “Do you want me to be your girlfriend?”
“Ruby!”
I shoot him a wink. “Can’t blame a girl for trying.”
“You are something else.”
“And for some insane reason you like me.”
“Yeah, a bit too fucking much.”
A huge smile takes over my face. “You’re a bit of a soppy tart, aren’t you?”
Josh groans. “Don’t call me that.”
“You are. Secret playlists, fourteen presents, Googling how far away I live…” I flick my fingers off the wheel one at a time as I count. “You’re basically one grand gesture away from asking for my hand in marriage.”
“Don’t push it, Rubes. Or I’m taking back the presents.”
“You can’t. They’re mine now.”
“I’ll nick them while you’re asleep.”
“I’ll sleep on top of them.”
He turns towards me, looking far too entertained by that. “All fourteen?”
“Yep.”
“You’ll be uncomfortable.”
“I’ll suffer for bought goods.”
Josh laughs, proper and unguarded, and the sound hits me right in the middle of the chest. “You’re such a knob.”
“But you’re the one who likes me, right?”
He goes quiet, enough for me to look over at him and there’s the tiniest smile on his face. “Yeah, Rubes. You’re my favourite person.”
“That’s good.” I beam. “Because you’re mine too.”