Chapter 14
GUY
Giant Arachnids
Well, this is fucking brilliant.
Not only am I stuck in a confined space but one that likely has a bat infestation or giant arachnids in the shadows just waiting to climb out and entrap me in a web of stickiness that I can’t unravel from.
I’m also trapped in here with a beautiful, smart, sort of well to do girl. Every time she lays her eyes on me, or her hands, my body reacts without my brain’s instruction. My heart rate sky rockets, my temperature soars, and there’s a tingling sensation in every nerve ending throughout my body.
I forget how to do the most basic of things, like turn my lips up into a smile or even fucking speak. Nothing comes out. I’m left staring at her in awe. This good girl. This sweet girl. This girl who really ought to do what’s best for herself and stay away from me.
I know she notices. She takes my silence as slander, my expressions of conflict and confusion as an insult.
I know because her very presence in a room seems to lift everyone else.
Yet, with me, she’s damning, cutting. Deservedly so.
Markedly so. And it’s weird how much I like that.
As if I have an in that nobody else does.
Now we’re imprisoned in this bastard dungeon together.
I have no idea whether it’s the thought that I’m locked in with the woman whose simple groaning around the juiciest of strawberries makes my member feel like it’s been hardwired into an electric pylon.
Or that I’m stuck with a stranger who seems so familiar to me, it’s terrifying.
So it’s like the elevator all over again, except with bigger, darker demons. An even bigger phobia.
I stare at the rows of wine bottles lining the stone walls of the space and wait for it… The yearning to pick up a bottle, pop the cork, and drain it to get me through this situation.
‘Are you okay?’ Lyra asks me, thankfully, stemming my spiral.
‘Am I okay? Are you okay? This place is the stuff of nightmares.’
I should know. Nightmares are my specialist subject.
‘So long as any rodents are old enough to be wearing false teeth, I’ll be fine.’
I chuckle. And immediately marvel that I’ve managed to have a socially appropriate response around this woman. Her surprise speaks volumes.
We get no reply to another round of banging and shouting on the dungeon door.
The rational side of my mind believes Lyra; someone will come.
It’s only a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds, because they know we’re here and I’m sure that if I don’t get back out there, Dave won’t replace me on that stage.
I’ve heard the man on karaoke. He’d empty the room faster than a skunk farting.
To distract myself, I start setting up one of the table frames Lyra and I were carrying.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks.
I plonk the tabletop onto the frame, patting the surface that will keep us both much cleaner than the grubby stone floor.
She hesitates, then hops onto the table and I take a seat next to her, my thigh unintentionally grazing hers as I do.
It’s there again, that hit of something like adrenaline or, dare I say it, desire.
It feels like I’m sinking into a warm bath.
The immediate heat of the contact spanning out through my limbs and making me feel hot, then soothing me, calming me as I slide deeper.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she says.
‘Something tells me you’ll ask regardless of whether I say yes or no.’
Damn that pouting mouth. Those soft, plump lips that have touched mine before. She could ask me anything right now and I’d answer.
‘I’m assuming that was intended to be a derogatory comment,’ she says.
‘Take it as you will,’ I reply, surprising myself with the light-heartedness in my own voice. She’s looking at me and I’m looking at those lips and I ought not to be. So I tell her, ‘Smart people ask questions, but be careful; sometimes curiosity kills the cat.’
‘I take it I’m the cat in this situation?’ She smirks and it looks good on her. It’s not the cute smile she reserves for her clients. It’s cheeky, mischievous, sexy. ‘When we first met, I asked you if you were Guy Walker. Why did you deny it?’
Something about the situation or that I know her better now makes me feel like I can’t lie, but I try to adopt the approach I did in the lift that night. I attempt to avoid the truth.
‘You didn’t ask me if I’m Guy Walker, you said I reminded you of him.’
‘You’re avoiding the question.’
I consider the stone wall opposite us and notice how the pointing between the stones is cracked.
I’m still focused on the wall as I admit, ‘You were asking me about Guy Walker the musician. The guitarist from The Hand Me Downs.’ I exhale, trying to get my next words right, in a way that answers her question but doesn’t lead to any more.
‘More often than not, I don’t feel like him. He’s someone from my past.’
I sense her eyes on me and whilst I don’t want to look back, I’m drawn to her like a bug to fructose.
It takes her so long to respond, I’m wondering what she’ll say. Whether she’ll ask me how I can divide myself, compartmentalise myself into two different versions of the same man, or tell me that I still am him because I sing at fucking weddings.
She asks neither of those things. She watches me for a while, probably a nanosecond but long enough that I have to look away, feeling as if she’s reading every thought I’ve ever had.
‘Is that why you won’t sing your own songs?’
She is smart. Too smart. And I’m curious about her, too. I don’t want to answer her question and expose myself any more, but maybe there’s a trade-off that’s worth it.
‘If I give you a response, I get to ask you something, and you have to answer truthfully. Deal?’
There’s something like trepidation in her eyes, the way her dark pupils widen against her brown irises, widening into flecks of hazel and gold. She has incredible eyes.
‘Okay.’
‘I didn’t write those songs to be sung by me; I wrote them all with my brother’s voice in my ears.
Now that he isn’t here to sing them, the words have lost their purpose.
’ I laugh to cover the threat of emotion but even I don’t buy in to the sound.
‘It took me three years of therapy to come up with that response and you’ve dragged it from me in a matter of weeks. ’
I expect her to say something along the same lines as my therapist did in London, that Scott would want me to sing those words in his stead or in his honour. That life goes on and I have to find some way of coping without Scott in it. That music can live on and can keep him with me.
She surprises me again because she doesn’t take that tack. ‘You didn’t write all the songs for Scott. My favourites are all songs that you performed.’ She swallows, and even in the dim lights, I swear that flush that’s so fucking cute on her skin is back.
‘Go on then, what was your favourite song?’ I don’t know why I care or why I ask, except that it feels like safer ground than delving into my therapy sessions.
The question seems to hang in the air and for some reason, I have a charged sense of expectation.
‘“You and Me”,’ she says, looking at me in a way that feels like a triage.
My next breath shudders because I already knew she was going to say that.
I knew before she said it and it’s crazy because I know that the girl from That Night wasn’t Lyra.
That girl wasn’t wearing a floaty dress and didn’t have long plaits in her hair.
She wasn’t cute and restrained; she was edgy, free.
But the song I was singing when my eyes met hers that night was ‘You and Me’.
‘What?’ she asks.
I’m about to tell her that I know how crazy it sounds but every time I see her, I have an overwhelming sense of knowing, as if we’ve met before, but that would lead to me saying I dream about her every night and have dreamt about her every night since she kissed me up against my Barbie-pink car and woke me up for the first time in three years.
I swallow deeply, finally shifting the tightness. ‘My turn.’ Clearing my throat, I try to disguise the desire that’s washed over me. ‘Why do you let your sister and her friends speak to you the way they do, putting you down?’
She raises her legs and suddenly finds her toes the most interesting thing in the room.
‘Honestly, I let them down.’ She bends and flexes her toes, still not diverting her attention as she shrugs. ‘I guess their…’
‘Passive aggressiveness?’
Finally, she glances up to me but it’s brief, then she’s all about her feet again. ‘I think it’s their way of reminding me… and I don’t feel like I can retort, truthfully.’
‘Am I allowed to ask what you did that was so bad?’
‘The crux of it?’ She looks at me now and those usually bright eyes are filled with something so close to sadness, it punctures my heart.
‘I was studying medicine at Newcastle University, exactly the way I was supposed to. Following in my family’s footsteps.
I was miserable doing it and, at the time, I convinced myself that I just didn’t want it enough.
It took three long years but after my third-year exams, I quit.
‘As if throwing Mum and Dad’s time and money back at them wasn’t bad enough, that night, whilst I was out at—’ She stops herself short and I wonder what the blank is – a bar?
A club? Some lad’s bed? ‘Well, I was having the time of my life for a few hours, then I got a call from my sister. The Dean of Faculty knew my dad and had shared my news before I ever got a chance to.’
Her hand is gripping the edge of the table between us and I have an unexpected urge to reach for it, to soothe her skin until her fingers relax.
Tentatively, I slide my own hand from my thigh, down to the tabletop, and I’m reaching for her.
But before I make contact, she shifts her hands into her lap, fingers interlaced.
Good for her. For me. For us.
See, she’s smart.
‘That was shitty of the Dean,’ I tell her, recovering from my near blunder.