Chapter 9
Nine
Corey
That morning, I’d woken up with what felt like a wedge of swans flapping their enormous wings in my stomach. Don’t ask me why a wedge of swans specifically.
My grandma was an English teacher, and she taught me about collective nouns over breakfast each Sunday.
A lot of them are old and not used anymore, but I still love the concept.
A wedge of swans, for example, is only the collective noun for swans when they are in flight; otherwise, it’s a game or a herd.
Some of my favourites were a ‘superfluity’ of nuns, a ‘hastiness’ of cooks, and a ‘covey’ of ptarmigan.
What even is a ptarmigan? I have no idea, but the memory of drinking tea and eating poached eggs on toast with Grandma while she told me all about the weird and wonderful words for groups of different things is one of my favourite memories of her.
I’d gotten up, showered, and dressed and then, like a coward, had hidden in my room until I heard Aidan leave the house.
His deep voice carrying across the large driveway as he greeted his brothers in the workshop opposite the house was the sign I’d needed to get my arse downstairs and talk to Rain.
We’d needed to have a proper conversation about things.
I’d needed to know he’s really OK, and I’m sure he felt the same about me if the concerned sideways glances he was giving me yesterday were anything to go by.
Rain was right where I expected him to be, pottering in the kitchen, looking right at home as he cleaned up their breakfast detritus.
The air smelt of cooked toast and coffee, and the familiarity of it – the scents and rhythms of a family home – made me smile and think of Grandma again.
Pax followed me into the room and immediately went out the open back door to do his business.
He must have been crossing his legs, poor thing.
I felt bad as I should have brought him down sooner, but I’d been too busy avoiding.
I saw him nudge his way into the workshop, so I’d closed the back door to keep the heat in.
Honestly, I’d been shocked by how frigid it is here.
You can certainly tell you’re close to the sea.
“Morning,” I mumbled, tiredness making my voice sound thick.
“Morning, babe. How did you sleep?”
“Like the fucking dead. Seriously, that bed is so comfy.”
Rain chuckles. “Tea?” he asked, indicating the kettle behind him.
“Mmm, please,” I replied, smiling at him in gratitude.
Rain flitted around the kitchen, grabbing mugs from the cupboard and taking teabags from the canister on the worktop.
He added milk and sugar, then handed me the steaming cup and, without asking, turned toward the bread bin and took two slices of brown bread from the bag before dropping them into the toaster.
He was obviously tense, his movements frenetic, and I think it had been helping him manage his own anxiety about our imminent, much-needed conversation.
As he made toast, and I drank my tea, we talked.
“So, um, did you get on OK with Nash yesterday? Was everything OK? Physically, I mean?” My stomach flips at the mention of Nash, but I quickly school my features and grin at him over the rim of my cup.
“I’m fine, Rain. Honestly. I mean, I wasn’t.
I’m not going to lie. When you left, Dan went fucking spare.
He came barrelling into the club and had me pinned against the wall, screaming into my face about how I knew where you were, and I had to tell him and stuff.
Obviously, I had no idea you’d even gone, let alone where you were, and I told him so.
Well…” I pause, unsure how honest to be.
I decide ‘fully’ is the only right answer.
I owe him that much for giving me a safe place to land.
I don’t want to upset him, though, so I try to be gentle, even when speaking the horrible truth.
“He didn’t like that, and neither did Dom.
Dan hit me a few times, but then after he spat in my face, he left, and then when Dom got me home that night…
It was,” I sigh at the memory, “it was pretty bad.” I look down into my tea, willing myself to forget that night and all the nights, days, weeks, and months that came before, since I met that prick.
“What do you mean ‘pretty bad’?” Rain asks, seeming uncertain as to whether he actually wants to hear my reply.
“He… um… You know what, it’s OK. You don’t need to hear it. I…” My words trail off as I cringe at the memories, the emotions, this conversation is bringing up.
He reaches over and puts his hand over mine on the counter in front of me.
“I need to hear it, babe. If you don’t want to or can’t say it, that’s something different.
But don’t try to protect me.” Rain has beautiful eyes, but they are disconcerting when they stare into your soul and tell you that he is just as stubborn as you are and will not be backing down.
I know he won’t really push me if I say no, but I think he knows I need to get this off my chest.
“He fucked me that night, babe, but it wasn’t a normal fuck.
It was… brutal. Painful.” The memory of that night still haunts me.
I do a good job most of the time of burying it so deep in my mind it’s like it never happened.
“I let him, so it wasn’t really anything worse than usual, but his grip on me was tighter and his words more caustic; just called me the worst names you can imagine and had me in a chokehold at one point.
” I don’t mention how he marked me with his cigarette afterwards, or how he told me if I didn’t behave, he’d cut me open, since the look on Rain’s face at what I’ve admitted already is enough to break my heart.
His pretty eyes are filling rapidly with tears, and I know that we’re both going to be sobbing messes before this conversation is over.
“I’m so sorry, Corey. I’m so sorry that happened to you,” he says, and a lump starts to form in my throat at the guilt I can hear in his voice. “That’s why I left,” he says, and my gaze snaps sharply up from where it had drifted back down to the countertop in front of me.
“What?” I ask, confusion lacing my tone.
He goes on to tell me how Dan brutally beat him and sexually assaulted him right where he fell on the kitchen floor, before passing out from his drunkenness and over-reliance on cocaine.
Rain had feared for his life, and that was the night he left.
He snuck out, put a finger on a map, and it led him here.
His car broke down as he drove into the village, and as he tried to walk, he collapsed.
Aidan found him that night, and the rest is history.
“Fuck!” I shout, launching myself off my stool, tears flowing freely down my face now.
“Fucking fuck! Fuck those cunts!” I pace the kitchen, pulling at my stupid blond hair that I despise.
Rain jumps up and wraps me in a warm, comforting hug.
We stand there, holding each other as we cry.
Two men, two survivors, two friends. We got away. That’s the important thing.
We’d talked for a little while longer. I told him about how, after my parents kicked me out, I’d lived with my gran, but then after she died and Dad kicked me out of her house when he inherited everything, I’d lived on the streets and sold blow jobs to have enough money to eat.
I tell him about my time in Coventry, about Emma and John and the job I’d been so proud of, because it had been mine, with no strings attached.
And then he’d asked me to stay.
“Will you stay? Aidan and I want you to stay with us until you get sorted out. But I want you to stay stay. For good. This is a cute place, and it’s quiet and so different from London. Everyone here knows everyone, but it’s not oppressive, it’s like… family?”
Warmth fills my gut as his words sink in. He wants me to stay so we can be the family to each other we never really had before.
“Babe, I have literally nobody else, and nowhere else to run to. I’m staying as long as you’ll have me. I’ll find a job as soon as I can,” I say, meaning it.
“Thank fuck. I’m so pleased,” he says, and I believe him.
“Now tell me all about your sexy-as-fuck lumberjack. How did that happen, and where can I get one?”
If Nash’s face pops into my mind at my words, then that is between me and my conscience.
After our heavy start to the day, we decided we needed a bit of levity, and so when Rain asked me what I wanted to do, I didn’t even hesitate.
“Can we find a hair appointment? I want to get this shit off my hair and get rid of these fucking contacts.”
Rain had looked at me as though I were crazy.
“We can definitely find a salon, I’ll ring round in a sec. What do you mean ‘contacts’?”
I’d raised an incredulous brow at him.
“Surely you don’t think my eyes are naturally this colour? Dominic thought if I were blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and completely hairless, I’d rake in more money at the club.”
“I-I never even thought about it, but now you mention it, your eyes are so unnaturally blue,” he’d said.
“At least all my body hair has grown back now. Although the itchy stage was no joke, living a tent.”
His laugh was music to my ears, but his expression soon morphed into one of concern. “Why are you still wearing them, babe? The contacts, I mean.”
I breathed out a long, slow breath.
“I don’t know. Maybe…” I lifted my eyes from where they’d fallen so I could look into his. “Maybe I didn’t want to see the real me looking back at me in the mirror when I’ve felt so little like myself for years.”
He’d cupped my cheek in his hand and said possibly the most important thing anyone has ever said to me.
“I want to see you. The real you. Because what I know of you as a man is worth being seen. Even by yourself.”