7. Ivy
Ivy
Dawn’s not coming back from this. This is it for her—this dreadful little room that’s basically nothing more than four walls and wheelchair-friendly doorframe and a call button.
She’s a beautiful human, and this is the best we can do for her.
The best I can do for her. The best that hours spent prancing around in Alchemy can buy, bending over for rich, entitled knobs who see me as nothing more than a pair of great tits and a set of holes.
The horror, the dread, has been creeping up my body the whole way over here like this cold mist. It’s been coming for me since Dawn’s expression morphed from stricken to grimly resigned to blank while I held her hand in the back of the ambulance.
It was the resigned part that really got me, but now that we’re here, the coldness has got a grip on my heart and my stomach and my throat, squeezing and squeezing until I can’t bear it.
I can’t leave her here, and yet I have to, and I find myself in the fucked-up state of hoping that she spends as little time as possible being lucid from now on, because this small, sad room will surely extinguish what’s remaining of the Dawn I know: the warm mother and loving wife and champion of children’s literacy.
You know when they talk about people ‘going downhill’ when they get a diagnosis or get admitted into hospital or whatever? I can completely see that, because if the LBD doesn’t kill her, this place will.
LBD. Oh to be back in the good old days of ignorance, when I thought it only stood for little black dress.
The Dawn I know and love faded away on the ambulance ride, and she’s still gone, retreated to somewhere unreachable inside herself.
I don’t blame her. I’m tempted to dissociate the hell away from this place, too.
Her dark eyes are watchful, suspicious. Her hackles are up.
Fuck knows what’s going on inside her poor, mashed-potato brain right now.
‘What is this place?’ she slurs. ‘What is that smell?’
That smell is the stench of industrial-grade cleaning fluid, the kind that exists to nuke every last germ in the most aggressive way.
While I suppose I should be encouraged by their commitment to hygiene, I’m as freaked out as Dawn is.
Because the stink of it has even forced its way through her dementia.
It’s hostile and institutional and the absolute opposite of home, and I fucking hate it.
I help her to sit down on the bed as the young nurse who wheeled her in hovers next to us. Her fingers are twisted these days, her knuckles gnarly. I try to take her hand, but she pulls it away.
‘Who the hell do you think you are, you silly little slut? Leave me alone.’
‘Maybe you should let us settle her in,’ the nurse suggests gently. ‘Honestly, love, it’ll just be more upsetting for you. You can come and see her tomorrow morning during visiting hours, yeah?’
‘Okay,’ I say in a pathetically weak voice. I don’t want him or Dawn to see how much this place is freaking me out, to be honest. I pat her on the shoulder and take my leave, and as I emerge into the side street, I wouldn’t admit what I’m thinking for the world.
Because what I’m thinking is that I couldn’t get out of there quickly enough, and I don’t know what kind of shitty, inhuman stepdaughter that makes me.
It’s not until I’ve made sure the twins are asleep that I crawl into bed.
It’ll never stop being weird, sleeping in Dawn and Dad’s old room.
I’m definitely going to move my stuff back downstairs.
Anyway, I like being closer to the entrance than the girls.
If anyone broke into the front door to the side of the caff below and made their way up the narrow staircase to our flat, they’d reach me before they found the twins.
They’d have to deal with me first.
I lie on my dad’s side of the bed, feeling the familiar dip his body made beneath my shoulders and hips. I don’t know how the hell we got here. Two dead parents, one parent here in body—for now—but absent in spirit, and me the legal caregiver for two teenage girls.
Holy fuck.
The only thing more terrifying than bringing up my sisters is the prospect of social services taking them away from me.
I know that much. And God, does that kind of fear focus the mind.
I need to keep a clear head. I need to earn money—a lot of it—and I need to do everything I can to ensure that Lily and Rose have a normal adolescence, and definitely one that’s as free from trauma and poverty as I can make it.
The outlook isn’t good. They’ll almost definitely be burying their mother in the next year or two, given the short prognosis for LBD, and the money side of things… well, the money stuff is tricky. More than tricky.
I’ve submitted an urgent application to Westminster City Council for the three of us to be moved into council housing.
The worst thing I could do right now is bury my head in the sand, and there’s no point in pretending that I can afford the rent on this place—or anywhere similar—going forward.
Not while my obligations to the twins outweigh my ability to take dodgy, high-paying jobs.
It will kill me to move the girls out of their home, but I just don’t see any way around it.
Having social services sniffing around my job at Alchemy is too high risk.
With every second that I spend spiralling, that cold mist of terror creeps over my body again, making all my muscles tense and achy.
My heart is hammering, and the lump in my throat that’s stopped me from being able to get any food down at dinner is worse than ever, and I can’t seem to take a full breath.
I don’t really know what panic attacks feel like—I don’t think I’ve ever had a proper one—but this feeling is scaring me, and I have to keep my shit together for the twins’ sakes.
I’m the grown-up now. The buck stops with me.
I need to go somewhere in my head that isn’t here.
I need to go to a place right now where I can forget that I now have two teenage wards and a stepmother wasting away in some hideous facility that stinks of bleach.
I’ve tried not to think about the other evening at that ridiculous estate, Belvedere; I really have.
No good can come from fantasising about houses and gardens and men that aren’t real life, but, honestly, this is an emergency.
So I go there. I screw my eyes shut and curl my hands up into fists, and I imagine being in that beautiful room full of bright golden sunshine and ridiculous oil paintings and delicate furniture.
I recall how it was to be there, how it felt as though the real world and all its problems and shiftiness had faded away. How fun it felt, how infectious.
What is that word?
Hedonistic.
That’s how I felt.
Like all I had to do was have fun. Nothing else was required of me except to sit back and allow myself to be pampered and trussed up in sexy corsetry and a pretty gown. To go to a fancy party, filled with gorgeous, aristocratic people, and be bubbly, fabulous Ivy for a few hours.
Then I allow myself to think of him.
It should have been the cherry on the cake: being dicked down by a ridiculously handsome fairytale duke, or whatever the heck he was, in a lilac bedroom that felt like being inside a music box and was fancier and more indulgent than any room I’d ever been in in my entire life.
If he’d fucked me like he was supposed to, like he clearly wanted to, it would have been the pinnacle of the whole experience.
I could have lain there in a real four-poster bed with him and pretended I was Duchess Georgiana from Grosvenor.
It’s one of my best go-to fantasies, right up there with painting waterlilies in Giverny, except it would have been real.
That look on his face when I got my tits out was one for the records. Absolutely bloody priceless. I do—did—well for myself at Alchemy, but I’ve never seen such naked lust etched onto a man’s face as I have when his eyes were on my boobs.
It was power, that feeling. Real power. Jesus, it felt so good.
Good and, given the epic shitshow my life currently is, rare as fuck.
To have lured Prince Charming away from a party in his honour, to know that, for those few moments, his friends downstairs didn’t exist and I was all he could focus on was honestly the headiest thing I’ve felt in a long time.
The sound he made when I placed his palms over my boobs.
The ravenous way he sucked my top lip into his mouth.
The incredulous look in his eyes.
I blindsided the fuck out of him, but, until he came to his senses, he was all in.
Boy, was he all in. And God, was he hot.
For starters, he was in full period costume, which didn’t hurt.
He was every inch (every inch) my Dominick-Duke-of-Coventry from Grosvenor fantasy come to life.
Undoing his breeches was definitely a surreally hot, WTF moment.
But even without the sexy breeches and all the rest of it, the guy was a knockout.
Tall. Far taller than me. Dark hair, longish on top and styled away from his face.
The kind of hair that would definitely fall over his forehead, Mr Darcy style, as he fucked you.
Straight nose. An aristocratic nose, maybe, even if I couldn’t tell you exactly why.
It just looked like the result of good breeding.
Full mouth. Forest-green eyes that did an admirable job of giving away everything he was feeling.
And, like I told him, a most excellent dick.
He looked like that, and the whole setup was perfect, just dreamy, and then he had to go and be a humourless, pompous, self-important dickhead with some kind of very unnecessary and very unwelcome crisis of conscience.
For fuck’s sake!!!!!!!!!
I may enjoy a humourless, pompous, self-important dickhead in my books and on my screen, but it turns out I absolutely do not enjoy them in real life.
Especially not when I’m genuinely gagging for it, and it’s probably going to be my last fuck in God knows how long, and there’s the promise of a hefty cash bonus on the table if I deliver.
And especially not when said dickhead makes me feel cheap as chips with all his uninvited pontificating on how awful sex work is and how he couldn’t possibly exploit me.
Ugh. What a self-righteous wanker.
I hope he was as frustrated as I was. I hope he regretted his puritanical bullshit as soon as I walked out that door. And I hope to fuck he lives in abject, sexless misery with his beautiful, scary-looking fiancée for the rest of their posh, privileged lives.
Well, that little trip down memory lane was spectacularly unhelpful for my spiralling anxiety levels. Now I feel a horrible mix of pissed off and horny and cheap.
There’s only one thing for it. I twist my body and fumble on the floor next to the bed for my headphones, untangling their cord and sticking them in my ears. Once they’re plugged into my phone, I pull up my secret song and set it to repeat.
When the real world fails spectacularly to make me feel safe, this is the one thing that always works. It’s so stupid, but it’s like a meditation for me.
I put one hand on my heart and one on my tummy and force myself to focus on my breathing.