Chapter 16 Adam “Cheek to Cheek” #2
She’s not blinking. I feel this hideous tension rising up inside me. Then I sigh and it’s like I can feel a giant weight dropping off my shoulders. This secret I’ve carried too long.
“I’ve thought about it,” I admit.
She nods slowly. “Go on.”
“About Meredith…and sometimes when you and me, when we’ve not been getting on…I’ve wondered what might happen, because me and her, we really do…”
I expect Jules to fly off the handle. I brace myself. Because I deserve it, don’t I? Only the nuclear explosion I’m expecting doesn’t come, and staring down at that phrase, Be Kind, I wonder if that’s the only thing holding her back.
I still can’t bear to look her in the face.
Then she says, “Because we really haven’t been getting on, have we? For too long. Too long without trying to fix things.”
“No, I guess not…”
“Are you and me still what you want?” she asks.
“Yes,” I answer, without hesitation. The way we’re talking now…
this letter, and what it’s telling us to do…
it’s suddenly like I can see a way forward again.
We’ve still got so much to fight for, haven’t we?
For us and everything we’ve built together.
For our kids. “And you? Is this…do you still want us too?”
I feel like I’m on the thinnest of ice. Like one wrong word and I’ll be plunged into the icy void.
This time, I do look at her. She nods. Thank God. Without blinking. Like she’s staring right into my soul.
“I miss you,” I tell her.
“I miss you too.”
And it’s so weird, but the word miss, it kind of sounds like love.
“And Darius?” I ask, because even though this crazy piece of paper could have been written by anyone, even him, I still have to know. Just asking the question is making me feel sick.
It’s only then I see the tears in her eyes.
“You were right,” she says, “he did try to kiss me the other night in the car.” She swallows, hard. “And that wasn’t the first time either. Back when we didn’t go to San Francisco. He tried it then too.”
No.
I can’t believe this. Don’t want to.
“I should have told you back then,” Jules says, a tear rolling down her beautiful face, “and the night before last. And I’m sorry, so sorry I didn’t. But this is the truth. I’m being honest with you now, just like you’ve been honest with me.”
“Darius…” It’s all I can say. I feel like I’m spinning away.
Footsteps.
Nelly walks in.
She looks from me to Jules, then back again. Clearly reading something in our expressions.
“What about Uncle Darius?” she asks.
“He’s a prick. He just fired your dad,” Jules says, but still looking at me, that teardrop still shining.
“Are you joking?” Nelly demands.
“No,” Jules says, “and he says it was out of his control. But that’s a lie. He’s a liar.” Still looking at me.
Then, perfectly timed, the unmistakable sound of Darius’s Ferrari snarls into our drive.
Jules holds out her hand to me. I stare at it, but only for a second. Then take it.
“Come on,” she says, squeezing my hand tight—that tightness that always gives such strength.
I squeeze hers back, wiping her tear away with my other hand.
“What’s going on?” Liam asks, trotting down the stairs, scratching at his left hand the way he sometimes does when it’s playing up, either alerted by Nelly’s raised voice or the sound of Darius’s car.
“Uncle Darius fired Dad. He’s a prick,” Nelly answers him, his face registering shock.
Jules and I open the front door together and step out as Darius slowly, carefully reverses in between Dad’s shonky brick wall and Mum’s ?koda that Jules got towed back from the Quark Studios office yesterday.
“Guys, guys, guys,” he says, reaching out his hands. “I had to come round because I’m genuinely sorry about what’s happened. But like I say, it really was out of my—”
“Fuck off,” Nelly tells him. She’s followed us out. “You snake.”
“Whoa,” says Liam.
“Yeah, steady on—” I find myself saying, automatically, because this is still Darius, right? Our friend. Even if—
“No,” Jules says. “She’s right. He’s betrayed you.”
“It’s just business,” Darius tells Jules firmly.
Jules still hasn’t let go of my hand. “Best friends don’t do that to each other. Any of that. They just don’t.”
“Jules…” says Darius—and it’s impossible to miss the note of warning in his voice, because he knows what she’s talking about too.
“Leave,” I tell him, anger bubbling up inside me. “Now.”
He looks like he’s about to say something else, but Jules speaks first. “No,” she says. “Not before I tell him something first.” She marches right up to him. “What you said at your party about me and Adam and what we have and the kids, and how we really lucked out—”
“What?” He looks at her like she’s gone mad.
“Well, it never was luck,” she says. “It’s been hard work, every step of the way, and will keep on being hard work.
But it’s also been worth it and always will be.
You might act like you’ve got everything, but you’re nothing, and you’ve got nothing next to him.
” She points back at me. “He’s held down a job he doesn’t even like for years to pay our mortgage.
He’s raised two kids, and he might not be a millionaire, but he’s a hero. ”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Nelly says, but then I see it. Her mother’s expression on her face. The one that warns she will not be fucked with. “But you know what?” She glares at Darius. “You can stick your job up your arse.”
“And your sodding music contacts,” Liam says, stepping in beside her and glaring at Darius too.
The strength I felt from Jules squeezing my hand, I feel it doubling now from the look my daughter gives me. Of total solidarity.
“Wha—what job?” I say.
“Oh, yeah.” Nelly sniffs. “He wanted me to work for him at Quark. For him and Meredith. He said she was going to train me up.”
Jules walks back to me. Again, she takes my hand.
Darius opens his mouth to speak, but then shuts it.
For once, lost for words. In spite of everything he’s done, I feel a swell of sympathy for him, my best friend.
I can’t help it. Because Jules is right.
He doesn’t have this, what I’ve got. He doesn’t have any of the things that really matter.
“Just get the fuck out of here, Darius,” I say, looking my ex–best friend dead in the eyes. “Or didn’t you hear me the first time, mate.”
Puce-faced, he gets back into his car, and the four of us stand there together in a line as he drives the hell out of our lives.
—
It takes us a good hour to calm down after that. I make us a cup of tea and a round of BLTs that we eat in the sun at the bottom of the garden by the shed.
Then Liam’s off to Max’s to practice and Nelly’s out into town, where she’s meeting Eva.
Because what just happened with Darius has made up her mind that she’s going to use some of that money she’s been fastidiously saving for her flat to go traveling with Eva around Central and South America instead.
“I really enjoyed that, speaking my mind to someone like Darius,” she says just before she leaves. “So much so that I’ve told my other boss to stick his job up his arse too.”
Not something I’d have got behind a few weeks ago.
But the way she’s talking, about scoping out jobs for charities abroad while she’s gone, and that sparkle that’s back in her eyes, like when she used to talk about saving the world as a kid, who’s to deny it?
Or the way she says Eva’s name. With such a wide smile.
“She reminds me of us,” Jules says after she’s gone, “when we were young.”
She’s thinking about Australia and then San Francisco, of course. But it’s like we still can’t say it out loud.
“I wanted to go too,” I tell her. Be honest, right? “What I said to you after Darius’s party, I’m still so sorry. I wanted to go to Australia every bit as much as you did. I wanted to go with you everywhere. I still do.”
She nods but not like she already knew this. More like she needed to hear it. Her eyes glisten in the morning light, but then she takes another swig of her tea and smiles.
Then, next thing I know, we’re talking about Liam.
How I’m going to corner Rory from the Great Escape and KP from the Troubs and tell them about Liam’s band and ask them if they can help out.
Something I suddenly feel okay about because I’m finally starting to see that Liam’s just doing the same as Nelly. Just following his heart.
Plus, what else can I do for him now that he’s an adult, other than be there for him and give him all the support that I can?
Finally, we talk about us, and this weird letter here on the table before us. About our futures.
“Okay, so apart from the cool businesses we’re going to run, what else are we going to change?” Jules says.
It’s a challenge. But she’s right. This is our chance to draw a line in the sand. To move on.
“Okay.” I play along. “My body. For one thing. You know, I’d like to get a bit more”—buff, I’m about to say—“healthy,” I settle on instead. “Just to keep myself more active. So, you know, you and me, we can keep on doing stuff together as we get old…”
Because we’ve stopped doing so much stuff together, haven’t we? Even simple, everyday things like walking the dog.
“Good one,” she says, smiling.
“What about you?”
“Finances. I’d like to get more on top of them.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve messed that up, haven’t I?” I say.
“No. I don’t just mean your job. I mean me too. Like my credit card.”
“What credit card?”
She pulls a cartoony grin. “The one I haven’t told you about. The one I owe three grand on.” Her grin shifts to a grimace.
“Oh, Jules,” I say—I can’t keep the dread from my voice, or from rising up inside me.
“I know, I’m so sorry. For lying…and for the debt, because I know how much that scares you,” she says. “It’s also why I think we need to listen to this letter and make these businesses work.”
She’s right. We have to.
We will.
—
A few months later…
The Troubs save their best song for last.