Incapable (Love Triumphs Book 3) (18 page)

He needed more than her voice, because her grief was an arrow point in his chest. “Sit closer, please.”

“No. I have to finish this.”

He could move, slide across to her, but she clearly didn’t want that. She sucked air in stages. It ratcheted into her throat like a reverse sob. She was building her defences.

“We were going to be the next Coldplay, the next Oasis. Hamish and Rafe, Don, Freddy and Clive. Hamish would write the songs, Rafe would arrange them and I was going to give them the kind of sound that would make us all rich and famous. That was the dream. We wanted to give the world new music to dance to.”

“You didn’t get the chance.”

She shifted in the silence and all he read was despair.

“There was a student in a bunch of my classes called Jeffrey Sealstrom. He was brilliant. Topped the year, hardly ever bothered to open a book. He was one of those people who could make you nervous. Partly it was his intelligence; mostly it was his temper. He would menace the lecturers if he thought they were wrong. If you got in his way, or he thought you were wasting his time, he could get physical. He’d smash things, knock things over. Most people tried to stay out of his way. They were the sensible ones.” Her voice, matter-of-fact until now, wavered. “I tried to help him.”

Damon moved; he needed his hands on her. He got the flat of her palm on his shoulder holding him off.

“Don’t.” She shuffled further around the curved seat away from him, taking his equilibrium with her.

“The only reason Hamish got hurt was because he was trying to protect me from Jeffrey.”

“Jesus.”

“I told you I wanted to be an audio engineer because sound doesn’t lie. You asked me who’d lied to me. No one did. It was just that I failed to see clearly. I thought Jeffrey was this quirky genius, a freak who was misunderstood. I liked him. I knew he wasn’t normal, but I didn’t judge him. We became friends. I was a naïve fool.”

Rattle of spoons on saucers. Coffee and cake they’d both ignore arrived. Georgia’s thank you to Angus sounded routine, as if she wasn’t in the middle of explaining how her life got taken apart, how guilt created her future.

“I could talk Jeffrey down. When he got angry, when he wanted to lash out, I could calm him. He would tell me how sorry he was, how burned up with remorse. I stopped him hitting another student in the lunch queue. There were dozens of people around—but I was the one who reached him.

“Hamish told me he was bad news. He wanted me to stay away from Jeffrey. We used to argue about him, about how Jeffrey was unstable, but he was always sweet with me. I thought he needed someone to talk to and I wasn’t going to abandon him.

“Then one day Jeffrey overheard Hamish and I arguing about him. He came to me and asked if I wanted him to do something to get rid of Hamish. I was horrified. I told him I loved Hamish and that if Jeffrey was going to be like that we couldn’t be friends anymore. He backed off. I thought he understood.

“The night of the attack it was coming on dark, it was drizzling. Hamish and I been at the library. We were supposed to be researching a joint paper, but we were fooling around, snogging in the biology stack. We were walking home to his place and came across a fight. Jeffrey was hitting a student in Hamish’s stats class, Thomas Tines. Thomas was so covered in blood he was barely recognisable.”

Damon gripped the bottom edge of the banquette seat, upholstery tacks and staples biting into his fingertips.

“I was different then to how I am now. I was confident. I thought I was invincible. I was in London on an exchange program, a scholarship. I was the girl who organised things, who fixed things for people who couldn’t fix things for themselves. I was into everything that wasn’t nailed down or illegal. My dad was a drunk and I managed him. It never occurred to me that Jeffrey would hurt me.”

“Oh fuck.” He didn’t want to hear anymore. Didn’t want to know this was Georgia’s reality: the colour of blood and mind-altering fear, the shape of anarchy and the solidity of confusion. But this is what she was made up of, not brown curls and pale skin, but mistakes of judgement and best intentions and inexplicable terror.

“Please, I need to hold your hand.”

14: Lost and Found

“I need you to let me finish.”

If Damon touched her, she would disintegrate. Sense and reason would stream out of her and diffuse in the atmosphere. The anxiety in his voice was enough to make her want to stop. If he took her hand, wrapped her safe in his lean strength and forgiveness she wouldn’t be able to do this, and he had to hear it all to understand that of the two of them, she was the one who stumbled around blind and needed help navigating the world.

“I called out to Jeffrey. Hamish tried to stop me but I shook him off. I got in Jeffrey’s face and he let Thomas go. Dropped him like he was a bag of groceries. It was only then I saw he had a knife. Another man, a pedestrian, tried to take it from him and Jeffery stabbed him. Hamish tried to pull me away.”

She risked a glance at Damon. His eyes were closed. His face contorted. He was there with her in the rain and the fading light. If she touched him, he’d surround her with sympathy when what she needed was something more pragmatic, more like recovery than remembrance.

“I could see Jeffrey was out of his head; his eyes,” she took a fortifying sigh. “He told me all the people who’d laughed at him needed to die. The police said he had a cocktail of drugs in his system.”

She couldn’t look at Damon’s face. She’d told this story before. Not often after the investigation, after the trauma therapists had declared her well, but often enough for the words to be there without having to fret them, often enough not to lose her place or to break down. She could do this calmly and knew that made it easier for others to deal with. But as much as she knew this needed saying, she didn’t want to see the horror of it play across his features.

“I asked Jeffrey to put the knife down. I told him everything would be fine if he put the knife down.”

Damon’s hand was on the seat, fisted into the red vinyl, depressing the padding. The muscle in his thigh was bunched. “You were insanely brave.”

There was no way to prepare him for what was coming.

“Jeffrey put the knife down. He rushed at Hamish, punched him, pushed him until his back was against a traffic barrier. I was screaming at him to stop. He picked Hamish up and tipped him over the barricade. Hamish hit the road headfirst. He was almost crushed by a car.”

Damon moved, slid sideways towards her, but she stopped him. “Don’t.” She shifted to put distance between them again. “Please don’t touch me. I need to tell you the rest. If you touch me I won’t be able to say another word.”

His elbows came up on the table. He put his head in his hands. “You don’t need to relive this on my account.”

Her, “I need you to know it,” made the tendons in his neck flare.

“Jeffrey was calm then. He said, ‘I did that for you. I did that for you, Georgie girl.’ Hamish spent six months in hospital. He had to relearn how to do basic things again. Thomas had broken ribs, a punctured lung, a broken nose, eye socket, two blown eardrums, multiple stab wounds. He never got his hearing back. Jeffrey didn’t even know who he was. Jeffrey was charged with assault but he got off. He had a cousin who was a Queen’s Counsel. I should’ve known to stay away from him. I should’ve known I had no business trying to reason with a madman. A drunk is one thing but…I was so sure of myself. So arrogant. If I’d listened to Hamish he wouldn’t have been hurt.”

“That wasn’t your fault. That bastard could’ve killed you both.”

That’s what everyone said. It didn’t help.

“The band broke up. Hamish couldn’t stay awake, forgot words, couldn’t read, or write at first. He got savage headaches. We were going to travel, see the world, get married, have one boy and one girl, didn’t matter which came first. We were going to be together forever.” She took a breath and it caught in the back of her throat, tasted like old books and blood. “I put Hamish in Jeffery’s sight.”

Damon rubbed his forehead as though he was trying to hold the events and his emotions in order. She knew that wasn’t possible. It was too big, too random, too dreadful to make sense of. “You probably saved Thomas’ life.”

“I couldn’t save Hamish’s. He almost died. Most days he wished he had. His injury was severe, but he was young and fit. We didn’t know how long it might take him to recover. We married when he was still in hospital. And for a while, we were happy enough. His condition improved, but he couldn’t read music anymore or play, he couldn’t work at first. I graduated and got whatever steady work I could. We needed my salary.

“But Hamish wasn’t the same man. He was in pain. His personality changed. He couldn’t get the kind of job he wanted, we were always short of money, and he needed a lot of help day to day. When we learned Rafe was making it as a composer, Hamish grew bitter.”

He’d trapped her with love and guilt and obligation, with the tyranny of his physical needs. He needed so much of her help and yet he resented it. He became as rigid and inflexible as the wheelchair he had to use at first and as unreasonable as the wasted muscles in his body. At least her father had never been a mean drunk, just a man who couldn’t cope with the death of his wife.

“He stopped loving me, and he started blaming me for what happened to him.”

“I don’t understand how you survived this.” Damon’s voice was edge and point, all his smoothness roughed over by shock. He knew the worst of it now. She could afford to look at his handsome face without his expression triggering tears.

“Jeffrey once tried to teach me Chaos Theory. I didn’t get it until after that night.”

“The butterfly effect. A small change in one state that results in a larger one in another.”

“That’s right. I was the butterfly. I was the party organiser and the cheer squad leader. I was the friend collector and the chief mischief-maker and the fixer of things. Jeffrey was the chaos. Did you know butterflies don’t live very long?”

Damon nodded. “A few days, a month.”

“Jeffrey didn’t stab me but he took my confidence, he taught me to doubt myself, to be fearful, to hesitate. He changed my outlook, my personality, my whole life, because of what he didn’t do to me, and what he did to Hamish because of me. I’m not a butterfly anymore. I don’t have the grace and ease I once had and I never will again.”

“Jesus, Georgia.” Damon flattened both hands on the table in front of him. The hands that’d made her feel alive and young again last night and beautiful this morning, because they’d touched her with desire. She wanted that feeling again. But not at the expense of the truth, and she didn’t think he’d want her when he knew what her disability was.

“I came home to make a fresh start, to learn who I am when I’m not the woman who trusted Jeffrey, who got Hamish hurt. Who stayed too long in a loveless marriage out of obligation. You weren’t supposed to happen.”

She laid her hand alongside Damon’s. She didn’t dare touch him because if he rejected her, the sting might last forever. “I wasn’t supposed to meet a man like you, feel so much for you so quickly.”

“You tried to send me packing.”

She nodded. “I did.” Irresistible was as much a part of Damon’s nature as indecisive was hers, post-Jeffrey, post-Hamish.

“And now?”

“I had to tell you because I needed you to know why I run hot and cold when I’m with you. It has nothing to do with you being blind and everything to do with me being uncertain. I should never have married Hamish. That’s not what either of us needed. His parents tried to talk us out of it, but he needed me and I needed to work through my guilt. We were the perfect wrong fit. When he refused counselling, when he got abusive, I should’ve left him, but I thought I deserved his anger. I know that’s twisted.”

“You didn’t deserve any of this fucked up shit.” Damon scrubbed his face. “Sorry, but I don’t have more eloquent words to give you.”

“I don’t know what it’s like to be in a normal relationship. I don’t know how to love a man without being his nurse and his punching bag. You being blind made alarm bells ring in my head.”

He dropped his hands from his face. “Are they still ringing?”

Yes, but for an entirely different reason. Bells could ring for joy as well as to signal danger.

“You don’t have to be my nurse. You don’t have to love me. We can enjoy each other’s company as friends.”

Could she be his friend and deny how much she wanted his kisses? “Is that what you want?”

“I don’t want to push you into a corner. I don’t want to scare you, rush you or manipulate you, and I’m guilty of all that. I get I’m not who you need.”

“I thought I knew what I needed, and then I met you.”

“You need someone to love you, not for who you once were, not for who you’d like to be, but for who you are right now: shy and sexy, capable and tentative and so very brave. Did you know butterflies can see colour; red, green and yellow?”

Was he offering to love her, to be what she needed? “I didn’t know that. Are you making that up, like sexing a goldfish?” She hoped that might make him smile, but he shook his head as if her attempt at humour was at odds with the whole world.

“It’s true, butterflies see colour like I see you, Georgia.”

He’d see her in blurred fragments that didn’t jigsaw together cleanly because that’s how she saw herself.

“I see the red of your courage, the yellow of your pain. I see the green of your fresh start.”

He stared at her, his hands spread on the table, tension cording his neck. If he could see her he’d know he’d made her tear up with his tender talk of butterflies. She squeezed her eyes shut to stop them falling, to send the tide back out, taking the memories with it like garbage left on the shore.

“I’d like to give you more colours, all the colours there are, if you’ll let me.”

She opened her eyes. There was a whole half circle seat between them, a thousand reasons why they were a bad choice for each other, a thousand more to walk away now, when they were a half-formed notion with little more than frenzied kisses and a fish to bind them. But he sat, steady, when he might have twitched to separate, offering her a bright new spectrum of life.