Incapable (Love Triumphs Book 3) (33 page)

So anyway, assuming I haven’t now bored you to death with all this, Georgie, I am most humbly sorry and most terribly guilt stricken and dear God, dear God, I’m hoping you are well and happy and making a new life full of all the things you didn’t have with me.

I want there to be someone who will love you like I wasn’t able to. I want there to be work you enjoy, not just work you could do and still have time left over to care for me. I want you to have millions of friends who make you laugh like you used to, and most of all, most of all, I want you to be happy again.

With my heart firmly in my mouth and no expectation of a reply. Please, please don’t think you have to.

Hamish.

27: Chokehold

Damon rolled over on the sofa, waking from his drugged slumber. He’d dreamt he was at the movies: champagne, a private screening, the colours so bright, the movement so quick and the sound so loud he had to shake his head to tell awake from asleep. It was his own voice he’d heard strong and certain, maybe that was what woke him. It took a moment, sitting with his head in his hands, to know he was wrong, and then he was instantly on alert.

Someone in the house was crying.

He scrambled to his feet. He had no idea what time it was, had stopped wearing his watch because it hardly mattered, one day trying to evade his thoughts eked slowly into another.

He had to stop himself calling out. He stilled and listened. The sound had stopped. Whoever it was had heard him getting up and didn’t want him knowing.

Georgia had shared her fears about Avocado going under. She was worried, had started searching for a new job. He’d done what he could, touching base with industry contacts to see if anyone had anything going. Was she more upset than she’d let on?

Taylor was off about something and not giving. She’d lah, lah, lahed every time he’d asked her in a note and she’d resisted all his forms of attack, including sitting on her and tickling her till she just about wet herself.

It could be either of them.

And it could easily turn into a game of hide and seek he could never win. Frustration, never far from his grasp, simmered in his chest, boiled in his gut. He slapped his hand down on the wall in the doorway between the kitchen and the lounge. That choking sound had come from further inside the house. He moved into the kitchen, every sense straining, picking up only stillness and peripheral noises; his own movements, birdsong, the sprinkler system from outside.

Fuck this.

There was a bowl of fruit on the counter. He swept it to the floor with a backhander, the bowl shattering, the fruit bouncing and rolling.

Running bare feet. “Damon.” Georgia in the room. “What happened?”

He frowned and pointed at her.

Her breathing was uneven. “Stand still, there’s glass everywhere.”

He needed to know right now what was wrong with her. He slammed his hand on the countertop.

She sniffed, little gasps of breath. “Don’t move while I clean this up.”

He slid a bare foot towards her, and another.

“Damon, don’t.” Her voice cracked.

He took another and met something sharp under his heel but kept moving. Her breath caught, a strangled sob, and when he opened his arms she came into them, no longer able to hold it together.

He lifted his heel, something embedded in it and stoked her hair, held her while she sobbed, convulsing. Her face was wet, her neck. This couldn’t be about her job.
Jesus Christ
, had someone died? She wasn’t saying anything, couldn’t catch her breath to. He scooped an arm down to her knees and lifted her, limped out to the deck where he could bleed without making too much more of a mess.

Two strides past the doorway, two left, he found the lounge and sat, holding her on his lap. She curled into his chest, clutched at his neck and he was so afraid of what was happening to her. He rocked her, breathed her, held her tight, his foot buzzing, a scream building in his head.

Taylor had been his noise, his nonstop reality show narrator. She’d filled his brain with sound: her talk, her music, her bad-tempered presence in the house, but Georgia had been his everything else. His sanity and satiety, his rest and consolation. She was the hands that soothed, the lips that whispered his name, calling him back from the blackest thoughts, the emptiest prospects. And now she was somehow broken and he could not fix her with his body alone, any more than he could stay silent.

“Georgia, tell me.” His first words, soft and unformed in his throat like porridge, like sludge in the air, too heavy, too fractured for volume.

Her hand fast to his throat. Her, “Oh no,” slipped inside a sob. Then she kissed him, lips firm, pressing ungently, stopping him from saying more while he held her too tight and tried to swallow over the soreness in his throat and the ache behind his eyes.

She twitched, shifted. He was holding her too hard. Her hand over his mouth now. “Don’t talk, don’t, please don’t. I’m sorry. I’m all right. It was a shock.” He relaxed his grip, but tried to scent her distress in the salty heat of her tears. “No one is hurt, everything is all right. I’m so sorry I panicked you.” She traced a finger over his lips, up his cheek, around his eye. “I got a letter from Hamish.” A shuddered breath Damon felt in his ribcage. “I’ve been carrying it around for a week. Too scared to open it. He wrote to apologise for…” She wiped at her face, her elbow brushing his chest. “To apologise for what went wrong between us. It was a shock. I’ll be all right, I’m fine. I’m so sorry I scared you.”

He caught her chin in his hand, brought his nose to her face. He knew his cheek would be rough on hers; he could barely remember when he’d last shaved, but he needed to feel her, to learn her distress and her hopes though his skin.

Her hands went to his neck, to his hair. “I promise you I’m okay. Our end was so bitter, I never thought I’d hear from Hamish again. I’ve been carrying the letter around since your operation. I almost threw it away. He half expected me to.” She sighed, and he could all but taste her unhappiness. “I made you speak.”

He would’ve transformed into a flying, fire-breathing dragon for fear of what was happening to her, for the visceral need that lived inside him to have her safe and happy, and that knowledge was rawer, tougher to bear than the sound of his torn voice.

“It’s too soon to know. It’s too soon.” She’d been shocked by the contents of the letter and shocked again when he spoke after days of communication that was all touch and breath, type and sound, so tender and tenuous it made him want to curl up in it and take comfort, but so emasculating, he also recoiled from it.

It wasn’t too soon. It was already over. And the time for indecision, for stalling was run to nothing.

Four more days would barely make any difference. He felt like he’d eaten a bucket of sand. The swelling should be down by now, swallowing less constrained. And Georgia, who’d been his consolation when he’d wanted nothing but to wallow in the sweaty stink of his fear, now needed her own comfort

“Don’t try to talk again. I’ll get your tablet.”

He stopped her moving. He’d had enough of the tablet, the reading software, the pad and pen, the inability to express himself directly without breaking something. He was so eaten up by foul humour had he voice he’d have rivalled Taylor for attitude. He’d have silenced the birds and shaken leaves from trees with his anger, laid cracks in the house’s foundations and had the neighbours calling the police.

And she who needed comforting was still comforting him.

She pulled from his clench. “Then let me see your foot. I forgot about it.”

His foot could rot. Turn into a stump and wither, cripple him in a new way. Why not? He was stumbling around, locked in silence and darkness, what did it matter if he stumbled some more?

She crouched beside him, her hand on his instep. “I’ll read you the letter, but not yet, not today. I need time to read it again, to let it settle. I never thought to hear the things Hamish said. Never thought we might find a place we could be civil with each other.”

It wasn’t too soon and things would not settle, not for him. He flinched when she pulled a shard of porcelain from his heel. Wanted to push her away, stop her fussing. He tapped her shoulder and shook his head. Was she even looking at him?

“I’ll get something to put on this.”

She left him there, to his anger, to the septic decay in his heart. He’d struggled to know what to do, a prisoner in his own head, but he knew now. He wasn’t mythical creature enough to give her what she needed, and though he didn’t know the extent of the impact of the letter on her, he could hear it in her voice, a kind of wonder spotted with hope. It was the sound of his decision.

He let her plaster his foot. He took a call from Jamie, his lame joke of the day. He cooked, for the first time in a long time. Smoked salmon pasta, capers in cream sauce. He drifted through the next few days. He heard that hurt and pleasure in Georgia’s voice when she read him Hamish’s letter and he took her kisses, like a thief.

At night when the house slept, in the odd moments of the day when he was alone, he broke the silence. He spoke to the night air and the dew damp grass; he addressed the dining room table and the sweet smelling flowers in vases in a voice that was lace and tissue, made from ash and scoured metal, erratic like a mad kitten, composed of too many stops and starts, sudden quiets and uneven pounces.

He had a voice, but it was not Damon Donovan’s. It was not the one he wanted or needed, had trained to command attention. Damon Donovan’s voice could command a space fleet, start an interplanetary war.

This imposter would have trouble ordering a pizza.

And it was only going to get worse.

28: Death Wish

Taylor’s punch made Damon fold forward. His hand went to the wall to steady himself and he grunted in shock. Georgia wished Taylor had hit him harder.

She ducked to look at his face. “What were you doing?”

Jamie had phoned the house an hour ago in a panic. He’d lost Damon and was out of his head worried, unsure what to do. He’d called again, relieved and angry fifteen minutes ago and now he had nothing to say beyond a grimace and a head shake. He walked passed them into the kitchen. Taylor went in the opposite direction, out to the front of the house where she sat on the front steps to fume and nurse her hand.

Damon straightened up. “It’s called swimming.” The harsh low grate of his voice almost matched his appearance. His hair was matted, damp and stiff with salt, his t-shirt wet against his chest, the board shorts that once fit so well hung off his hips. He was unshaven again and he needed a haircut. He’d traded sleeping most of the day away to hardly sleeping at all. She’d wake to find the bed empty. He’d be somewhere in the house with his headphones on, music leaching through them, locking himself away again even when he no longer needed to, but this—swimming in the surf on his own—this was a different kind of lashing out.

“You went in without Jamie.”

Damon shrugged. He walked straight at her, knocking her shoulder even as she tried to get out of his way. She followed him through to the kitchen where he got a beer from the fridge, not bothering to ask after anyone else.

He’d had been drinking steadily every evening. None of them had been able to get him interested in leaving the house other than for his specialist appointments, and those he would only do alone, until Jamie suggested the swim.

Watching Damon sip his beer, Jamie said, “Cheers,” rolling his eyes, then his temper got the better of him. “Fuck, Damon.” He looked at her and mouthed the word, sorry. “You could’ve been taken out by a rip, by a fucking shark. How did you even think you were going to find our place on the sand after you got out of the surf?”

“You found me, what are you worried about? I knew you would.”

“Jesus, you dickhead. That was too much of a risk. What if I didn’t? What, tell me what was I supposed to do? The beach is closed after six, there wasn’t anyone around to help.”

“I wasn’t asking for help.” Damon coughed and took a slug of beer. “I was swimming.” He walked to the table, felt for a chair, pulled it out and sat. Georgia kept her distance from him. His voice was so uneven, uncertain, if he’d needed help there’d be no way he could’ve effectively called for it.

Jamie watched him like he was an unexploded grenade. “Are you trying to step it up from drunk to death wish?”

Damon coughed again. He wasn’t meant to be drinking fluids that were too hot or too cold and he knew it, like he knew all his current choices were bad ones. “Are we back in drama class? Dalia would be proud of your performance.”

Jamie jammed fists on his hips. “What is wrong with you?”

“Nothing.” Damon gave the word gravel rash; it fell from his mouth gutter low, hateful and mean. “You asked me if I wanted a swim. You told me you had to take a call from the car. I knew you’d be back.” His voice failed on those last words, dropping to a whisper. He took a long drag on the bottle then slammed it on the table. “I don’t see what the big deal is.”

Jamie smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “He doesn’t see what the big deal is.” He looked at Georgia and barked out a laugh, fake and forced, then his eyes shifted to Taylor now standing in the doorway.

“Leave it,” she said, coming into the room. She made a throat slashing movement with her hand, then put it on Damon’s shoulder.

“Leave it?” Jamie’s voice squeaked with incredulity. “Did you not just punch him because he might’ve drowned, and now you want to leave it?”

“We know why this happened.”

Georgia stepped forward from where she’d been standing by the sink. She’d meant to put the kettle on, make tea, make peace, try to get Damon to eat something, now she wanted to stop Taylor and Jamie going at each other in front of him.

“No, we fucking well don’t, and don’t speak for him,” said Jamie.

She was too late.

Damon stood, brushing Taylor aside, knocking the chair over. He stepped wide around it, hiccupped, cleared his throat, went to the fridge, took another beer out and left the room. And all the three of them did was watch him, impotent now, as they had been for the last month, to help him adjust.