Players, Bumps and Cocktail Sausages (9 page)

“Jasper?” Oakley called quietly outside the door.

“Yeah, I’m awake.”

She walked in, carrying a plate and mug. The smell of coffee hit me, and I sat up.

“Here,” she said, “eat this and take these.” She put the plate of toast and coffee on the bedside table and handed me a packet of pills from her pocket.

“Thanks,” I replied, popping the tablets out of the pack as soon as they’d landed on my lap.

“Everleigh doesn’t know you’re here so Cole is taking her to his sister’s for a bit. Apparently Mia bought glitter play dough for the girls so Everleigh’s excited.”

I looked up, knowing what that meant. “So you want to talk.”

“I do, but only when you’re ready. You look like shit right now.”

“Thanks,” I replied. Just what I wanted to hear on top of everything else. Siblings really didn’t sugar coat it. “Abby is cheating.”

Her mouth fell open, and she sat down, making the bed bounce at how she dropped down onto it. “She what?”

“Yep, I was right. Isn’t that fucking fantastic.”

“I don’t…” She shook her head. “With who? How did you find out?”

“Walked in on her kissing that fucker Brett at school.”

“Oh my God. I can’t believe it.”

“Yeah, well, me too.”

“I’m so sorry, Jasper.” Her eyes filled with tears. I looked away from the pitying expression. “I can’t believe she did that to you.” She suddenly looked murderously angry. “Like you needed that after everything. You can stay here as long as you like. You know that, right?”

Like anyone needed that ever.

I looked back and saw her trying to control her emotions. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“What’re you going to do now?”

“You know a good divorce lawyer?” I asked, laughing with no humour.

She bit her lip. “Have you spoken to her since?”

“No, and I don’t want to. She’ll hear from me through our lawyers. She can have the house; I don’t want it. She’ll either have to buy me out, or we’ll sell and split what’s left.”

“Are you sure? That’s your home.”

“Not any more. It’s all hers. I want nothing to do with her. Has she called you today?”

Oakley shook her head, and I took a gulp of the boiling hot coffee.

“Good.”

“This is all happening so fast. Are you sure you don’t want to talk to her?”

I stopped mid-swallow. “You think I should forgive her again?”

“God no! I think you should talk it through though. You bottle everything up and move on without ever dealing with anything. Don’t you have questions for her?”

Oakley was now a deal-with-things-and-find-the-answer-by-talking-the-shit-out-of-it, and I was a deal-with-it-and-find-the-answer-in-the-bottom-of-a-bottle kind of guy.

“You’re supposed to be on my side, you know?”

“I am, Jasper. You have no idea what I want to do to her right now, but I just want you to be all right. I worry about how you deal with things.”

“Well, I will be fine, after the divorce.” I shrugged.  “Having a wife was just holding me back anyway. I mean, come on, it wasn’t really me, was it?”

She looked away and tears pooled in her eyes. “Don’t. You know you don’t really think that. You love her, and you’re hurt but going back to your old sleep-with-anything-that-moves ways isn’t going to help. You’re better than that. Please don’t shut us out. Speak to Carol again. She can help you. I know she can”

“I don’t need to talk about it, I need to forget it and move on.”

She sighed sharply. “But forgetting it isn’t really moving on. I tried that for eleven years and look where that got me. Other people were hurt because I bottled it up–”

“That wasn’t your fault.”

“Fact is if I would’ve spoken sooner things would have been… dealt with sooner.”

They would have been behind bars sooner. But that wasn’t strictly true. The only evidence proving what they’d done to her started when she was eight. If she’d have spoken up straight away they might’ve got off, a child’s word against an adults may have meant they walked free.

And it wasn’t her fault.

“You were just a child, Oakley.”

“We’re getting off topic. You know what I’m getting at. It was only when I spoke up that I was able to move on. Mum too. That just leaves you.”

“I’m fine. Men are hard and all that.”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t give me that stereotypical man crap. Neither of us believes you don’t feel just as much because you have a penis.”

I laughed and want to hug her for being one of the only people that could make me laugh right now. “The word penis sounds wrong coming from you.”

“Well I’m glad I amused you. Now eat your breakfast and have a shower – you smell like a brewery – we’re going out.”

“What? Out where?”

She stood up and left, ignoring me. That was just great. I didn’t want to go anywhere today. If she thought that I was going to speak to my soon-to-be ex-wife, she was very, very wrong.

After finishing a slice of toast – as much as I could eat without wanting to hurl – I hopped in the shower. The night Abby and I showered together immediately sprang to my mind, kicking me in the gut. It hit me then that I was going to be solo in the shower – and everywhere else it really mattered – for, probably, the rest of my fucked up life.

Leaning against the cold tiled wall, I sunk to knees and did something very stereotypically un-manly, I cried.

Chapter Ten

“Where are we going?” I asked Oakley as she drove us…somewhere. I had a throbbing head, what felt like knives stabbing my heart and a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and she was taking me on a bloody field trip!

“I’m going to deal with the one thing that still haunts me. We’re going to be strong together,” she replied. “Then you’re going to deal with your wife.”

“What still haunts you?”

“The place where we camped,” she whispered. Her hands tightened around the steering wheel.

The sick feeling multiplied. “What? Why do you want to go back there?”

“I’ve not told anyone this, but I dream of that place sometimes. It’s the one thing that I still hold on to because it’s too painful to face.”

I gulped. Did I want to go there? “So today is all about exorcising our demons?”

“Yes.”

“You make it sound easy.”

She gave a short, humourless laugh. “I’d love it if it was. Going back over things is the hardest thing I’ve done – closely followed by leaving Cole – but it’s also the only way I’ve been able to move forward. Jasper, you can’t expect to sweep everything that happens under the carpet and not have a breakdown at some point. There’s only so much a person can take. So I’m facing this and then you’re speaking to Abby.”

“I want nothing to do with her.”

“I know, and I support you one-hundred per cent. I wouldn’t want to get back together with someone that had cheated on me either, but you have to speak to her. A marriage isn’t something you can ignore.”

I hated it when she was right. There were so many questions I wanted Abby to answer.

“Can’t I just call her?”

She shrugged. “If you want. Either way, you have to have that conversation.”

“You don’t have to do this, you know? I get your point, and I’ll talk to my whore of a wife, but you don’t have to go first.”

“Actually, I do.” She bit her lip. “I’m tired of being scared of a scrap of land.”

It wasn’t just a scrap of land though. It was the place our bastard father took her to and photographed his friend abusing her. It was where she lost her innocence and most of her childhood. That scrap of land started her eleven-year silence.

“How come you’ve not told Cole about this?” I asked. He knew more than anyone – besides Mum probably – but she hadn’t told him. They had a tell-all rule that I was sure was Oakley’s idea after living with too many secrets and lies.

“I’ve not told anyone, not even Carol. I wasn’t ready to deal with it, so I pretended it wasn’t an issue. You’re the only one that knows about the nightmares, so, please don’t say anything.”

“How does Cole not know about your nightmares?”

“He’d sleep through an earthquake! They’re less frequent now, maybe one every few months. I don’t wake up screaming, so there’s no reason he’d know, but I can’t go back to sleep afterwards. Maybe if it’s not haunting me in the back of my mind any more, I won’t see it in my dreams.”

“You think that will work?”

She shrugged one shoulder stiffly. “I’m hoping. It’s worked with the rest of it well enough.”

“Well enough?”

She sighed. “There’s no miracle cure, Jasper. It’ll always be there, but it’s no longer in my head all the time.”

“Good,” I whispered, not daring to admit it was still in my head all the time.

We fell silent. Oakley seemed somewhere else, and I desperately wanted to know what was going through her head. She kept her eyes focused on the road, still gripping the steering wheel too tight. She said she wanted to do this, but it sure as hell didn’t look like she did.

She pulled into the forest and turned down the track to the campsite. Her hands gripped the wheel so tight I could see the tendons in her inner wrist.

“Hey,” I said softly. “It’s okay.”

Nodding, she gulped and parked in a space at the edge of the car park.

“I’m coming with you,” I said. I wasn’t sure if she planned on going there alone or if I was here to be with her the whole time. Either way, I was staying by her side.

Her grip loosened a touch. “Thank you.”

I stared at a piece of grass nearby a stream. Beside me, Oakley stood deadly still, clutching my hand as if it was her lifeline. She was thinking about what happened to her, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t let myself think about it. I couldn’t think about the man that was supposed to be there for us but had let us both down.

She took a deep breath. “It’s less overgrown now. The grass was longer. A few bushes have been cut down too.” I wanted to ask if we were in the right place, but her fear vibrated off her. This was the place.

“How do you feel?”

“Sick. Scared.” She frowned. “Actually, less scared. Seeing it as an adult makes it seem smaller. When I was little everything was huge, and I don’t just mean size, I know I was smaller then too. I’m not explaining it well, am I?”

“You’re explaining it fine. I think I get it.”

“This is just a bit of land with grass and mud and trees.” She nodded once, and her eyes glazed over. As strong as she was trying to be it was still hard for her.

“What did the bastard do when he saw how scared you were of this place?” My hand tightened around hers. Whenever I thought about him, I wanted to rip his head from his shoulders. Hate was a strong word but not nearly strong enough for what I felt for him.

“Nothing.” She gulped. “By the time it got…really bad I wasn’t talking, and he didn’t care.”

Okay we were done with that conversation. I was having trouble breathing evenly. I wanted to kill him so badly it hurt.

“Did, er, did Frank stay all weekend?”

“Yes. He was in a separate tent though. A bigger one.”

“You shared a tent with Max?” I asked. He wasn’t Dad to me, and he hadn’t been for a long time.

“Yes.”

“And he definitely never did...anything.”

She shook her head. I knew he hadn’t; she’d said many times before that the man that created us never touched her like that – he’d just let his sick friend do it and took pictures. What we didn’t know was that the place it happened still haunted her. Secrets had plagued our family for years. I didn’t want any more.

“He was a different person when we were away. The change was instant. As soon as we were in the car he was cold and detached. Like he was severing our relationship in his mind so I was no longer his daughter.”

“Hope they fucking rot,” I growled.

“Calm down,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Don’t let them get to you like this. We’re here, and they’re not. I never think of it as winning, but I suppose that’s the easiest thing to compare it to. If you let them rule you then they win.”

He’d already won. He may well spend the rest of his life in prison, but he’d screwed us up forever. Like Oakley said, it would always be there. I was a man; I was supposed to protect the women in my family. I failed my baby sister and all the time our dad was hurting her I was hero-worshiping him. I hated myself.

“What can’t you get past? The guilt?” she asked. Her voice was so low I barely caught it.

“That’s the main one.”

She squeezed my hand again; opting to not tell me I shouldn’t feel guilty for the seven millionth time. I loved that she didn’t blame me for not knowing; it would kill me if she did, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t blame myself. Who didn’t notice something like that?

“I think I’m ready to go now.”

“Yeah?” I asked through clenched teeth, trying to calm myself down.

“Yes. I expected to feel… more. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“Good. I think good.”

She look up at me and smiled tightly.

“I think maybe it is too.”

I turned, and it took her a second to move but then we were walking back to the car. We’d been there less than five minutes. It wasn’t over; I wasn’t stupid enough to think that demon had been exorcised already. It was more like opening the door for her to talk about it.

“Now, how do you want to deal with Abby?” she asked.

“Time machine so I can go back and not marry her. What the hell is wrong with me? I never should have given her a second chance.”

Oakley stopped, grabbing my arm and pulling me around to face her.

“Don’t you ever blame yourself for what that bitch did. Even if you were growing apart, that doesn’t give her the right to cheat. It’s
not
your fault, Jasper.”

“I don’t know what to do now. I want to hate her.”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around me. I hugged her back, swallowing the rising lump in my throat.

Her betrayal hurt like hell. The thought of her with another man, kissing him, underneath him, telling him what she wanted, made me want to hurl.

“What am I going to do? I can’t get the image of them out of my head. I can’t stop thinking about her.”