Playing With My Heartstrings (23 page)

"Luke. Luke Clark." I came to knowledge his surname when Luke handed his I.D card over to me one time, exaggerating about the dull, depressing picture he had taken, but I wasn't listening - my eyes had darted over to his surname, which I instinctively liked. Luke Clark sounded like a hero out of a comic, with a dashing costume and a mega-watt smile to turn girls weak at the knees. Just as he always did for me.

"Lucky him," Joel muttered, under his breath.

"Yeah, he certainly is." Without warning, I suddenly wished to be back at the mini campfire, burning vanilla marshmallows until they turned an undelectable shade of smoky black, telling You've Been Framed-worthy tales to Luke and staring at the stars, trying to distinguish the real ones to flashing helicopters flying by. Our fight - or rather, a petty exchange of needless speech - needn't have happened; I sincerely hoped that Luke had realized that. I missed him already.

"Anything else you wanted to talk about, Sadie? Strangely, walking several miles into a forest to speak to you for a few minutes -"

"Actually, I think more time has passed than you choose to believe," I pointed out.

"- well, my maths teacher never said I was brilliant with time, hence the reason why I haven't bought a Rolex lookalike." I shared a grin - one without hand-shaking nerves - alongside Joel, whose smile always reminded me of a tail-wagging dog, minus the roaring bark. "As I was saying before you chose to interrupt me, I'd like to spend more time here before I go back home."

A butterfly zoomed past me, its soft, delicate wing barely touching the tips of my ear, and I was bedazzled by its charming beauty, gazing admiringly at its black and red pattern. "In the meadow?"

"Yeah, why not?" Joel said, a happy smile lighting up his ecstatic face. "You and I are both alone, so it would be perfect!" Upon noticing my hesitation, Joel bit his lip, a stream of wine red blood flooding down his chin.

I fished out a tissue inside one of my many jeans pockets and handed it over to Joel, who quickly cleaned up the mess, which sent a wave of revulsion through my body, a shiver slivering its way up my spine. Blood disgusted me entirely; even at the age of eleven, Mum would be obliged to give me a Freddie Frog chocolate bar to calm my erratically behaving nerves if I ever fell over and cut myself, usually resulting in deafening shrieks of agony. Four years on, my fear - it definitely qualified as one - of blood hadn't progressed towards a possible cure.

"You OK?"

Joel quietly replied with a half-hearted 'yeah', whilst staring at the blood-stained tissue. I couldn't tell whether he was fascinated by its gore or revolted. Sometimes, boys never gave the game away.

"So," Joel said, once the bloody tissue had bored him, "do you like my idea or not? You don't seem awfully enthusiastic about it."

Um, had Joel suddenly contracted myopia and had become short-sighted to what was clearly laid out in front of him? Sure, our discussion - which might or might not have finished just yet - may have been genial enough towards the end, but it totally didn't suggest that I wanted to set up camp with him - even in a glorious meadow like this - for a whole night. Despite airing my opinionated views and flatly pointing out his wrongs, Joel was still deluded like a brain-eating zombie, preferably one which starred as an extra in Shaun of the Dead.

"Well," I began, fully aware of keeping Luke's closer-than-Joel-thought presence in the dark, "I intended to camp here by mys-" but I never managed to finish my sentence as an echoing yell trilled through the forest, his voice recognizable.

Luke.

"Who the hell is yelling?" Joel wondered, turning his head around to the gate, where the frantic shout appeared to be originating from. "I think he is saying - wait a moment, is that your boyfriend calling your name?"

I recoiled in horror, cringing uneasily. Whilst relief washed through me like a cool glass of a milk, at the same time I didn't want Luke to meet Joel, as I'd pretended that I had been camping all by myself, therefore spawning more lies and hassle.

Did anyone, apart from myself, listen to their gut instinct?

Chapter 16

His yells becoming less frequent, Luke bounded towards the gate, his heartfelt eyes resting on my lazily sitting on the grass, a scowl mocking his Nivea-soft lips. He quickly unfastened the lock on the gate, then strode into the meadow without bothering to shut the gate or look back behind him.

"Sadie, who is this?" Luke asked me, his hands flying into a gesture pointed towards a taken by surprise Joel.

Looking the other way from Joel's domineering glare, which was as sharp as a burning laser beam, I turned my attention to a red-faced Luke - with no relation to humiliating embarrassment, simply running as quickly as gone-in-a-blur Usain Bolt - and replied, "Joel," rather awkwardly.

Breathing deeply, a frown - completely unnatural for his light-hearted, care-free features - still persisted on Luke's expression, which made me terror-stricken. Not only had I casually hidden the fact that my boyfriend was also spending the weekend camping with me to Joel, Luke probably had gathered some wacky ideas from witnessing Joel and I's amiable acquaintance. Really, if the thought had occurred to Joel to bring some scotch eggs and I made some mayo-free sandwiches alongside a couple of bottles of ginger beer (the only beer that my parents gave me the go-ahead to get, even though the bitter flavour exploded in my shocked-stiff taste buds and was alcohol-free), both of us could have enjoyed an evening picnic, avec slowly-appearing stars and canarying birds. What was my boyfriend - and so-called ex - supposed to believe?

"Um, what have you two been doing?" Luke inquired, in an unusual stiff manner. "You seem pretty comfy on the grass over there."

Luke couldn't have been further from the truth. As much as I attempted to ignore it, the daisies that I was sitting on - I had no other choice because the vividly bright flowers had covered the entire lot of grass, a spectacular display to lay my eyes upon - had created an unbearable itch which encouraged me to scratch my bare ankle with my spiky set of manicured nails, eventually  turning the sensitive area of skin a sore shade of lobster red.

Still, unlike a man who is begging for pity whenever he contracts a cold, a woman - or girl, in my case, as my shocking selection of turquoise eye shadows confirmed - must bit her tongue or Rimmel-glossy lips in urgent times. Or did it honestly matter?

"Just sorting out our differences," I stated, truthfully. "It has taken a while, but I think we're getting somewhere."

Joel grimaced, his face expressing his hidden desires to return to the loud, hot park with hot-as-cherry-pie Kate, kissing her irresistible lips with absolutely no fears of a crazy, non-Converse wearing teenage girl gazing sadly behind an overgrown bush. Possibly.

"Maybe we were getting somewhere before your boyfriend turned up out of the blue," Joel pointed out, scornfully. "Did you know he was here?"

My ankle, which I couldn't bring myself to stop scratching roughly, wasn't going to forgive me for this until Cassie chucked me her reserved bottle of soothing aloe vera gel once I burst through the doors at home sweet home. Uh oh. "Yes, I did," I admitted, swallowing a lingering taste of lost pride, "as he came with me."

Joel inhaled a breath, pondering intensely over my confession, whilst I awkwardly pulled myself up from the daisies, all of which sadly looked as squashed as a run-over squirrel. Or wrinkle-covered sofa after its sitter had endured a stomach-bloating Christmas dinner.

"You're utterly nuts, Sadie Thompson," Joel breathed, disdainful scorn the main bittersweet flavour of his words. "I thought this was between you and me - why bother bringing your boyfriend -" he declared the word in doubt, provoking a rush of blood to my flushing face "- into it?"

No way was I going to allow Joel to question my motives when his - given without a valuable explanation or true apology - were the ones I originally doubted in the first place.

Neither was Luke prepared for that, too.

"Sadie only brought me into the equation after I saw the damage you had created for her," Luke spoke up, moving nearer towards my grain-stained self, his loving twinkle re-emerging in his chocolate-melting eyes, "and that only occurred a few days ago, so can you possibly imagine how much pain she had been storing inside her head, revealing barely anything to anybody?"

"Actually, I did have heart-to-hearts with my sister and mum," I specified to Luke, under my breath. "Even my sock-loving cat knows more about my heartache than Joel does."

Raising his eyebrows amusingly at the prospect of a half-insane cat - who collects more socks than I do with vintage scarves - becoming my unqualified therapist in the comfort of my own bedroom, Luke grasped my hand, wrapping his large fingers around mine like an entwined bow. Preferably the colour red in order to match my lively cherry-shaded t-shirt.

"How was I supposed to be aware of that?" Joel shot back, placing his defensive armour over his casual suit of a plain white tee and indigo blue jeans. "In case you hadn't noticed, Sadie has been very vague about her feelings, haven't you?" directing his imperious question in my direction.

"She has been vague purely to protect others surrounding her," Luke responded, never once letting unsurprised rage go to his head, "though at times it has been unavoidable to release those feelings, right, Say?"

Enfin! A decent nickname that I utterly adored! Er, what was the question, might I ask?

A nod, served alongside a half-smile (obviously not being offered to Joel), seemed the ideal response, therefore avoiding an outburst of flooding tears as I tried to express the misery that Joel had struck upon me.

"Don't you see, Joel - Sadie has gone to hell and back because of you. Are you blind to realizing your mistakes?"

"No, I'm not!" Joel roared, flying completing off the handle. His yell scared away the tweeting family of birds enjoying their version of karaoke high above on a nearby tree, their wings fluttering loudly as they prepared for take-off and fly away into the near-night time sky.

Throwing his hands into the mop of hair I once dreamt of touching and running through my fingers, Joel sighed and groaned like an irritated King Kong, his moan turning the air ice-cold. "I think I've explained enough to Sadie about what happened, so I don't need your unnecessary pep talk, Luke, because I've had it."

Catching on to the fact that Joel was heading on the journey to all-sirens boiling point, Luke took a step back and gestured to me to sort out the dilemma, which was quite frankly giving me a headache that even a spoonful of strawberry-heaven Calpol was immune to diminishing.

"Joel, I'll admit it, I'm sorry about lying to you," I said, "but I only felt inclined to do so because Luke gives me a sense of safety and security that spurs me on to carry on when it all else appears utterly impossible." I shrugged. "That's love is all about, right?"

"Sure is, Sadie," Joel agreed, solemnly, then added, "I owe you a mega large apology in return, too, which I ought to have made a long time ago." He frowned, sadly. "Not being able to think straight nearly cost me my relationship with Kate and caused so much trouble for you - I'm guess that I'm not too great with love, am I?"

"In certain ways, you can be the best person in the world, but yeah, you do kinda have your moments of weakness, which I guess is part of human nature," I admitted, purposefully including a spirit-raising compliment.

His short-lived sullen behaviour quickly vanishing into the peach coloured sky, Joel grinned that once heavenly-perfect smile which I dreamt of his offering to me, yet no longer set off a stream of fireworks inside my spellbound mind or created a wave of butterflies - high on ecstatic thrills and a heart-pounding fire racing through my body - manically fluttering, sending me into a state of semi-shock. Realization had given me the answer on my heart's whereabouts - and it was lying happily in Luke's hands, cradling me as gently as my instincts had always been crying out for. Home was nearer to me than I'd ever believed - what else could I have asked for?