Wildflowers (3 page)

One-night stands have never been my thing—they’re marginally better than masturbating. But I don’t want to go back to that room and lie awake, guilt eating away at me. I want to forget. I need to forget, even for just a minute of white noise—I’m not expecting stars.

I follow him to his room. He wasn’t lying about the coffee. He passes me a cup and I look around. It’s surprisingly neat and clean. Well, maybe not so surprising. I get the feeling he needs to be in control like me.

I wonder how this is going to play out.

“Where are you headed?” He sits down on the bed.

I remain standing even when he gestures for me to sit next to him. “A field,” I say. “Near the sea.” It sounds better than “we don’t know, we’re just driving aimlessly,” and in a way it’s true—we’re looking for our field of wildflowers.

“Well, you’re almost there. The sea, I mean. It’s only about twenty minutes away normally, except the main road has been closed since the accident.”

“Is there another road?”

He shakes his head.

“Is it going to be opened again soon?”

“I doubt it. The ground opened up, took a big section of road with it. Only one way in or out of town now.” He drains the last bit of coffee from his cup and places it on the dresser next to his bed. “I’m surprised you didn’t see the signs when you drove in.”

I put my half-finished coffee next to his and, without giving him a chance to preempt me, put my hand in the center of his chest and push him onto his back.

He looks startled but doesn’t fight me.

I climb on the bed and kneel over him. He grabs my shoulders and leans up as if to kiss me, but I shake my head and move out of his grasp. “You got condoms and lube?”

He nods, reaches to the side, and opens a small drawer. I’m actually a little surprised that despite all his posturing, he submitted so easily.

I don’t want to admit it, but part of me wanted a struggle, to placate that desperate need to prove myself that prowls around inside me like a hungry animal.

I flip him onto his stomach. I’m not in the mood for foreplay, and I certainly don’t want to see his face. He pulls his trousers down while I rip the foil packet with my teeth. My incisors are sharp. Joe used to say I looked like a vampire when I smiled. Surprisingly, I don’t lose my erection when I think of him.

Using my free hand, I stroke up Alex’s back under his shirt while I rub a generous amount of lube over my half-hard cock and then squeeze an even more generous amount into my hand.

He whimpers when I wrap my arm around his chest and bring him to his knees. I stroke his back again, gently, watching his body language. I don’t want to scare him. I want him to know he can trust me to stop.

Panting, he rests his head in his arms on the bed. I trace small circles over his lower back.

“You’ve done this before, right?” I ask him.

“You’re joking, right?” I smile. “Get on with it,” he groans.

I let my hand drop lower and lower down his spine, following the crease of skin between his cheeks until he gasps. I press my finger against his hole for a second. Then I coat it with lube and push inside. He’s still tense, resisting the invasion. I reach round and grasp his hardening cock and begin to pump it with long, slow strokes. Better. I slip my finger deeper and push a second one inside, making him squirm against me. Slowly I begin to fuck them in and out, adding more and more lube until he’s slick deep inside and pushing back against me, meeting each thrust. I add a third finger and then pull out.

“Come on,
please
,” he gasps.

I stroke myself a couple of times, enjoying the slicked-up feeling before I put the condom on. Then I rub myself against him, easing myself inside. He pushes back and makes a noise deep in his throat. I wrap my arm round his chest again and pull him upright. I need to feel some skin against mine. A warm body that’s not dying.

That’s not Sam.

Awkwardly, I shift him forward so that he can brace himself against the wall, and I pound into him, fucking him harder than I’ve fucked anyone in a long, long time. Distractedly I feel him come, but I can’t let go. I’m on the edge but I can’t go over. Something holds me back. I keep going, sweat-slicked and panting.

Then I just stop.

This has never happened to me before. Alex is shaking in my arms; harsh sobs are coming from his throat. Then I realize it’s me.

I’m the one fucking crying.

I pull out and grab my clothes. Alex stays braced against the wall, his head down, not looking at me.

“I’m sorry,” I say as I back out of the room. “I’m sorry.”

I realize too late that our room is directly opposite Alex’s. Sam would have heard everything. I think I’m going to throw up and I hurriedly pull on my clothes. Then I run down the stairs, remembering just in time that the kitchen door doesn’t have a lock, just an exit bar. I shove it open and empty my stomach in the alley behind the café.

The cold air feels wonderful against my skin. My legs give way beneath me, and I sink back against the doorframe. Yesterday morning I didn’t think anything could possibly get worse.

I was so wrong.

I’VE BEEN
sitting outside for hours, just staring at the night’s black clouds and the stars. I should be upstairs with Sam. There’s this little voice in my head telling me he’s dead, that I let him die alone, that I broke every promise I ever made to him. I know I’m crying. I’ve never felt like this before. If I had to name it, I would call it absolute despair.

I cannot move.

When Joe died, I didn’t cry, except in my sleep. We’d broken up months before he overdosed, and though we talked on the phone most days, I hadn’t seen him in weeks.

I had friends then, and I wallowed in their sympathy. I’d go round to their houses and while away the hours being passive and entertained, cooked for and comforted. Joe was a gaping hole, but they filled it, bandaged me up, fixed me until I was almost whole.

Sam is a screaming fucking void. I can’t deal with it. I think I’m losing my mind.

It wasn’t shock I felt when three weeks ago Sam walked into the library where I worked, but it was more as if the past four years just vanished and we were back standing on that dark road outside the commune, neither of us wanting to say good-bye.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

I don’t know what’s wrong with Sam either—in every sense.

The library was busy when he wandered in. I was in the middle of a shift. Sam wavered on his feet when he saw me, looking like he was about to collapse in front of the reception desk. As soon as I got myself together and took him outside, his knees gave way and he really did collapse. I caught him before he hit the ground. Collette, my manager, followed us. She told me to take a break, to take as long as I needed.

I remember the sun was shining when he told me he was dying and didn’t want to be alone. When I asked him what was wrong, he told me it was what his mother had died from. He told me he knew he didn’t have long—he told me he could feel himself fading.

I remember feeling the world around me darken as if I was closing up, shutting down. Damage control, I guess. But perhaps it was already too late for that. Perhaps this whole mess had begun a long, long time ago.

PERHAPS IT
all began the very first time I saw Sam four years ago, the day we moved in to the commune. He was running from something then too.

Joe and I had answered an ad in the paper, for farmhands: free accommodation and free food in return for helping to bring in the harvest. We were two months behind on the rent on our bedsit in the city, both of us in minimum-wage jobs we hated. Being outside all day, living with a group of people on a farm near the sea… it all sounded pretty idyllic.

The farm was owned by two brothers, Tyler and Tom. They were both big men, impressively so.

Tom showed us round the farm and introduced us to the twenty-or-so other farmhands—men and women, but mostly men—and took us to the field with a long, low building divided up into dormitories. There was a small caravan at the end of the field, far away from the building.

We were in our room and starting to get settled when we heard shouting outside. A group had gathered. At first I couldn’t see what was going on, so I moved round to the side and was knocked flat on my back when a dark-haired boy barreled into me. He was all arms and legs, struggling to get up and away from me as if he thought I was going to hurt him. Instinctively I held on to him. One of the other farmhands, a blond guy, stood over me and hauled him off.

“Fucker,” he said and flung the boy to the ground as if he were a bag of rubbish.

I scrambled up and watched him kick the boy cowering on the ground.

“Creepy little shit,” he said as he aimed another kick, but I knocked him off-balance before his foot could connect.

The boy was up and gone without a backward glance.

Joe pulled me back into his arms before I could punch the blond guy.

“What the fuck is going on?” I said through gritted teeth.

“Calm down,” Joe whispered against my ear.

We were the strangers in this place and picking a fight was not a sensible move. But I couldn’t calm down. “He was just a kid, where do you get off kicking the shit out of a kid?”

The blond guy just sneered at me. He had no intention of fighting me. “He put a dead bird in my bed. He’s a fucking creepy little shit,” he said as he pushed past us into the dorms.

Across the field I saw the boy turn—his pale face surrounded by a mass of black hair, his clothes torn and dark. And as I watched him, it was as if I was remembering something I had always known but never acknowledged.

THE SKY
is beginning to lighten as I slip back inside and make my way up the stairs to our room at the café.

Sam is alive and asleep. But this is no longer just about him, I think as I curl up on the floor behind him and pull his warm body into my arms.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper into his hair. “I’ll do it if you want. I’ll be with you.”

I know he’s awake now, but he doesn’t respond.

JOE USED
to say some people were destined to be together, but I never believed in destiny.

I never really understood love either. Until the commune.

It’s only now I can admit that. Now that Joe is gone. I was a coward for not being honest with him about my feelings at the time—how when I was with him, it was nothing like what I felt when I was with Sam. I should have trusted my heart when I had the chance. Now it’s too late. Now everything is fucked.

When I close my eyes, I fall into a fitful sleep. I dream of the past. I dream of what haunts me: Sam standing in the dark road outside the commune on the night we left all those years ago, and me in the passenger seat of a car driving past him, driving away.

My drinking had become a problem, and Joe was unhappy. One night, when my guilt was at its worst, he convinced me that leaving the commune was the right thing to do. And so we left.

He thought the commune was the problem. He wanted to drive as far from it as he could. Back to the city, where our relationship would only last a few more turbulent months before Joe finally seemed to understand that my heart wasn’t in it.

But that night as we left, I watched in the car’s cracked rearview mirror as Sam dropped to his knees on the dark road as though felled by an act of violence. I saw him curl up there. I made myself look until the darkness swallowed him utterly, and I knew I’d broken something—something inside me, something inside him. Something irreparable.

The flashback turns into a nightmare where I get out of the car and try and run back to him, but I never make it—he always remains out of reach. The scene plays out over and over. I wake up shaking and crawl off the floor and onto the bed. Sam is sprawled next to the wall away from me, blankets forgotten. I bury my face in the mattress and try to calm my breathing.

All I left for him at the commune was a letter. And I hate that I wrote him a letter. He had my heart, and I wrote him a letter to say good-bye. I didn’t even know for sure that he could read.

In the letter I told him to come find me if he needed anything. I made a promise to help him and I meant it, but I was sure he wouldn’t. And yet three weeks ago, he did. He came to the library, and I told him I would uphold my promise.

Anything.

I’d given him my parents’ address on the letter—Joe and I had left the commune with no place to live back in the city and my parents had lived at their address forever. I guess that’s how he found me at the library. He’d never contacted me before.

I don’t know what happened at the commune in those past four years. I don’t even know why he was at the commune in the first place.

There is so much I haven’t asked him, figuring he’ll tell me when he’s ready if he wants me to know. But I haven’t told him about my life in those four years. I haven’t told him about Joe, and I would if he asked.

I MUST
drift off. When I wake, the room is cold. Blue morning light spills in through a gap in the curtains. I turn over to look at Sam, but I can’t see him. I sit up and stare at the jumble of clothes. He could barely walk yesterday—he can’t be far away. I check under the bed as I pull my shoes on, reining in the deep sense of unease now stalking me since my nightmare.

The place is silent. Alex’s door is shut, as is Simon’s at the end of the hall next to the bathroom. I move quietly, not wanting to wake either of them. I check the bathroom and then move on down the stairs.

Sam is in the café, slumped in a chair in front of the big window, looking as wilted as the aloe plant.

“Sam,” I call quietly, but he doesn’t move.

I pull up a chair and sit next to him, staring where he is staring, wondering if we are seeing entirely different things. “Want to go now?” I ask softly.

Barely perceptibly, he nods.