Give Me Love

  Jared and Jessica had a much better ring to it. Their celebrity name would be Jarica, pretty in a sort of ghetto-ugly kinda way.

  “No,” he said, grabbing my hand back. “She died.”

  “Oh, Jared, I’m so sorry,” I blurted out, horrified at my insensitivity. “I can be such a thoughtless bitch sometimes. I’m sorry.” I gave his hand a squeeze.

  He squeezed back before letting go to rub his hands down the front of his jeans. “That’s okay. You didn’t know.”

  “What happened?”

  He picked his glass back up off the coffee table and sank into the navy leather couch, fiddling with the stem of the glass rather than taking a sip. “I met her when she moved to Sydney from Perth. Her dad had been relocated for work. She was only a little thing with short blonde hair and brown eyes, but she was trying out for our high school mixed soccer team anyway. I was inside the six yard box and going for a hat trick when she got in the way and the ball slammed into her jaw and sent her flying. I got ribbed for months after that, but it certainly got her attention,” he said with a chuckle. “She asked me out after I’d bruised her jaw all purple and green, said she liked my powerful inside curve kick.”

  I didn’t know anything about soccer, and for a brief, selfish moment, I felt jealous that this girl had shared something with Jared that I would likely never do.

  “Anyway, we’d been together for three years, and about two years after we started uni, she began acting strange. Not ringing or coming around as much, being secretive, taking phone calls in another room. At the time, we were so busy caught up in part time jobs, assignments, and group study, I didn’t think too much of it. Then a few months later, she started getting really sick: tonsillitis, constant infections, tired all the time. When she came down with pneumonia and was hospitalised, they diagnosed her with a rare type of leukaemia.” He paused to take a sip of wine and ran his fingers through his hair. “It progressed so bloody fast. Three months later they said there was nothing they could do for her, that she had anywhere from two to four months left, and sent her home. It was awful and I felt like I couldn’t do or say the right thing.”

  Tears filled my eyes at the pain in his voice, and I blinked them away, watching him rub a hand down his face. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to watch someone lose their life, right in front of your eyes, and know there was nothing you could do about it. Knowing the type of person Jared was, feeling useless would have cut him deeply.

  “Apparently, it was time for death bed confessions, and she admitted to sleeping with someone else,” he said bitterly. “Not just some one night stand either. This was a relationship that had been going on behind my back for a whole year and only ended when he moved away.”

  She cheated on him? On this man? Disbelief and anger were conflicting emotions, and I tried to keep my thoughts from travelling down the path where it was wrong to speak ill of the dead. Oh God, this was why he didn’t trust me! That hurt. It fucking hurt knowing I was paying for something she’d done. But then wasn’t Jared paying for the actions of others from my past? Did that mean it hurt him too? I didn’t know what to think, but I did know I wasn’t the only person in this relationship carrying scars on the inside.

  I took his hand back in mine, giving it another squeeze, encouraging him to finish.

  “I felt so fucking stupid. I still do to be honest, thinking back on it makes my insides feel all twisted. How could someone be such an idiot to not notice something like that going on for a whole year?”

  I shook my head in disagreement. “I think the question should be ‘Why was she such an idiot?' Did she ever say?”

  He nodded. “She tried to tell me she was in love with the both of us and how could she choose? What was I supposed to do, Evie, when she told me? Be the asshole boyfriend who dumped his girlfriend of three years when she had maybe two months left to live? How was I supposed to forgive that before she died? I couldn’t leave her, and I felt so angry and sad and fucking stuck. I couldn’t tell anyone either. How could I when she had so little time left? She died about three months later, and I felt like a heartless bastard at the funeral when all I could feel was anger because the past year and a half of my life had been a complete lie.”

  Leaning forward, I sat my drink down on the coffee table with a loud clank, and then I turned around and straddled his lap, running my palm gently down his cheek. “Jared, right until the end, you were with her. I can’t even imagine how it must have felt to do that, but I know you wouldn’t have forgiven yourself otherwise. Maybe she lost your respect for her actions, but you never lost respect for yourself.”

  He slid his arms around my waist and locked his eyes on mine. “Thank you, Evie. I know my past is no excuse for overreacting the other night and storming out on you, but for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. It’s just…” Jared paused and let out a shaky breath “…you mean so much, so much more than anyone ever has, and that’s fucking scary.”

  My throat grew tight at his words, and at that moment, my admiration and respect for Jared was immense. Shitty things happened to good people all the time, and it was how you dealt with it that mattered. Despite the emotional cost, Jared had acted with so much dignity and honour, it left me wondering what he saw in me. The way I’d dealt with the shitty things in my life was so very different. Jared knowing that my actions were disappointing and shameful was scary because then maybe I would lose his respect just like Jessica.

  “You mean a lot to me too, Jared, and your apology? Taking the time to explain something so painful just so I could understand your actions is worth more than you realise.” His eyes remained on mine as I spoke and I rested my hands on his chest and pressed a soft kiss on his lips before pulling back.

  “Jessica is part of your tattoo, isn’t she? A reminder about how being true to yourself is being true to others.”

  He nodded, breaking eye contact and turning his head to stare at the darkening sky through the window. “Part of it. I hated that I felt like our time together was a lie, but it also made me realise I didn’t love her like I thought I did. Not because of her actions, but before that. Maybe I just wanted to love her, and if I had been honest with myself and realised that, then maybe the whole shitty mess wouldn’t have happened.”

  “I think you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. Of course you loved her. Maybe not in the way you think you wanted to, or should have, but sometimes it’s hard to know what it’s in your heart.”

  At my words, his gaze returned to mine. “My mind knew, Evie. It just didn’t fucking tell me what I wanted to hear.” He hesitated. “Speaking of hearts….Are you going to tell me about Asshole Kellar now?”

  “I’d probably have to start with Wild Renny first,” I muttered.

  My stomach growled angrily, and I checked my watch to see that time had gotten away. Jared eyed my stomach before asking, “Wild Renny, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I replied with a heavy sigh, not in the least looking forward to reciprocating the sharing process. “Maybe you could feed me first?”

  “What would you like?” he muttered, staring at my lips.

  His fixation was getting me hot. “You, for starters.”

  The corners of his lips tilted up, and his green eyes glittered. “Yeah? I’m just the entrée? What’s the main course?”

  I squirmed on his lap. “Well…” I drawled out.

  “Wait,” he chuckled. “Let me guess, Mr. Chow’s?”

  I blinked at him in surprise. “How did you know?”

  He gave me an exasperated look. “Coby does happen to be one of my closest friends you know. He told me all about you and your Mr. Chow fetish.”

  “Yeah? Well who doesn’t have a Mr. Chow fetish? Besides, I heard all about the fetish the guy who works at Mr. Chow’s has for your ass,” I nodded knowingly.

  He tugged at the knot of hair at the nape of my neck so it unfolded down my back in a mass of waves. “Who doesn’t have a fetish for my ass?” he joked, his fingers threading through
my hair.

  Later, after dinner arrived, we sat at the solid oak dining table drinking iced tea and eating honeyed chicken with a side order of steamed dim sims, steamed vegetables, and rice.

  Jared pointed his chopsticks at me. “Wild Renny.” His eyes bore into me, prompting me to spill.

  I swallowed my mouthful of chicken, feeling my insides tie themselves in knots. “Right,” I mumbled, wondering how to begin.

  Jared knew my dad had disappeared and Mum died, but he didn’t know the full story, so that’s where I started, telling him how Ray had deserted us, Mum was always working hard, the car accident, and my party.

  “I don’t remember the months after Mum died much. You know that feeling you get when you’re just waking up? When you’re not quite conscious but you can feel your dreams slipping away? I felt like that. Constantly. That was when I met Lorenzo Rossi, or Renny.”

  I took a swallow of tea as Jared sat across the table, chewing thoughtfully and watching me as he listened.

  “He was the typical bad boy, eighteen, longish black hair, black eyes, tattoos, and a black Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle.”

  Jared nodded. “Sweet ride.”

  “I know, right? By that point I was starting to lose the surreal feeling, that dreamlike state I’d been drifting in, and that meant anger was slipping its way through. I didn’t like being angry. At the time, I didn’t realise it was perfectly normal to feel anger at a parent for dying and leaving you behind. I just knew that it was there and that I didn’t understand it. Being on the back of Renny’s motorcycle took me back to that dreamlike state, and going back there felt so good. It felt even better at night. I could tilt my head back and watch the stars, feel the wind in my hair and everything twisting around inside me would disappear.”

  I pushed the vegetables around on my plate a little to make it look like I was eating them. “Trouble was that being with Renny didn’t make anything better. It kinda got worse. The anger wouldn’t go away, and it was like the more I pushed at it, the stronger it got.” Tears worked their way from my throat, and I swallowed them back down. “It just wouldn’t let go, and I hated myself for it.”

  I took another sip of my drink to compose myself. “Renny introduced me to tequila, which at the time I thought made those night time motorcycle rides feel even better. Coby tried to pull me out of it, but he wasn’t a dad and he was dealing with losing Mum too. Nothing I ever did back then was fair to him. God, I knew the way I was acting was wrong. Even at the time I knew, but I couldn’t stop, and Renny made me feel so good after everything had left me feeling so bad. Six months of skipping school, disruptive behaviour, and drinking excessively ended on a four day drunken bender where it was all I could do to remember my own name. Coby and Henry had tried ringing and messaging constantly, but I didn’t even notice, and my phone eventually died. The bender finished with an evening motorcycle ride down Melbourne’s Highway 31, tequila bottle in one hand, the other wrapped around Renny. When I felt the bike swerve I was suddenly airborne…” Jared closed his eyes as though to brace himself “…and while I don’t remember anything after that, the accident investigation report suggested Renny simply went off the road. I was lucky, Jared, that I actually woke up in a hospital. Lucky to be alive. Renny managed to walk away, and he did it so well that he checked out of the hospital the next day without even a backward glance.”

  Ray leaving, Mum dying, and then knowing Renny walked away so easily had hurt like nothing I could ever imagine. I swallowed the feelings of abandonment the memories still managed to evoke.

  “Well that wasn’t the end of it. Social services turned up and put Coby through the wringer because he was my guardian and supposed to be looking after me. So he almost lost me twice. That’s just how twisted and selfish I can really be.”

  “Fucking hell,” Jared muttered. I chanced a glance to see he’d stopped eating. His elbows were on the table as he held his hands together, resting them against his forehead as he stared at his plate.

  When he looked up to see me watching him, I expected to see disgust in his eyes for my actions, but all I saw was sadness in his pained expression.

  “Evie, baby, you were so young and going through so much. How can you expect yourself to have known how to deal with something like that on your own? I would think acting out is normal, maybe not as wildly as you did, but you didn’t have the support network there that so many people have. Don’t blame yourself anymore for how you acted, okay? The main thing is that you came out the other side, and I have you now.” He smiled to reassure me.

  “Maybe,” I murmured.

  “Though I’m not sure my heart can take hearing any more,” he muttered.

  “Well I haven’t got to Asshole Kellar yet,” I pointed out.

  He stood up and made for the kitchen. “I know. I think I’m gonna be needing another drink first. A real one. Beer?”

  I shook my head and Jared got a beer out for himself and topped up the iced tea in my glass. Before sitting back down, he leaned over and pressed his lips to mine, coaxing me with his tongue until I opened my mouth to let him inside. The kiss was sweet and soothing and nothing like the hard and fiery ones we shared earlier.

  “Okay,” he said after pulling away, and sat back down, picking up his beer. “Sock it to me.”

  “James Kellar was a drug pusher.” I was all for ripping off the bandaid this time. He did ask me to sock it to him after all. Jared winced and downed a huge swallow of beer. “Not that I knew that at the time,” I added hurriedly. I was trying to pull myself together after Renny, and I didn’t want Jared to think I was deliberately turning to harder, more mind numbing endeavours.

  “He was older, twenty-five to my eighteen. I thought he was such an improvement over Renny, different, and he really looked to have it together. I was trying hard to make an effort. I stopped drinking except on weekends, improved my grades at school, and was finally dealing properly with losing Mum, so I thought maybe I was capable of making better choices. Kellar had plenty of friends and owned his own house. He had a beautiful car, a 1967 Shelby Mustang in gun metal grey with these big black racing stripes. He loved that car like it was his baby. Looking back I think I loved it more than him too.” I tried to lighten the moment, but Jared didn’t look amused so I hurried on. “Well I didn’t know it at the time, which was really stupid, but I didn’t know anything about drugs, that he was slipping pills now and then in my drink. I thought I was just getting tipsy because I’d lost my alcohol tolerance. It wasn’t until later when I thought about it that I realised I hadn’t been drinking all that much, just maybe one drink, two if I was lucky.”

  “Fucking hell, Evie,” Jared bit out. “The house, the car, the people constantly coming and going... How obvious did it need to be?”

  “Jared, I was eighteen and I’d never been exposed to that level of the drug chain before. Despite all the wild, stupid things I’ve done, drugs are actually something I’ve never touched, so how would I know? You’re trained to see this kind of thing.” I actually didn’t have a clue if he was trained to see that kind of thing at all, but it sounded good.

  He relaxed his clenched hands. “Shit. Sorry, it just pisses me off that he did this to you.”

  “You and me both. So one night we were having a party and there was a raid on his house. Unfortunately, whatever he’d slipped into my drink that night was particularly strong and thank God for the raid because the cops found me climbing up the third balcony railing in an attempt to fly and caught me before I went over.”

  Jared’s golden skin went sheet white, and he held up his hand to indicate he needed a moment. “Please tell me they caught the asshole?”

  He closed his eyes in relief when I nodded.

  “But not before I watched him squeal out of the driveway in hail of gravel and gunfire like a really bad James Bond movie. I’d like to say that was the last I saw of him, but the police came by several times, and I had to testify against him in court.”

  Jar
ed stood up and took our plates to the sink as he spoke. “So both of these two bastards broke your heart and almost got you killed and now...”

  He trailed off into silence, as though lost in his own thoughts.

  “And now?” I prompted.

  “Now I…”

  I got up from the table and moved into the kitchen, frowning when he didn’t meet my eyes. “Now you what, Jared?”

  He leaned up against the kitchen bench and folded his arms, wincing as he rubbed at his chin. “Nothing, baby.” He unfolded his arms and reached for me, pulling me close. “I’m just glad you’re safe.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  After leaving Jared's loft the next morning, my health took a fast downhill slide by the time I reached the driveway of our duplex. In light of Jimmy, he followed me home in his car, and after waving him off, I weaved unsteadily into the house and promptly sent him a message.

  E: Dying. Was it an attempt on our lives by Mr. Chow or are you ok?

  J: Baby, I’m fine. Want me to take you to the doctors?

  Of course he was fine. Mr. Chow’s manager probably slipped something in the food that somehow only killed off females, thus removing me from the equation and allowing him to make his move.

  E: No. Thanks though. Will see how I am later.

  Jared had left this morning for what he said was a busy day, no doubt interrogating suspicious witnesses with his unwavering stare and coordinating million dollar ransom drop offs. I wasn’t going to interfere in that.

  Mac and Henry still asleep left me free to hit the shower and towelling off, I promptly found myself either about to lose my entire stomach to the bowels of the toilet or die. Dying, at that point, seemed the much preferable option.

  Henry banged on the bathroom door. “Evie, are you okay?”

  “Peachy,” I called back feebly and curled myself into a ball in the bathtub, hesitant of venturing too far from the toilet that was now my new best friend.