‘These things happen. He’s young. He’ll get over it.’ She placed her hand on the banister, lightly drumming her slender fingers. ‘How would you and Aaron feel about coming to a party on Friday evening?’
Whoosh – she took me by surprise, grabbed back the upper hand. ‘At New Dawn?’
‘Where else? Jean-Luc is going back to Paris – he said he told you. So this will be his leaving party. We’re combining it with Papa’s fiftieth birthday.’
‘Cool,’ I murmured. I was on tenterhooks, listening out for and dreading the slightest sound from Jarrold. ‘Can I bring Grace and Jude?’
‘It’s open house so please bring as many friends as you like,’ she said with a smile. She gave the banister a final tap. ‘I’m going to miss my twin brother so I want all his friends to be there – to make this party very special for him. You’ll come, I hope?’
‘For sure.’ Leave, please leave! I prayed that she’d believed what I’d said, that Jarrold would stay hidden until she and her car were well out of sight.
‘So if Jarrold does try to contact you …’
‘I’ll let you know!’
‘Good.’ She gave me the mwah-mwah double kiss and another burst of perfume. ‘Au revoir, Tania – until tomorrow night.’
I closed the door behind her and raced upstairs. I flung open my bedroom door. There was a note on the bed but no Jarrold – only an open window with the drapes blowing in the breeze.
T, you know how I feel about you, the note said. I love you and I can’t be without you – J x
13
‘What did I do?’ I begged Grace to tell me. ‘I get this note and I don’t know what I did to make it happen.’
‘Show me,’ she said quietly.
I handed her Jarrold’s message written on a yellow Post-it in a surprisingly even, flowing hand.
‘“I love you and I can’t be without you”,’ she read. She turned the paper over, examined the sticky strip on the back, turned it over again.
‘How did that happen?’ I sighed.
We were in Grace’s big, open-plan kitchen with maybe ten minutes to spare before Jude and Aaron showed up.
Grace got me a glass of iced water and sat me down at the breakfast bar. ‘I have to tell you something, Tania. Knowing you, it’s probably not anything you did – OK?’
‘I gave out the wrong signals,’ I argued. ‘Guys don’t write love letters unless they get the idea you want them to.’
‘Sometimes they do. They’re blind, or else they misread the signals. Sometimes they’re just psychos.’
Ignoring this last remark, I blundered on. ‘I did tell Jarrold about Orlando, or I tried to. We were together at the triathlon. Jarrold knows I’m not—’
‘Available?’ Grace interrupted. ‘But that won’t always stop psycho-boy. What seeing Orlando on Saturday did in Jarrold’s mind was turn the whole of life into a competition where you’re the prize. He’s the type who has to be a winner.’
‘I let him kiss me,’ I confessed, my lip trembling.
‘Yeah?’ She gave me a long look. ‘The same way you invited him into your house, into your bedroom while you took a shower?’
‘No way! You know I wouldn’t do that.’
‘Exactly. So cut yourself a little slack, Tania. And remember, this is what they do.’
‘“They” meaning the dark angels?’
She nodded. ‘You’ve been here before. Last time it was super-cool Daniel with his party-organizing and his horse-whispering. OK, so Jarrold is a more macho version, but he’s basically out there to seduce you and pull you over to their side.’
‘I don’t know. I can’t figure it out.’
‘Believe me!’ Grace urged. ‘Throw the note in with the trash and forget about Jarrold – the kiss, the whole I-can’t-live-without-you histrionics, everything.’ The doorbell rang and she set off to answer it, but she stopped in the hallway. ‘You do want to forget about him, don’t you?’
I took a gulp of water then nodded. ‘Totally,’ I muttered. Even if she was wrong about Jarrold, I loved Orlando. To show her I meant what I said, I grabbed the note and screwed it into a ball.
I was checking my text messages while Grace brought Jude and Aaron into the kitchen. There was one from Mom, updating me on progress in her latest physical therapy session, another from Orlando saying he was worried about me after our latest Skype session and how we totally had to talk. He signed it with three kisses.
Come home! I thought. Be here now, by my side!
The third message was from Aurelie. ‘Sorry, I meant to tell you – theme for tomorrow’s party is Native American,’ it read. ‘No costume – no admittance. See you at seven thirty p.m.’
‘Note?’ Grace quickly checked with me as the boys took Cokes from the fridge.
‘In with the trash,’ I confirmed. If only I could screw my doubts and confusions into a ball and throw them away like the note. Or erase the words written on the small yellow page and now firmly lodged in my head. ‘T, you know how I feel about you …’
‘So I say we tell the Randles the whole story,’ Jude said as he sat beside me in his grey hooded jacket and black jeans. ‘As Holly’s parents they’re entitled to know what’s happening to their daughter out at New Dawn.’
‘Then what?’ Grace argued. She reminded us she of all people was in the best position to judge how Holly’s mind would be working right now. ‘Holly is convinced heart and soul that she wants to stay with the community and nobody, especially not her parents, can argue her out of it. Anyway, look what happened when mine tried.’
I remembered the Montroses’ doomed visit to Black Rock. They hadn’t even got beyond the security gate before Brancusi’s security team had used shotguns to blast the air out of their tyres. ‘I agree with Grace – I don’t think Mr and Mrs Randle can hack it.’
‘So let me try,’ Aaron said. ‘This time I promise I won’t break any laws, OK?’
I shook my head and turned to Jude for help. ‘He’s one guy,’ I pointed out. ‘And he doesn’t know what he’s up against.’
‘OK, dude, we have to sit down and figure this out.’ Jude’s analytical brain was what we needed right now. ‘Tania’s right – you’d have zero chance of getting Holly out of there by just knocking on their door: “Hey, we’re here to collect our buddy.” So how else can we make it happen?’
‘We could wait until tomorrow night.’ With a bad feeling screwing up the pit of my stomach, I threw in the new factor that changed the whole equation.
‘Why? What’s happening tomorrow night?’ Grace spoke and all three looked to me to clear up the mystery.
‘A party. To celebrate Amos’s fiftieth birthday and Jean-Luc’s leaving.’
‘You have an invite?’ Jude asked.
‘Me and you, Aaron,’ I confirmed. ‘In fact, Aurelie said to bring as many friends as I liked.’
I hear the drumming of a hundred hooves over dry earth, a cloud of dust, buffalos with heads down and galloping, driven to the cliff top, kettled and forced over the edge. Running in blind panic, falling to their deaths.
‘No, forget that,’ I said to Grace, Jude and Aaron as my skin suddenly began to crawl. ‘It’s a really bad idea. I don’t think we should go.’
It’s like forest fire – set a spark to dry grass and let the wind get at it, drop one single cigarette butt in a fire hazard area and the whole mountainside goes up in flames – shrubs, thorn bushes, junipers, pinon pines.
‘We’re going to the party,’ Aaron had decided. Like a force of nature, he’d dragged the time and place out of me, made the others promise to be there too.
‘Then what?’ Jude had asked, always the cautious one, the planner.
‘Then we hijack Holly out of there. No talkie-talkie-nicey-nicey, no trying to persuade her – we just grab her and get her out.’
‘Yeah, right,’ Grace had sighed. How many X-Men movies had Aaron watched lately, she’d wanted to know.
‘So what’s your idea?
’ he’d countered.
We didn’t have one, we’d admitted. It had to be the party – in the end we’d all agreed.
I drove home from Grace’s house with the buffalos still on my mind, competing for my attention with Jarrold on the run. I was in the usual inside-your-car bubble, cut off from what was going on in the streets, barely noticing a change of lights from green to red when I glanced in my mirror to see a guy on a Harley pull up behind me, way too close. His visor covered his face, but there was something familiar …
The lights changed, the Harley guy swerved wide and overtook me on the junction, glancing over his shoulder as he picked up speed.
‘Costume!’ Grace’s text reminded me after I’d driven up Becker Hill and pulled up in my drive. ‘You need to go Native American and if Orlando plans to come along, so does he!’
‘Will get on to it,’ I texted back with a pressure around my heart. It was only when I got inside the house and turned on the TV for background noise that I recognized the oppressive sensation. Call it reluctance about the party. Heighten that and it grows into dread. Yeah, big-time dread was what I felt.
The sun went down that night in a spectacular blaze of red. You could almost see it melt on to the black horizon.
I sat in the garden, comforted by the call of Zenaida in the tree above my head. She perched high up, raised her tail and ducked her head forward, shuffled her pink feet along the silver branch.
‘Jarrold – good or bad? Dark or light?’ I mused without expecting an answer. I tried Jude’s method of applying logic. I was thinking hard, building up the negative column. He’s New Dawn, so he has to be in with the dark angels. He’s arrogant, he keeps secrets. Grace called him a psycho and compared him with Brancusi’s henchman, Daniel, which makes him covert, manipulative, dangerous. Maybe he even killed a guy in the lake. Dark side – no contest. Zenaida sat on her branch puffing out her grey chest feathers to keep out the cold. She prepared for the night.
On the positive side, Jarrold had saved my life. This was a biggie. I recalled how he’d lowered himself down the sink hole, risked death to save me. He’d written me a note to say he loved me. Besides, it was clear from the start that Jarrold didn’t follow the New Dawn rules. He was an Outsider. And now he’d gone on the run.
Zenaida called softly through the falling darkness. The very last leaves fell from the aspen trees and settled around my feet.
‘That must mean he’s on our side,’ I murmured, looking up. Jarrold was a foot soldier for the angels of light.
There was silence from above.
‘Eat,’ Dad said. He’d made breakfast of blueberry pancakes before he set out for work. ‘Tania, you hear?’
‘Yeah, thanks but no thanks.’ My stomach was churning so badly that I would definitely throw up if I tried a single bite.
‘Too strung out?’ He took away the plate, tried me with a glass of milk instead.
‘All good when Orlando gets here,’ he promised. ‘How long now?’
‘A few hours.’
Dad picked up his car keys. ‘You’ll call me?’
I nodded.
‘I worry until I hear.’
‘I’ll text.’
‘All good,’ he said again as he left the house for Paloma Springs.
I filled in the gap before lunchtime by buying stuff from the art shop to create costumes for Friday’s party – beads, feathers, some soft suede material, fabric dyes, et cetera. Then I worked in the garage which Dad had converted into my studio, complete with easels and a large table where I stretched canvases and made silk-screen frames for printing. I played music as I worked – which is why I didn’t hear the sound of the motorbike coming up the hill and I only noticed my visitor when he was actually standing in the studio doorway, shiny black helmet under his arm.
‘Jarrold, don’t do that!’ I almost staggered under the weight of the shock when I finally saw him, recognized the broad face and square jaw, the Viking locks.
‘Did you get my note?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Stay where you are. Don’t come any closer.’
‘What I said is true,’ he insisted. ‘I can’t get you out of my mind, Tania. I had to come.’
‘Are you even listening to me?’ I’d been working with a craft knife and I kept it in my hand as I advanced towards him. ‘You can’t keep on showing up like this. Just turn round and leave.’
His gaze didn’t falter. ‘Give me a reason.’
‘One – I didn’t invite you. Two – I promised Aurelie I’d tell her where you were if I found out. Three – my boyfriend will be here any minute. How many reasons do you need?’
‘You didn’t give me the one that matters,’ he said, looking steadily at me and reaching out for the knife.
I glanced down at my hand, surprised it was there, not resisting when Jarrold took it from me and put it down beside his helmet on the table.
‘Tania, the only way I’d walk away and never come back is if you told me you didn’t love me.’
It happened again – he walked all over my reasons, trampled them into the dirt. He was standing close enough for me to read the passion in his eyes.
‘Tell me you don’t love me,’ he whispered.
I shaped the words, had them on the tip of my tongue, in spite of the way he drew me in and made my heart hammer, my palms sweat.
He didn’t wait for me to speak. He reached for me and put his arms around me. His lips were on mine. I felt his warm breath, his tongue, his fingertips on my cheek, his eyes searching my soul.
‘Say it!’ he whispered through smiling lips.
He was tall, strong. His physicality overpowered me.
He felt me submit. ‘You do love me, don’t you?’
A breeze blew in through the studio door. Over Jarrold’s shoulder I caught sight of two thin white trails from jet planes criss-crossing an immense blue sky, and in the garden a grey dove rose from a tree.
‘You have to go,’ I told Jarrold, somehow finding the strength to push him away though my skin, my lips, maybe my heart wanted him to stay.
His eyelids drooped, his thick lashes brushed my cheek as he pulled back.
‘This doesn’t alter anything,’ he said softly. ‘My feelings for you don’t change.’
‘Go,’ I sighed.
I couldn’t watch him leave, just turned away and heard his footsteps retreat. When I risked a glance over my shoulder, I saw that he’d left his helmet on the table. Instinctively I ran after him.
He stopped, waited.
‘You forgot this,’ I told him, handing over his helmet and watching the sudden glint of victory in his eyes fade.
He left, this time for real. He climbed on to his bike, started the engine, lurched from the sidewalk into the street, sped away.
Ten minutes later, Orlando’s truck pulled up in the space Jarrold had vacated.
We were in my room. I was lying on my bed, watching Orlando in the shower. His head was tilted back, he was turned away. His beautiful body glistened as white foam washed away. When he reached out of the cubicle for a towel, I was there to hand it to him.
He grinned then shook his head, spraying me with droplets from his wet hair.
‘Hey!’ I twisted the control to turn on fresh jets, pushed him back under the shower and let him drag me with him. Together we felt sharp needles prickle our skin. We kissed with wet lips, together again.
I was with Orlando, filled with warm joy, relief, thankfulness. The dread of my dark angel had eased.
‘I don’t know what happens inside my head,’ he confessed when we were dressed and sitting in the kitchen. ‘I just have to look at you and my brain turns to mush. All I want is you – I can never get enough.’
‘Mush – is that good or bad?’ The pizza in the oven smelled great. We were both hungry and totally happy. ‘It doesn’t sound good!’
‘It’s you’re fault – you’re so beautiful.’
‘So good.’ I decided with a smile. I took out the pizza, sliced it
and put it on the table.
‘Especially naked,’ he added with an exaggerated sigh.
‘I hear you.’ Leaning over his shoulder as I put down the plate, I kissed him.
‘So if we want to have a serious conversation we have to stay fully clothed.’
‘Seriously – do we have to?’
‘Eventually, I guess.’ We were both smiling and laughing, I was giving him small kisses on his cheek and neck.
‘So you think we should talk?’
‘You’re the one who texted to say that, remember.’
‘I was worried about you – about us,’ he said hesitantly. Then he stopped kissing me back and narrowed his eyes. ‘Should I be?’
‘I don’t know.’ I sighed as straight away I thought of Blondie always in the background when we Skyped and of Jarrold’s lips so recently on mine. Deflecting this last image, I turned it back on Orlando. ‘Should you?’
Orlando gave an irritated shake of his head. ‘We don’t need to do this.’
‘What don’t we need to do?’
‘Play these games. Don’t you see the pattern – we get close then we start to pick-pick-pick at each other. Why do we do that?’
‘I’m not picking.’ My stubborn shield was up. I wasn’t behaving well.
‘OK then. We put up barriers.’ He stood and walked out through French windows into the garden where the bare trees stood stark against a heavy grey sky. ‘We have to get through this, Tania. We have to say what we really mean.’
Following him out, I stood beside him. I didn’t feel edgy or scared but for some reason incredibly sad. When he next looked at me I was crying.
‘I love you.’ He whispered our mantra as he pushed stray locks from my face. ‘And I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘For whatever it is I do.’
‘You don’t do anything. I do it to myself.’
‘When we’re not together I get incredibly insecure,’ he confessed. ‘That’s why I put too much pressure on you to come with me to Dallas.’
I was shocked. Why would this gorgeous guy feel this way? No way would you look at him and think Orlando was anything except gifted, confident, relaxed in his own skin. But love does this to a person – it makes you fly and fall, soar and plummet. ‘It’s OK, I understand.’