Chapter Thirty-Four
Ruby
Life takes on a routine that I follow, a monotonous constancy to keep my head in check: work, home, sleep. There’s a deep hole I keep tripping into when I’m not paying attention, but apart from that, I push on. The biggest thing that’s pissed me off is I can’t play right now. I’m so frustrated by life that even trying to hide myself in the colours of my music world won’t work. So when I get a midnight text from Jem asking to see me, after three weeks of silence, I’m angry and respond with a colourful version of that fury.
Jem doesn’t reply.
The one text is enough to tap into my brain, a searing pain forcing Jem back in. The nausea and twisted stomach, the unrelenting ache of being turned inside out at the loss of him, grips again.
This isn’t fair. Two weeks of dazed acceptance and a week of tentatively re-joining the world, my head finally disconnected from the idea I can have what nobody can, Jem Jones’s love. I won’t let him rip off the skin I’ve grown over the raw wound he caused.
A second text wakes me at two a.m. and when I squint at the phone, I see Jem’s name. A pang of worry over his not sleeping and what that indicates about his mental state pushes in momentarily, but I firmly shove it back out. Not my problem.
But as I close my eyes to go back to sleep, I can’t let the worry go. Images of Jem surrounded by broken glass, the first day I realised how shattered he was, won’t leave my head.
Swearing at my decision, I drag myself out of bed, dress, and head to my car.
November isn’t the best weather for hanging around the streets in the early hours. Luckily, I still have my key; I don’t know why I kept it. False hope? Deluded thoughts things would mend? Cautiously, I climb the stairs.
“Jem?”
For a horrible moment I think he’s been robbed, the lounge room is trashed. Sure, there’s half-empty pizza boxes and food wrappers strewn around, but more than that. A table lamp lies on the floor, bulb smashed and the glass table it once stood on is upside down. The large white cushions from the sofa are halfway across the room and glass picture frames are shattered. No, if he’d been robbed, the expensive sound system and TV wouldn’t be here, and neither would the rare guitar that’s survived amidst the chaos.
A noise alerts me from upstairs. The crash of something heavy as if thrown, loud enough I’m convinced whatever it is will fall through the ceiling. My heart sounds in my ears. What if this isn’t Jem? No, the front door was locked and I needed the key code for the secured gate. I creep up the polished wooden stairs and listen. Jem’s bedroom door is open. Hoping whoever it is, will be too distracted to see me, I peer around the door.
Jem’s room is as big as mess as the rest of the house, drawers knocked over, clothes scattered around, even his mattress is upended. The house is unrecognizable beneath the chaos.
A figure stands in the darkened room. Jem. He faces the window, staring at the closed curtains.
“What’s happening?” I ask him quietly.
He turns. In the shadows of the room, Jem’s face is hard to make out; but he looks confused, chest rising and falling rapidly. His hand shakes as he pushes it through his hair.
“Jem?”
“Why are you here?” he asks hoarsely.
“You asked me to come.”
“Did I? Oh.”
“I can go.”
“No!” He tempers his tone as I step back. “No. Don’t.”
I rest against the doorframe, the space between us a gulf filled with the unspoken. “What happened?”
“I think I broke something.” He gives a small laugh.
“This is a bit more than a broken glass in the kitchen, Jem.”
“Yeah. And I’m a bit more fucked.”
With those words, the crack in his voice, and the tired defeat, every fibre of me wants to cross the room to Jem, hold him, tell him I’m here. I’ve known Jem long enough to recognise the despair.
But he rejected me, doesn’t want me.
“Do you want me to call Bryn for you?”
Jem sits on the low windowsill. “No.”
“Then what? What did you want me for, before you forgot you asked me to come over?”
“In the kitchen.”
“What?”
“Go in the kitchen and do something.”
I rub my head; this man makes no sense as usual. “What? Make you a drink?”
“Shit!” Jem doubles over and wraps his arms around his head.
I freeze. He hasn’t, surely… Heading downstairs, I halt in the kitchen doorway. Glass from a broken bottle covers the floor and a strong smell of whisky accompanies the brown liquid seeping across the tiles.
Jem, you f-ucking idiot.
Glass crunches under my feet as I walk into the room. An empty tumbler rests on the counter and I smell the inside. Nothing. Maybe he didn’t. My first instinct is to clear this up. If Jem’s slipping, then the smell of alcohol won’t help. I pick up the largest parts of the broken glass and set them on the counter. I can’t do this. I don’t know how to help him right now. Stepping back out of the kitchen, I pull my phone from my pocket and search for Bryn’s number. Jem needs his friends, not me.
“Don’t call anyone.” Jem’s low voice comes from the doorway behind.
“Have you been drinking?” I demand.
“No!”
“So where’d the bottle come from?”
“I didn’t drink anything, but I was f-ucking close!”
Hesitantly, I move closer but there’s no alcohol smell on his breath. The curls hang into his reddened eyes; and in them, I see a suffering my heart can’t handle; something has really hurt Jem. I reach out and touch his hand, attempting to take Jem’s fingers in mine. When he snatches his hand away and tucks both beneath his arms, backing away, the rejection hurts as much as the day he told me to leave.
“So you want me here to babysit?” I say harshly. “Wasn’t Bryn available?”
“I didn’t try Bryn. I wanted to see you,” he says in a flat voice.
“Why?”
“Because you won’t judge. You won’t push. You’ll just be.”
“I’m not staying if you don’t tell me what’s going on. You can’t randomly contact me three weeks after breaking my heart, and then expect me to be okay with it.”
Jem rubs his temples. “Breaking your heart?”
“Of course, you f-ucking did!” His eyes widen. “Jem, just tell me what’s going on.”
He mumbles something in the direction of his feet and I huff and step closer. “What?”
“I saw my mum,” he tells his feet.
His simple words smack understanding into the situation around us. “When? What did she do?”
He ignores my response. “And she died yesterday.”
Jem’s despair washes over me, sweeping away the wall, and dragging my heart back to him on the tide. I’m on the verge of breaking down with Jem because this is something that would kill me too. Jem faces a resurrection of the past, heart ripped open for one last time by the person who failed him. My mum left once and forever. Jem’s did it multiple times, mending the wound then tearing it further open each time she did it again. I had Quinn. Jem was alone.
Jem’s alone now, struggling to swim against the tide of the memories he’d fought to keep away. In front of me, the devastation drowns him, he’s fighting his pull to relapsing; but he reached out – for me.
I have no words. I grab Jem’s stiff figure and bury my face into his chest, holding as tightly as I can. I want to give Jem some of my strength, help him cope.
Jem remains stiff. “Yeah. So that.”
“I didn’t know she’d been in touch with you.”
“No. Only Dylan knows.” He disentangles himself and rests against the wall, arms tightly crossed as if he never wants to let anybody in again. A bolt of realisation hits.
“Is she Marie? Was that who I was accusing you of cheating on me with?”
“Yeah.”
“Jem. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Couldn’t.”
“Why? I’d have helped, been there for you. I care about you more than you realise. I can’t stand to think you were going through that alone.”
He peers up at me from beneath his fringe. “It hurt. I didn’t want to go back there.”
“Back where?”
“To the guy who let someone in, and then got fucked over again.”
Every word he says adds more sense to the last few weeks but this isn’t the time to dig into there. “If you’ve finished destroying your house, will you sit and talk to me?” I ask gently.
For a moment, I think he’s going to tell me to leave again; that he’s closed down. “Jem, you asked me to come. There must be a reason.”
He nods and heads to the sofa, picking up the leather cushion and pushing it back onto the seat so he can sit. I turn the coffee table the right way up and perch on the edge.
In stilted terms, Jem gives me a bare minimum explanation about his mum’s illness, his decision to see her. Anxiety joins the words, his breath short, as he continues. I place a hand on his. “Don’t say more if you don’t want to talk. I understand now.”
“Do you? I don’t.”
“I understand that you’re stronger than you think. The broken bottle in the kitchen tells me that.”
His eyes darken. “Yeah. That was you.”
“It was broken when I got here, Jem.”
In a shift in mood that takes me by surprise, Jem grabs the side of my face, digging his fingers into my hair. “You stopped me. I had a choice - lose myself in that shit or lose myself to you. That’s why I called. I remember now.”
His grip hurts and I extricate his fingers. “That was a big ask after how you treated me.”
“But you came. I hurt you and you came. Why?”
“I honestly don’t know. Because I pictured this - you needing help and reaching out.”
Jem stares ahead. “I f-uck everything up.”
“No, you don’t, only the things you choose to.”
“I fucked us up. I didn’t want the pain.” He grips my hand. “That didn’t f-ucking work because the pain came anyway; and now when I need the good to deal with the bad, it’s not here. You’re not here.”
I shouldn’t be here. This goes against everything I promised myself; but the distress on this man’s face, the destroyed look I see in his eyes, is why. “I am.”
“Why?” he repeats.
“Because I can’t switch off how I feel about you. I can’t stop caring about the man who’s a mirror of me. If I can help you, then I know I can survive shit too when it’s my turn.”
“I fucked up.”
Jem’s not in a place to talk, like a child he’s seeking reassurance; but I doubt anything I can say will help. He needs what he always did; quiet understanding from somebody who cares. Jem can’t be alone with options that would set him careering into the past again.
“I’ll stay if you promise you’ll talk to someone tomorrow. Your counsellor or one of your friends, somebody you trust to help you through this. If I stay tonight, you don’t get to push this into the ‘not dealing’ part of your mind because it’ll never stay there.” I climb onto the sofa next to him.
“You, I can talk to you,” he says quietly.
“No, I can’t help with this. I’m in the middle of that screwed-up mess of hurt in your head. I’ll be a friend to you until you decide if you want more.”
Who am I kidding? I love this man. Why else would I be here? I’m risking so much and possibly for so little.
I take Jem’s hand; and for a few minutes, we sit side by side, but the waves of suffering coming from him are palpable. Giving in, I wrap my arms around Jem, and pull him close. Jem responds by gripping my hair, mouth crashing onto mine. He told the truth; he doesn’t taste of alcohol, but of a kiss that wraps around my soul and drags mine into his.
I recognise this urgency of Jem’s mouth, the sheer force of the desire rolling from him. With the kiss, comes Jem’s frantic need to fill the empty spaces inside, as if I’m the only one who can. But this is the man who emptied me and pushed me aside, and I don’t have the ability to give him what he’s crying out for now. One day, I will if that’s what he wants, and when he’s dealt with whatever is happening here. For now, I’ll lose myself too, in the illusion that the man with me now is my Jem.