Chapter Thirty-Five
Ruby
Jem doesn’t sleep. He calmed after we kissed, pulled away, and held me tightly as if I’d change my mind and leave. How could I? Jem can’t be alone right now. I doze on the sofa as Jem repeatedly gets up and wanders around. When the sun filters through the curtains, I wake to find him attempting to straighten out some of the mess in the lounge.
“Do you have work today?” he asks, holding a broken lamp in his hand. The wild confusion held in his eyes last night has softened but the stress hasn’t left his face.
“Yeah. This afternoon.” I rub my bleary eyes. “I’ll go home when somebody else gets here. Have you called anyone yet?”
Jem says nothing, walking to the kitchen instead. Great… I follow. “Jem?”
The room still smells of alcohol but the glass has gone. “Not yet. It’s early.”
“It’s an excuse.” I drag my phone from my pocket. “Who do you want me to call? Bryn? Dylan?”
“Dylan.” He sinks against the bench. “I need coffee. You want some?”
“I’ll get it. Sit down.”
Jem nods and leaves. He’s compliant, definitely not back with us yet. I chat to Dylan briefly as I make coffee, tell him the minimum about last night, and ask him to come. He sounds surprised to hear from me. Yeah, I’m not entirely sure why I’m here either. I return to the lounge where Jem sits, chewing a nail, the way he does when he wants the nicotine his body misses. For the first time in months, I crave a smoke too. We worked on kicking our nicotine habit soon after we got together, which worked more easily than expected. Someone told me it was the endorphins from being in love that helped us break the addiction. You can imagine mine and Jem’s reaction to that.
Five months ago, I saw Jem Jones in a bar and I fought between the desire for his attention and the excitement he’d come to see the band. I was in a bad place; a fucked-up place that he gently eased me out of. Our lives entwined because of Ruby Riot and then because of the place inside we live. There’s a piece of Jem in his music that he shares with the world when the rest of the time he hides. I’m unsure if everybody sees this or whether he realises how much this pulls people to him. When Blue Phoenix’s music spoke to me as a teen, Jem was speaking to me too.
Did fate bring us together when we needed? Two broken people recognising each other’s demons and understanding how to begin to exorcise them? The man on the sofa, lost in the place he’d begun to drag himself out of, still has his demons. Jem can’t shake his as easily as I’m able. His have lived with him longer and he feeds them. Jem needs to sever them and live his own life again, not one full of pain from being strangled by a past that needs putting back where it should be.
“Dylan’s on his way. I’ll need to leave when he gets here.”
Jem looks up and his eyes tell me so much. Jem knows I’m here for him too; the suspicion I saw in his face the first time I tried to help him that night amongst the broken glass in the kitchen has gone. Nobody has looked at me in this way before. He sees through everything I have built around, looking straight into my heart.
The one he shattered.