For the first time ever, I ran away from Ryan that night. As soon as the words left his mouth, as soon as I felt the suffocating confusion, felt the panic rise with his name, I grabbed my iPhone and slammed out of the apartment.
Because that's all I ever did, right?
Don't ever want to think about it, don't ever want to face it ... take a drink, take a pill, have a line, find a stranger, find a soulmate. Anything but looking myself, my shadows, in the face and reaching into myself to ward them off. Fight or flight, all it ever boiled down to.
All I'd ever done was run.
I knew how pathetic I was, it didn't escape my notice, I curled my legs up under me, even now desperate to call Cayden.
I was sat on a bench in a quiet park on the outskirts of the city, darkness around me, the hustle and bustle of the streets behind the heavy oak trees was far, far away. Like it always was. I'd never really allowed myself to open up to anything, ever be a part of anything. Even my friendship with Ryan was designed to segregate me from the world around me; I found one person that was just as fucked up and broken as I was and clung to him. And in a way we clung to each other, because we both had this hurt, these demons, this past, and finding someone else that had been through that, well it was like you weren't broken into half the person that you used to be.
Because, while we held each other up, it felt like we were an army even though neither of us faced a fucking thing.
Because we couldn't even run away on our own.
Cayden made us both confront the fact.
For the first time, our solipsistic hedonism was cracked open as we both had to face that we were two different souls who both couldn't stay in this fucking purgatory that we were living in – both just escaping, running, because the only anchor that we had to real life was each other.
My brother was dead.
Cayden had cracked the bubble.
At least I thought he did, I hadn't even waited to find out, I knew that was what Ryan had been getting at.
And the Chelsea smile was basically a Gates' family trademark, for fucks sake – I think it was even invented by one of them, from what I'd picked up on in the Google searches, so it didn't take a genius – a psychopath, maybe, but not necessarily a genius!
I pulled up his number, this was too fucking much, I needed some answers.
"Hey, gorgeous," his smooth voice picked up on the second ring, "What's up?"
Did you kill my rapist prick of a big brother? Did you set my psychotic mother on a murderous, drug-fuelled rampage to find me? Did you tear apart the very tenuous foundations I'm standing on? And why?
Where do you even start to ask those questions? Why the hell did I not think about what I was going to say before I just pressed the call button? Just dived in expecting him to take the lead, like always, fuck I was a mess.
I look back sometimes, and realise how broken I was, then, how fucking lonely and damaged.
I was mumbling unintelligibly, just random bursts of air floating through the phone for at least a minute – the booming sounds coming through the phone quietened, so I knew he'd move somewhere more private – where the hell was he?
"Where are you babe?" I heard the engine start, then, and told him the name of the park quietly, before hanging up the call, praying for a backbone.
It was still running away, even if I had an Audi R8 as a chariot, and a gangster for a White Knight. I was a fucking joke.
I just sat there hugging my knees into my chest away from the cold night air, tears silently tracking down my cheeks, wondering when I was going to grow up and stop behaving like the ten year old child my big brother set out to destroy.
So that's how he found me, not ten minutes later, stroking errant strands of my hair from my damp cheeks as I looked up at him reverently, my heart shining out of my eyes, Mac mascara that I couldn't afford to be wasting smudging halfway down my face.
Neither of us said a word, I blindly took the hand he offered me as he walked me further into the darkness.
Cinderella had fuck all on me ... except where she got glass slippers I got Chelsea smiles.
*************************
There was just too much to sift through. In the hour since Cayden had dropped me off outside my apartment, everything had shifted out of its fragile balance.
Neither of us had said a word during the drive over to his place, I don't know to this day if he knew what Ryan had told me that night, it was as though he simply took over from the second I made that phone call.
He parked up and took my hand as he led me up to the apartment, the air fraught between us, he settled me into the sofa, grabbing a bottle of Jamesons out of the cupboard, ice from the dispenser on the fridge, two tumblers, and sat next to me.
It felt more like a thousand miles away.
He poured us out a few shots, resting back into his seat with a resigned sigh, looking out into the dimly lit room as he kicked out his legs in front of him, crossing his ankles. Waiting for me to say something. Anything.
"Did you fuck Lyla Rogers?"
I tried to make my voice cool, uninterested, like he could be. But I'm not built like he is, so it came out small, and croaky, and I reached for the whiskey to drown out he traces of tears I was still struggling to swallow.
He laughed quietly – a dark, humourless sound – and stared into his glass, twirling the amber liquid around the crystal thoughtfully.
"I haven't been able to so much as think of anyone else since the night I picked you up, and you fucking know it, so don't put that on me. I assume you're talking about the premier?" he looked across at me, his eyes so unreadable and hard, and I could only nod back at him, "My PR people set it up, she's heading up the campaign my Marketing department are running for Absolute Vodka, the details were announced in the business reports earlier that day – I posed for a few pictures because pictures," he sounded like he was spitting the word in disgust, "make it so much more sellable in print."
"Oh," I sipped my drink quietly, not really having another response. He seemed so far away from me at that moment that I didn't really know if it mattered anymore whether I believed him or not. His jaw was rigid – his whole body was, actually – and his eyes were focusing so hard on empty spaces on the barren walls that I knew he was intensely introspective, like he was reliving nightmares while he was wide awake. Like he didn't even know if I was still in the room with him or not.
"I can't believe you'd ask me that," he murmured, after the empty silences stretched out between us, "I can't believe, after everything, that this is where we are. Are you so determined to ruin this that you'll invent problems ..."
"Did you kill my brother?" I interrupted him then. But I was calm, because, God forgive me, I didn't really know how I felt about the fact that Alex was dead. I just wanted to hear it from Cayden.
"I told you," he said coolly, "I demand blood or money when I'm wronged. Six years inside didn't fall into either of those columns."
I suppose that was the day I really saw the darkness in him properly. I really saw it because it underscored every ice cold word he spoke. His face was so completely blank that it could have been carved out of stone.
My heart lurched, because I loved this man, with everything I had, I was willing to throw myself at his feet completely at his bidding, and yet he kept me out of most of his life. How fucking stupid did I have to be to love a man I barely even knew – a fucking gangster, no less. Maybe Ryan was half right. And yet, beneath it all, part of me couldn't deny that some of me felt a little lighter. Without his shadow, I could move on. Yes, I had my mother to contend with, but it felt as though I could somehow move through it. Cayden gave me that.
"At what cost to you?" I said quietly. Because it must have cost him something.
That surprised him, I saw it in the icy blue of his eyes as he swung his gaze around to me. It kind of surprised me too, maybe I was learning a thing or two from him, after all.
"That's not your concern, Jo," this felt like my Cayden – not the brickwork I'd been dealing with up to now, but still just as fucking evasive, sighing roughly through his words, "I just, I had to. I needed to give you your dreams back and this felt like the only way to me." I moved closer to him, laying my head into his lap. He pulled my hair out of the tie and ran his fingers through the strands, "How do you ... I mean ... shit I never thought this part of it through I guess, Jo."
I knew what he was asking, but I just shrugged, because I wasn't even sure I knew the answer to that myself.
How do you feel, Jodie?
Happy wasn't the right word .... But not sad. Grateful maybe? But yet, hating what Alex's abuse had driven Cayden to order as well. My mother weighed on my mind – Ryan's concern, Dr. Lyons too – but she felt smaller to me without my brother, somehow. What she offered was pretty much words, and it could fucking pierce through me like a Samurai sword, but it wasn't the threat of physical violence and torture that Alex presented. He was the real monster, and he was gone ...
I moved onto my back, looking up at his beautiful, tired features, my hand chasing through my hair to meet one of his and grip it. I gave him a sad, sad smile, wondering who the fuck this feeling – at this moment - actually made me.
"Free," I said quietly, "I feel free."