Waiting For You (7 page)

29 Feb 1996

Dear Evie,

Fuck, fuck, fuck… Shit, Evie, tonight was fucking awful. Really fucking awful.

Where are you, baby? Please.

I need to explain this. I need you to understand what happened tonight. Or what didn’t happen. Because nothing did. I promise you,
nothing
happened with her. NOTHING.

What you saw, what you walked in on, it wasn’t what you’re thinking. I don’t even like her, and more than that, I’d never do anything to hurt you. Ever. Because I love you…I love you, baby…so fucking much.

Please Evie, where are you?

I’m so drunk right now and none of this is making any sense. The only thing I do know is I miss you, and I love you, and I want you back.

I want you back, Eva.

Please come back… I love you.

Please…

I watch as she reads it quickly, her eyes moving rapidly over the page as though the faster she reads it, the faster this will all be over.

I kinda know how she feels, but I also know there’s still a lot more to come too.

“You okay?” I ask wrapping my arm around her shoulder and pulling her against me.

“Can we just keep going?” Evie asks, her voice quiet as she stares at the paper in her hands, not looking at me. “I just want to get this part over and done with.”

I reach for the box of letters, grabbing several of them as I check to see which one’s next.

“Yeah,” I say, resting my cheek on the top of her head. “I don’t want to hang around this time for too long either.”

Evie lets out a deep breath as she finishes off her wine and unfolds the next letter, which is several pages of barely legible scrawl.

None of this is going to be good.

29 Feb 1996

Dear Evie,

God, I’ve just woken up. I’ve just woken up and found myself stuck in this same fucking nightmare. It hasn’t gone away and you haven’t come back.

And everything has gone to shit. Everything is so fucked up right now.

I just read what I attempted to write last night, or some time this morning anyway. I was drunk and pissed off and hurting. And I know that it makes no sense and it doesn’t explain anything, so I’m going to try and explain it to you, Evie. Because I want you to understand, I want you to know that I didn’t do anything, that I would never do anything to hurt you. I want you to know how much I love you, Evie. How much I miss you right now.

I’d give anything to be able to get another day with you. Just one day so we could fix all of this before you forget me. Because more than anything, I don’t want you to wake up, get your trigger and then remember all of this and know we never fixed it. I can’t have that be your last memory of us, Evie. I mean we never fight and now, the first time we do, it has to happen on this day, on the day you disappear and I have to wait for you to come back to me, not knowing if you’re actually going to. Especially after what you saw last night.

I’ve never hated what happens to you as much as I do right now.

Ok, I have to get this out. I have to tell you what really happened last night. Bear with me, because this might take a bit.

Sometime around eleven is when I think this whole shit storm started. You were talking to Lily, and I was in the kitchen trying to rescue the bottle of Jack from Rachel. She shouldn’t have been drinking and even though Mum and Dad weren’t around, there was no way I was letting my baby sister get blind drunk like I could see she was trying to do. At least if I could help it anyway. Paul was in there with me, but he was getting more drinks for us and wasn’t paying attention. And that’s when she came in.

I swear, I don’t even know her name. Kate, Katie, something? I don’t know, Evie, because I don’t fucking care. I don’t care about her or her name or anything about her, at all.

What I do remember is that I was pulling the bottle from Rach’s hands at the same time she was trying to pull it from mine. We were standing by the back door and this girl, Katie or whoever the fuck she is, walks over and slides an arm around my waist and puts her other hand on the bottle. She looks right at me and says, “Come on, one more won’t hurt.”

And you know what I did? I freaked out. Then I yanked the bottle out of their hands, spilling half of it all over me, and I stepped away. I didn’t want this girl’s arm around my waist and I didn’t want her touching me. I was drunk, baby, I know that, but I wasn’t drunk enough that I didn’t realise how wrong it felt to have this girl put her arms around me. No one puts their arms around me, except you. It’s only you, Evie. You’re the only one I belong to.

So you know what I did then, I walked away. I grabbed my drink off the kitchen table and walked out of the room. I went upstairs to change my shirt. Well, I went upstairs looking for you too, hoping you could take it off me instead.

Only it turns out, it wasn’t my drink. It was Rachel’s. And Rachel had been drinking a lot more than I realised. The girl’s an idiot when it comes to mixing drinks. Either that or she was trying to sneak as much alcohol in as she possibly could. Because I’ll tell you something, her drink was lethal. I’m gonna estimate it was about 90% Jack and 10% Coke.

Now I know what you’re thinking. So what, it’s only one drink, right? And it was. But it was one drink on top of all the ones I’d already had. You know what it was like, we were all drunk last night. We were having a good time, weren’t we? Even though neither of us wanted to be at that party, with everything that we knew was going to happen at midnight, we did the right thing and we stayed. We stayed and we hung out with our friends, and we celebrated your birthday like any normal couple does. We had fun, Evie, and god knows, you and I are allowed to have fun sometimes, especially with all the shit we have to put up with.

But the problem was, Rachel’s drink pushed me that little bit further into really drunk. Not so much, that I didn’t know what I was doing, but enough that I was too slow to react, too slow to realise how fucked up a situation was getting.

Anyway, the point is, after all this went down, but before I actually realised I was moving into seriously drunk territory, I went looking for you. And I did this because even though I was drunk, I knew it wasn’t long till midnight. I knew we only had an hour left before you’d possibly disappear - did disappear - and I wanted to spend every second of that hour with you.

I remember looking around the living room. I remember looking out the front of the house, even though it was freezing. I’d just come from the kitchen, so I knew you weren’t there. You weren’t anywhere I could see you. And then in my drunken state, I had an epiphany.

I told myself that you were upstairs. That you were upstairs, waiting for me to find you, because it was that last hour together, right? We’d talked about it, about spending the last hour together after we’d agreed to stay at the party. And you know what, if Rachel hadn’t thrown this fucking surprise party because Mum and Dad were away in the first place, we’d have spent the whole night together in bed. You know that, don’t you? It would’ve been just you and me. And Eva, what you don’t know, what I should have insisted last night, is how much I wish we did do that. How much I wish we didn’t just say, screw the party and all these people, let’s just spend tonight together. But we both knew we couldn’t and we didn’t. We joined the party and we had a good time. Up until that last hour. That last hour when I wish I couldn’t just stop time, but reverse it too. Reverse it back to the start of the night and do everything so fucking different.

But I couldn’t. And I can’t.

So I did the only thing I could do, I climbed the stairs. Well, staggered up them was probably a more accurate description. But the point is, I went up there to find you, Evie. Only you.

I went into our room. The room you’ve been living with me in for the last 2 years. I knew you’d want this last hour with just the two of us. So I walked into my room, expecting to find you. I was pulling my shirt off at the same time, knowing we didn’t have much time. I wanted to be with you, Evie, one more time before you went. Maybe that sounds shallow, I don’t know, I don’t think so. I just wanted to be with you, show you how much I love you. I wanted you to remember me. I wanted to make last night so fucking amazing that there wasn’t a chance in hell you could ever wake up and forget me.

So, I started getting undressed, I knew you’d come in and find me, and when a pair of hands wrapped around me, I remember smiling because you had. But almost as soon as I thought that, I knew I was wrong. Because then, nails dug into me, lips that didn’t belong to you were at my ear and hot breath that wasn’t yours was whispering words that never would have come from your mouth. It was revolting, Evie, so fucking disgusting, that I instantly felt sick. But then when I heard your voice, when I heard you at the door, then I felt destroyed.

You screamed at me, you screamed, “I can’t believe you could do this to me.” And you know what, you were right. How the fuck could I do this? Not just let her touch me, but how could I let tonight happen at all. How could I let us, on our final night together, on your birthday, go to a stupid fucking party thrown by my sister that neither of us wanted to be at in the first place?

I can’t believe I did it either, Evie, and the only thing I can say to you is, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, baby…you have no idea how much I wish I could take this whole night back. How much I wish I’d said “no” to Rachel, or “let’s get out of here” to you.

I wish I’d wrapped myself around you and held you all fucking night, Evie, so you couldn’t possibly leave me.

God, I love you, baby. I love you and I miss you so fucking bad.

I don’t know what to do. I want to find you, because I need to explain this to you.

I just need to find you.

Please…

I love you… I love you.

There are tears streaming down her cheeks as she finishes the letter, her hands dropping into her lap as the paper falls to the floor. Neither of us picks it up, instead I wrap both of my arms around her and pull her close, pull her so she’s sitting in my lap. Evie buries her face in my neck and sobs, her lips pressed in a hard kiss against my skin as she cries and cries. She feels like she’s breaking, like she’s about to fall apart, her whole body shaking as I hold her in my arms and she lets it all out.

I know why she’s so upset.

It’s not so much about what happened that night, but more all the nights that came after it. All the nights we spent apart, so many of them when we didn’t need to. Evie didn’t remember me straightaway. I think it took her nearly two years to get the trigger that time, but even when she eventually did, she didn’t come back to me. She stayed away and didn’t bother to try and find me.

She was punishing me for that night and even though what she did hurt like fucking hell, a part of me could understand it. Well, not at first. I mean at first, I couldn’t understand any of it. Back then I went through every possible emotion; anger, betrayal, hurt, embarrassment, frustration. This lasted for years and turned me into a grumpy fucking prick too. I wasn’t really much fun to be around back then, and to be honest, I didn’t care. I’d lost the only thing that was important to me and I had no idea when I was getting her back, or
if
I was ever getting her back.

Paul tried to talk to me about it, a lot. But I could never tell him the full story, could never explain to him
exactly
what had happened that night. I don’t know how many times he used to tell me to just go to her, to find out where she was and just go and explain it all. I wanted to scream at him that I had no fucking idea where she was, much less whether she ever wanted to see me again. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t say anything.

Evie and I have talked about that night since then. Breaking my back in the fall at the warehouse and spending countless months in recovery will do that. And it helped too, being forced to talk to her about it all. Because as much as I was hurting in those four years we spent apart, for all the anger I had for her, now, I actually sort of get it. I get why she was so hurt because if I’d have had to see what she saw that night, I’m not sure how I would have reacted either.

What Evie and I had, what we still have, is more than just
us
being together,
so
much more. We have secrets and circumstances that other couples never have to deal with. And of course with this, because it all happened with that girl, and on a night when we knew there would be no tomorrow to fix it, that just made it all so much worse.

Rachel’s friend, whoever she was, had never been shy about her flirting, openly doing it in front of Evie, even knowing we were together. I tried to ignore it as much as I could. Always made sure that it was blatantly obvious that Evie and I were together, whenever this girl was around. But she was relentless and I know it pissed Evie off. And I get that too.

I’d spoken to Rachel about it so many times, but nothing changed. I don’t know if Rach ever said anything to her friend, she says she did, but who really knows, because this girl’s behaviour didn’t change. And it wasn’t until Rachel was on the receiving end of it herself, that she finally wised up and ended the friendship.

“I’m so sorry, Ben,” Evie eventually says, her words choked on sobs.

“Shhh, baby,” I say, stroking her hair. “It’s okay. We don’t need to go over all of this again, you know.”

Her body shudders in my arms as one last sob leaves her. “I’ve never wanted to forget something as much as I want to forget this,” she says, lifting her head to look at me. Her eyes are filled with tears, the colour of them even sharper, more green because of it. They look beautiful, but it’s not worth the sadness I can see in them. “I’ve never wanted to just
not
remember something so badly,” she says and it makes my heart break.

“I know, Evie,” I whisper, kissing her softly on the lips. “I know we both just want to forget it,” I say, knowing I’d give anything to forget that night. Forget all the things that came after, including about knowing she dated someone while we were apart.

It isn’t just Evie that has to live with a bad memory, a nightmare of all the things we did wrong in those four years we spent apart. We both made mistakes and we both paid the price for them. We’ve talked about it, but I know for me, I’d give anything to forget some parts.

And even though she’s told me nothing happened between her and this guy she dated, and even though I have no right to be angry given what she saw the night she left and the fact that at the time, she didn’t even remember me, the knowledge that some other guy had his hands on her. That some other guy got to kiss her and hold her, got to be with her, when I couldn’t… Fuck I’d give anything to be able to forget that.

Evie’s tears finally start to slow. I keep stroking her hair, my other hand holding her against me, squeezing her as close as I possibly can. “We’ve gotten through this once,” I tell her, my mouth at her ear. “We can get through it again, you know. It’s happened and there’s nothing we can do to change it. We just need to learn to live with it. We just need to let it stay in the past and live with it as nothing more than a memory.”

Evie nods against my shoulder before lifting her head again. “That’s a lot easier said than done,” she says, giving me a sad smile.

I smile back at her, tucking her hair behind her ears. “I know it is, but we both know it will never happen again, so all we can do is try.”

“It won’t,” she says, shaking her head as if to emphasise her point. “It won’t ever happen again, Ben,” she says. Her hands are under my t-shirt now, clawing and scratching at my skin, hungry and desperate. I let go of her, watch as she pulls my shirt up and off me. She never takes her eyes off me and they are filled now, with a determination, a want that makes my heart pound in my chest.

She throws my shirt across the room before her hands are back on me, her fingers moving everywhere, all over my bare skin, touching and teasing me. She shifts on the couch so she’s straddling me now, rubbing herself against me. I’m already half hard, the overwhelming need to have her, be with her in this moment, waking me right up.

“Evie,” I groan as she presses her mouth hard against mine. “Evie…”

“I need you, Ben,” she whispers, the words smothered by hard kisses. “I need you, now.”

“I know,” I say, understanding completely as I pull her t-shirt off. As soon as it’s over her head, her lips are back on mine and my fingers are undoing her bra, sliding it off her arms and throwing it onto the floor.

I slide my fingers down her ribs and waist to her sweat pants, pushing them down her hips as I go. Evie half stands so I can get them and her underwear over her hips and down her thighs.

“Baby, get up,” I breathe against her. “I need to get these off.”

Evie pushes off my chest, standing on the couch as she shoves her pants down her legs and kicks them to the floor. I’m still sitting between her legs as she stands over me and I use the opportunity to push my sweats down, kicking them to the end of the couch so both of us are now naked.

“Come here,” I say, staring up at her as I hold my hand out.

Evie slides her fingers into mine and gently sits back down, this time positioning herself against me so that I slide into her, her hips stilling against mine.

“Ben,” she moans, her mouth once more on mine, and not letting me say anything.

My hands find her hips, holding her, guiding her now as I move her against me. Slow because I need to make this last, but slow because I’m afraid of losing control right now. I might think I can let the past go and I might try to convince her that we both can, but those four years still feel like so much wasted time. So many mistakes, so many days and weeks and months that we lost, and it’s time that we will never get back either. No matter how hard we try. And even though I’m always trying to, my desperate, urgent hunger for her making me want to lose control with her right now, I know those years are gone forever.

“Ben,” Evie says again, the word an impatient groan.

“What, baby?” I whisper, shifting as I move my mouth from hers and press kisses along her jaw to her ear. “Tell me what you need.”

“You,” she says, wrapping her arms around my neck and bringing my mouth back to hers. “I need you. Now.”

I open my eyes and find Evie staring at me, her green eyes looking at me with so much love it actually makes my chest ache, hitting me with a force that’s so powerful, I almost can’t breathe. This is what I mean when I say that every time she comes back to me, I feel like I fall in love with her all over again. This is what I mean when I say that the force of what I feel for her is just
so strong
I can barely breathe, let alone think straight.

“Please,” she begs and I nod, closing the distance between us as I press a hard kiss to her mouth. My hands, which are still on her hips, grip tighter now, my fingers digging into her skin as I speed up our movements so that she’s riding me, harder, faster, pushing both of us to the edge.

My whole body feels like it’s on fire and Evie’s skin is hot beneath my hands, her body now covered in a light sheen of sweat. We’re still kissing, practically devouring each other, both of us desperate to get closer, to erase the past and all of the mistakes we’ve both made.

“Oh god, baby,” I moan into her mouth as she keeps moving against me. “Eva, shit…I’m going to…”

And then I do, my hand moving to touch her so I can push her over with me. It doesn’t take long, Evie throwing her head back as she lets out a loud moan and clenches around me, our bodies finally stilling as we both get what we need from each other.

My heart is pounding in my chest right now and I can feel hers doing the same thing as she collapses against me, her head falling onto my shoulder. I wrap my arms tightly around her back as I pull her even closer, our bodies practically glued together.

“Fuck,” I murmur, my face buried in her hair.

“Yeah,” she says, pressing soft kisses to my shoulder and neck.

“You okay?”

Evie nods against me and we sit in silence for god knows how long, both of us still trying to catch our breath, trying to get our heart rate back to normal. Eventually she lifts her head from my shoulder, her hands moving to cup my face, her fingers brushing my cheeks as she looks at me.

“Wow, I really needed that,” she says, finally smiling.

I smile back at her. “I think we both did,” I say, knowing that was the perfect way to erase all of the bad memories and thoughts and mistakes of our past. We still have more letters to read, more bad times in front of us, but knowing we are through that first one, the night which started everything, I feel like it’s gonna be easier going forward now. I feel like maybe this time, with Evie finally understanding my side of the story, we might actually be able to let all of this go.

“I also think I need another shower,” she says, glancing down at us. I’m still inside her, our bodies sticky with sweat and everything we’ve just done.

“Think I do too,” I say, grinning back at her.

“Come on,” she says, easing herself off me.

She stands up and holds her hand out to me, smiling as I slide mine into hers and she pulls me up off the couch. I pull her into my arms so our bodies are pressed together, skin to skin. “I love you, Evie Foster,” I say as I lean down and press a soft kiss to her mouth. “So fucking much.”