CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tommy
AND THAT, BOYS AND GIRLS, is how I become a stalker.
It starts with the path Abby takes to ride her bicycle to the hospital in the morning. I hang around, stationed in the shadows of an alley along the route, just to glimpse her as she passes. A few times a week, at night, I wait across from her flat until the light goes on inside—so I know she’s home safely.
When it’s too cold and icy for her bike, I sit sentry in an alcove at her Tube station. Sometimes I see her there, looking beautiful but tired, maybe even a bit sad—though that could be my stupidly hopeful, James-Blunt-listening, stalkering imagination running wild. Some days, I don’t spot her at all.
But she never sees me. I make sure of it.
I know it’s stupid and pathetic . . . I just can’t seem to make myself stop.
Until one night, a few weeks later, when my sister Janey comes by my place and corners me. For an intervention.
Janey’s the only one in my family who knows that Abby Haddock exists. The only one who knows me well enough to understand that while I said all the right things when I first told her about Abby—that it was casual and no-strings, a fuck of convenience—the fact that I was saying anything at all already meant it was more.
My sister’s eyes are a hard, impenetrable wall of light green, without a speck of sympathy. And that’s good. Because right now, I’m just barely holding it together—I don’t think I could handle her pity.
“Why her?” Janey asks me. “What is it about this girl that you can’t shake off?”
It’s a good question. One I’ve asked myself more than once. What is it about a person that hooks the heart and keeps you tied to them even after they’ve walked away?
And the answer is . . . I don’t know.
It’s not just one identifiable thing. It’s everything—Abby’s beauty and intelligence and her refined demeanor. It’s her heat and her heart and the vulnerability that she hides so desperately . . . that she’s only showed to me.
And it’s because at some point, all the parts that make her up—the frustrating fractures and the shy, sweet tender bits . . . it felt like she became mine.
Mine to protect and cherish, to lead and to follow.
And I really fucking liked feeling like Abby Haddock belonged to me.
“You have to let it go, Tommy. She’s done with you—that’s what she said. She hasn’t reached out . . . you have to move on.”
I give my sister a nod. And from that point on, I give it a go.
I stop checking my phone like a lovesick twat every ten minutes. I stop finding excuses to venture toward Abby’s side of town. I throw myself into work—signing up to guard a Wessconian banker traveling to Dubai for a month, and when I come back, picking up extra hours from Winston guarding at the palace. When I’m not sleeping, I’m working—moving—training the new hires to be extra thorough, completing projects around the shop, staying busy every second of every day.
On the outside I’m all me—cracking jokes, drinking, laughing—all the things I did before.
I start smoking again, and it feels bloody good.
And maybe . . . a bit spiteful.
But inside, in my head, late at night when the quiet wraps its hands around me and strangles—I’m still stuck on her. That doesn’t really change.
I think about her, picture her, dream of her—the vibrant silk of her hair, the sharpness of her eyes, the “O” of her pretty mouth when I made her moan and gasp. I toss off to the memory of that sound—the feel of her surrounding me, tight and wet and perfect.
I wonder where she is and what she’s up to. I worry that she’s sad or lonely . . . and I worry that she’s not. I’m able to concentrate on work, focus when I need to—but Abby’s always there in the background.
The white noise of my life.
And the cavern where my heart beats—that doesn’t change either. It drowns in the same hollowed-out, gutted sensation, every bit as fresh and empty as the day I forced my feet to walk away from her door. The awful ache doesn’t ease, and it doesn’t mend.
And after the days drag into weeks, and the weeks blend into months—I start to believe it never will.
* * *
“Hey, Tommy—that girl over there is looking at you.”
Willis is our newest hire. He’s a good lad—tough, loyal—if a little on the dense side. It’s Saturday night and we’re all at Katy’s Pub, drinking to him completing his training this week.
I glance over my shoulder at a dark-haired vixen with a heart-shaped red mouth giving me the eyes. And it’s like my whole body just sort of . . . shrugs . . . without a scrap of interest.