“You really want me to tell you what he said to me during sex?”
“Yeah, good point. So, how are you coping? It wasn’t what I intended, but I have to admit, I am amused to see prickly Ash being wooed by a biker babe.”
“Yeah, I think my ability to amuse you has come to an end. He walked out. How the hell did I manage to hurt someone who was brainwashed into being a fictional character?”
“Ah, Ash,” Tess sighed, leaning back into the car seat as we pulled out onto the highway. “You can’t bloody help yourself, can you?”
“What? I’m some horrible beast because I didn’t want to bring my one night, sorry, two-night stand to Mum and Dad’s?”
“It’s not that. Sometimes I think you’re the reason why the curse is this way.”
“What the hell?”
“You’ve always been . . . closed off. You don’t let people in easily. Remember Jimmy Flanagan?”
“Yeah, he was my boyfriend for two years, so I was hardly closed off to him.”
“He was totally in love with you, but you . . . It was like it hurt you physically to tell him that you cared for him.”
“Yeah, well, he found someone who didn’t find it too hard pretty quickly after we broke up.”
“He was a big, gorgeous Irishman, he was never going to have to wait long. But what about Steve?”
“High school Steve? You’re using the fact I wasn’t ready to settle down with my high school boyfriend as evidence against me?”
“No, I get he had some weird ideas about getting married after graduation, but it’s like, it’s like you’re content to let them love you, but won’t let them get under your skin, like you’re afraid to.”
I swallowed. She was my sister; we were always close, but her words hit me hard. I felt it, that familiar cold, dense ball that always formed in my chest when this kind of stuff came up, particularly when it came from one of my boyfriends. They always seemed to want so much, no matter what I gave them, no matter how hard it was to give them what they wanted. I’d been to see psychologists, even they had been a bit bemused. My parents were happy together, and so were my Nan and Pa. My whole life I’d been surrounded by people who had healthy long-term relationships, yet when it came to me. . . .
“Why, Ash?” Jimmy had asked one evening. We’d been sitting on my bed, the dying light turning the sheets to a pale grey. Both of us had swollen eyes, faces reddened from crying. We were in mourning, our relationship was dying. We’d known it for a while. When I was the only one pulling away, it had been OK, as long as he was prepared to do the chasing. When he pulled away, when it was my turn to chase, I’d been notably absent. He kept it up, coming around less and less, though when he was here, it’d spark a strange kind of passion. We couldn’t seem to keep our hands off each other, fucking all day and night, only have him to walk out the door and not come back for days.
Because I forget you exist when you’re not here, I wanted to say to him. Because my skin comes alive when you touch me, but nothing else does. Because I have built intricate battlements around my heart, to keep everyone out, but I’m disappointed that you couldn’t work out a way through them. Because it’s over and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Instead, I just shrugged as the tears dropped onto the quilt covering my legs. He’d moved closer, enfolding me in his arms, swallowing me for a moment in that big muscular embrace, the warmth of his skin fighting to thaw me, but not able to. He let me go someti
me later and then let me go entirely. He left the flat and never came back.
I’d seen the psychologist a couple of months later. I’d seen Jimmy on the street with a gorgeous girl with long brown hair and bright-red lipstick, looking the picture of joy. He’d flinched at the sight of me. She noticed, she seemed so attuned to him and his reactions and came over to introduce herself. She wasn’t being bitchy or trying to lord anything over me. She didn’t know who I was until he introduced us, her eyes widening and I saw the moment of regret at approaching me flicker over her face. They told me of their engagement in the kind of hushed tones people use at the death of a loved one. I plastered a bright smile on my face, gave each of them a big hug and kiss as congratulations, then beat a hasty retreat. They didn’t try to stop me, but she watched me go for a moment, over his arm slung around her shoulders. She looked almost sorry for me.
“Ash, you’re going to have to decide this is something you want,” the psychologist had said.
What? I thought, therapy? A relationship? A cup of coffee, what?
“I can talk it through with you, give you some strategies for dealing with the anxieties you have about intimacy. . . .”
I have anxieties around intimacy? I thought, seems to me I have the opposite, I just don’t care enough.
“Ash?”
I looked into the older woman’s face. She expected something, her lifted brows, her gaze indicated it, but I had no idea what she wanted. Story of my life, I thought, dropping my eyes down to the expensive Turkish carpet. What am I doing? Why am I even here?
“Ash, is intimacy something you want?”
“I don’t know,” I croaked out.
I’d stopped going not long after that. Tess had been disappointed, but Mum and Dad were just glad I was getting out of bed and going to work again. No one had talked about Jimmy since then, though I knew Mum and Dad got an invite to the wedding. I’d seen the cream gilt invitation in the recycling bin when around one day.
“I think that’s the point of Nan’s spell, to find someone who can get past your defences, open you up,” Tess said as we pulled into the driveway at our parents’ house.