Free Someday Find Me by Nicci Cloke Page B

Goes)
    Fight for This
    It Must Have Been
    So many voices, spilling out of the speakers, telling me what love was and what love meant, how it could hurt you and how itcould save you. None of them told me what to do when you were the one doing the hurting and you were beyond saving.
    I sat at the wonky table and listened to the system pick songs at random for me, for hours and hours, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, lost in the lyrics. When I finally looked down at the page, there was just a fat black bleed from the paintbrush hovering in my hand. I was in the dark, in more ways than I had ever been.
    I got up to turn the lights on. Fitz would be on his way home, and while I was waiting there was still the lovely possibility that things would be okay, that Cadbury would have agreed to give him another sub, that we could pay Kay and then we could find our way back.
    The sound of the key in the door made all the love I’d listened to leap up into my heart. Things were possible once again.
    When I saw his face, I knew I was wrong. In a fairytale or a crap film or a love song, there would be some tiny magic, some fortune, that would make things happen for us. But all our magic was gone. We were alone.
    He shook his head. ‘Sorry, lovely. No more subs.’
    And then he held out an arm, making a space for me to fill in the way he always did. I felt as if it was impossible to get close enough to him, with my arms wrapped round his waist and his cheek resting on my head. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘don’t worry, lollipop, it’ll be okay. We’ll just tell him we’ll give it him next week. He probably won’t even remember, you know – he was wrecked.’ He kissed the top of my head. And just like that, the magic was back.
     
    We sat on the sofa and twiddled our fingers together. As the evening wore on I let my head fall to Fitz’s shoulder, tucking myself into him. In the sixty-second news round-up between programmes, Top Idol was being accused of rigging phone lines and Fate Jones was still gone. Life was carrying on, and so would we. Fitz sleepily reached up a hand and stroked my cheek. Hewas reading my mind without even trying, and he was next to me. Even as things changed around us, that was true.
    And then the knock came.
    I felt my body go weak, and I wanted to cry out and grab Fitz by the hands, keep him in his spot and bury ourselves in Quin’s corner, but it was too late. He was standing up, straightening his jeans. He ruffled my hair. ‘It’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Leave it to me.’ And then he was gone, and the front door was opening, and I was clinging to his words even as they were fading.
    I could only hear Fitz’s side of the conversation; Kay’s was muffled by the walls into a deep, growling hum.
    ‘Hiya, mate.’
    ‘Look, about that …’
    ‘No, no, mate, nobody’s fucking you about!’
    ‘I swear, honest, I’ll get it for you!’
    ‘Come on, can’t we just be mates about it? Let’s have a beer, shake on it, yeah? I can get it to you next week.’
    ‘Please …’
    There was a dull thud as the door was shoved open, a faint wheeze as air left Fitz’s lungs, and a sudden rush of chill as the cold outside found its way into the flat. Kay swaggered in. He gave me a little wave in a way that made me feel sick all over, then strode over to the telly, his dirty boots leaving marks that would stay there for days. He knelt in front of it, looked it over, his face right up close to Simon Cowell’s hyperwhite smile as the rerun of Top Idol got into its stride. Fitz was standing in the doorway, bent almost double.
    ‘You guys need a new telly,’ Kay said conversationally. ‘Need a microscope to see anything on this piece of shit.’ He strolled around the edge of the room, looking at the furniture, weighing each thing up. As his eyes rolled round, I felt my heart sink.
    ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Here we are.’
    Fitz’s decks had their own table when they weren’t being used. It was an old coffee-table,