Bad Days (Four Days Book 3) Read online

  “There’s nothing you can do for me, apart from keeping your distance,” I tell him coldly, in a determined voice. I’ve never heard this side of myself, but it’s true. There is nothing he can do for me but to leave me alone.

  “And if…I didn’t feel like doing that?” he asks, getting closer to me, until he whispers in my ear. “If I wasn’t able to do it any more, Alex?” he concludes with a sigh, and I have to beg my heart not to give in to his words, to betray me here and now, and continue to swell in my chest only for him.

  5

  JASON

  “You can’t say these things, Jason,” Alex says as she breaks our eye contact. “And it seems to me like you’ve done very well without me in these last few years. It doesn’t seem that you’re having a bad time of it at all.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about…These five years have been…” I shake my head and rest my hands on the balcony. “It’s been hell, Alex.”

  She sighs and sits down next to me.

  “They’ve been five bad fucking years,” I confess to her and let my head fall into my arms.

  “If it hadn’t been for Aaron, I don’t know what I would have done. Surely I wouldn’t be here now talking to you, believe me. He got me out of some trouble, he gave me some warmth and a family. He and Rain have been everything for me.”

  She brushes my arm and that touch, so intimate and delicate, gives me the encouragement to go on telling her the truth.

  “We were in a terrible spot, but we rolled up our sleeves and did everything possible to make a go of things.

  “They still had a mortgage to pay off and I wanted to help out, to be for them like they were for me. I was a delivery guy, waiter, petrol-pump attendant…anything that would permit me to bring home a salary. Aaron did the same, and not to mention Patrick, Liam and Neil. You know where we come from…” I look at her through the corner of my eye.

  She also comes from that neighborhood and her family certainly wasn’t trafficking in gold, even if her father’s coffee-shop business always seemed to go pretty well.

  “We continued to play music, we never gave that up. We played in the streets, in pubs, at parties…and one day the impossible happened: someone noticed us. An independent label, no huge deal, but for us it was a start, you understand? Hope. Something we never had before.”

  “And then?”

  “And then success showed up, unexpected and frightening. We were still kids, we didn’t know anything about how to manage it. Our first album was a boom: concerts, fans, the press…everyone wanted us. We got a new contract and this time with an English record company.

  “They proposed a second album, an eight-month tour and a bucket-load of money. But Neil, Liam and Rain had that damned car accident. Neil died, he was our lead singer and the one who wrote all our songs. Rain was in the condition she was in, and Liam took off, abandoning us all.

  “You can’t imagine what it’s like to lose touch with your band. Everything you’ve always wanted, and to lose it all before you can grab it.” I look at her intensely because I’m not referring to just the music.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “The press was all over us; the car accident and Liam taking off created a huge mess, and his success in England certainly did not help. You know how bad the English press can be.”

  “And so you all found yourselves back here.”

  “When Rain started to get better, we were already drowning. Aaron had put their house on the market, they couldn’t stand to be near that place, we were under constant watch. So, we sold everything we could, cashed in on our first album’s success and our insurance policy and we invested all the money we had into this place.

  “Only4You,” she whispers with a smile on her lips. “You all did it for her.”

  “What else could we do? Rain is like a sister for me.” I say the words with a knot in my throat, watching her from a distance. “I thought I had lost her, Alex, that she wouldn’t know anything but a life filled with pain, confusion and solitude. Instead, look at her now. She’s well, she’s happy and she’s in love.”

  “I’m sorry not to have been there for her…and for everyone,” she sighs sadly. “But now she’s got Liam.”

  “Liam is an asshole and if Rain weren’t so in love with him, I would have already kicked his ass by now.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe you. You and Liam have been friends forever.”

  “Too much.” I smile tightly.

  “We’ve all known each other forever.”

  “It’s true, and we’re all still here. All of us.”

  Alex smiles slightly and breaks eye contact.

  It’s true that we’ve all known each other since we were kids. In the neighborhood where we grew up that wasn’t difficult to do.

  The houses were all lined up next to each other and most of our parents had lived there since their childhoods in similar conditions. We were often unhappy, and we helped one another and built each other up. We gathered strength in our comradeship and encouraged each other.

  And that’s what we did, the guys and I.

  Aaron and Rain, Liam and Neil, Patrick. And Alex.

  “Now things are going well, right?” she asks, shooting me a quick glance.

  “The pub is going well and the music is still…a maybe. Patrick fell in love with Erin, I’m still not quite sure I believe it. And they have a splendid little girl. Who would have ever expected something like that from someone like him?”

  “It was a shock for me.” She smiles.

  “Rain and Liam are now inseparable and Aaron, well, you know, he’s a rock and always finds a way to make it.”

  “And you?” she asks nervously, biting her lip.

  “And I crawl along, Alex,” I confess for the first time out loud. “I’m missing something. I will always be missing something.”

  —

  ALEX

  “Jason.” I block him before he can say anything more.

  “It’s the truth.”

  “I’m sorry for all of the things that happened to you all and I will always be sorry that I wasn’t there, to not have been there to help Rain with the most difficult time in her life. She needed me and and I wasn’t here for her and now we’re starting to make up for lost time. I’m trying to not let it weigh on her that she doesn’t remember most of our friendship and to not think about what happened with Neil and Liam and you all. And I’m sorry not to have been close to you.”

  “You’re here now.”

  It’s true. I’m here now. I came back and I didn’t know what would be waiting for me once I set foot back in Dublin. Certainly, I wasn’t expecting all these changes in their lives and I didn’t expect to find this Jason, that reminds me vaguely of a person I used to know a long time ago but who lost himself at a certain point in a place very far from here.

  Jason is not the same. He’s not the brazen, full-of-life boy that I fell in love with as a kid. He’s become a man, with a lot of responsibility on his shoulders, with a hollow, arid heart and a veil of sadness that shadows his limpid, brilliant eyes.

  He’s no longer my Jason. At this point I ask myself if he ever really was. But he’s not the only one to have changed.

  I’m also not the same person I used to be. My life has been completely turned upside down. I am not able to do all of the things I enjoyed doing. To tell the truth, I don’t do much of anything. And it’s not like I’ve been prohibited from doing it. In the end, I can live a life like most people, just slower, with less stress and without big shocks and surely with less emotions.

  And that’s my biggest problem. I’m able to manage physical exertions, I can avoid wearing myself out and avoid useless stress. I’ve been able to study, graduate, find a job I like and I’ll probably do a bunch of other non-lethal things over the course of my life, all those things that I’ve conceded myself to have an ordinary existence and that permit me to remain here for all the time I’ve been allocated.

  Because it
’s what I have to do.

  Continue to be there, for my family, for those who love me, without involving anyone else. There are already too many people in my life who pray that every day I’ll open my eyes.

  I have to deny myself what could make me give in, to that which would lead me to commit an unforgivable mistake—that I could destroy someone else’s life.

  And until now, I’ve been able to work it out just fine, until his closeness brought everything out into the light and now, I can’t ignore what I’m feeling being here so close to him.

  The emotions that are coming to the surface, the desire to touch him, to feel his scent on my skin, to let myself be wrapped in his warmth.

  Emotions that accelerate my heartbeat out of control and provoke a familiar sense of suffocating, anxiety and fear.

  They are emotions that cannot be controlled and that I have to avoid, I have to absolutely stay away from him.

  I can’t let myself get so close to him because these feelings start from being around him, he’s the only one who makes me feel this way.

  Because with Jason it can only be all or nothing. But my all would be too big for the both of us.

  I’ve never felt in so much danger as I do now, being next to Jason.

  No doctor has ever forbade me from having a boyfriend, a relationship, even having sex. And yet, I just feel that with him, I couldn’t have all that, because what I feel for him is just too intense, too devastating, and surely too dangerous.

  For me and for him.

  My love for him is uncontrollable.

  Lethal.

  I get up suddenly from the bar stool and Jason jumps to his feet at the same time.

  “What…did I say something?”

  “No, you didn’t say anything. It’s just I can’t. Try to understand me.”

  “You can’t talk to me?” he says, wrinkling his forehead.

  “I can’t get so close to you,” I confess, determined. “I’m sorry.”

  I back away as quickly as possible without looking back because I know he’s standing there, watching me go—watching me as I distance myself from him and my emotions that are trying to bring me down.

  From this love that I will never be able to live with, that I will never be able to touch and never be able to cancel.

  I could live my entire life without emotions because nothing can provoke the same goosebumps, or undermine me and invade my being like his big, lost eyes.

  Nothing can hurt me more than his love.

  6

  JASON

  I get back home after a tough afternoon at my dad’s house. I have the night off and so I called him to let him know I’d be stopping by.

  I haven’t seen Alex for a week, since that night she showed up at the club. I was hoping that day that perhaps … But she’s avoiding me and I don’t blame her. Even if she lives right around the corner, I can’t go knock on her door. She doesn’t want me around, and she’s made that clear.

  I almost killed her with my presence and I couldn’t do it again and I do owe her some kind of explanation. She’s never given me a chance to tell her how I feel, to be completely sincere. She turned her back and walked away and I let her go, because it was what she needed in that moment.

  We were friends, we had our perfect relationship just as it was and I ruined everything just in order to kiss her. A little boy, a stupid little boy, who thought he had his best friend all for himself.

  “You’re late.”

  My father is talking to me from the kitchen. I join him and see that he’s at the stove. This is new. When we eat together, we usually order out.

  “What are you doing?” I ask him, waiting at the door.

  “Making dinner,” he responds without looking up, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, whereas for him, or rather for us, it isn’t.

  “You mind setting the table?”

  What the heck is this? We haven’t eaten sitting at a table since we’ve been alone, just the two of us. We have avoided almost everything that could remind us of our life with her.

  “Why are you doing this?” I ask him harshly, ready to tell him to go to hell for the hundredth time.

  He turns slowly and looks me in the eye with an expression of resignation.

  “I should have done it a long time ago,” he begins, stopping me short.

  “I’m sorry that I was a shitty father. I’m sorry, Jason, for everything.” His eyes are blurry and I can tell that he’s holding it back.

  I go to turn and escape from this situation that is so unreal and intimate when he calls me and invites me to stay.

  “Don’t do it, don’t push me away. I’ve made so many mistakes, but please, give me a chance to make things better.”

  I stop at the door and, clenching my fists, ask myself not to break down.

  “It’s just one mistake after another. I can’t go back, I can’t give you back what you’ve lost, but now I’m here. And I hope it’s not too late, for both of us.”

  He pauses and I bite my lip so hard it draws blood.

  I’ll do anything to avoid letting that bastard of a two-timing tear fall down my cheek.

  “Stay, Jason. Stay with me. I know that you’re a man by now and you live on your own and that’s the way it should be, but now we’re here, me and you together. We can never have her back, but we’re still here. I was an absent father, a terrible one and I screwed up everything so terribly, but give me this possibility, the last one, and I promise you, you won’t regret it.”

  His voice is low, faint and he’s just barely keeping it together. Maybe it’s time to let go of this pain, to let it all out and maybe we need to do this together.

  I turn slowly and make my way towards the cabinets. I take out two napkins, place mats, plates and glasses and set them on the kitchen counter, drawing up two stools. I can feel his gaze on me, that he’s following my every move.

  “What are we having?” I ask as if nothing he just said really came out of his mouth.

  He smiles and brings a big pan over: rice with meat and vegetables, he tells me. Smells pretty good.

  We sit down without adding anything else and start eating like a normal family, as if it were part of our usual routine.

  Then suddenly, I break the silence.

  “I miss her.” I let my breath out and the tension that goes with it and finally let all of the muscles in my body relax. “Years have gone by, I’m grown, I’m…I’m a man by now. But I miss her, like I was missing a part of myself, a very important part. He absence is something I’m not able to bear. I wish she could just smile at me again, talk to me, touch my face. Or that she’d tell me to cut my hair because she can’t see my eyes. I miss her. Every day, every damn hour. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”

  My father sighs and leaves his fork on his plate. He watches me a few seconds and then starts to tell me about her.

  “Your mother was stupendous, the only woman I ever really loved, and I am not ashamed to tell you that I had a lot of women in my day, Jason, because when I laid eyes on her, everything changed.

  “My entire life changed. I thought I had time, years ahead of me to make her happy and so I missed out on a lot of occasions. Restlessness, the desire to be successful…they pulled me away from her so many times…” he says, drying a tear. “And when I understood that I was risking losing her I tried to put the pieces back together, to slow down, to be at her side, to be at both your sides.”

  His words are infused with bitterness and resentment and I’m sorry, damn it, he doesn’t deserve it, not even him.

  “She loved you, Dad, no matter what. She never stopped loving you and she was…was happy.”

  He looks at me for a few minutes and the silence wraps itself around my words, almost as if he needed time to take them in, to really believe it.

  “I disappointed her,” he says in a sigh. “I disappointed you both.”

  I move the leg of the stool and slowly get up and go to the opposite side.
I feel an obligation to lift this weight off his shoulders. I hug him and rest my head on his shoulder.

  This is new for both of us.

  “She was happy and so was I. She loved us and would not want to see us this way.”

  I don’t know where these words are coming from, but as I hear myself pronouncing them, I feel lighter, freer.

  “We’re still a family, even without her.”

  My father hugs me a bit more and I can feel his tears falling. He’s still so frail from this loss that I ask myself if he’ll ever get over it.

  Then he breaks off and gives me a pat on the back, inviting me to take my place at the counter and eat.

  “Let me tell you something, Jason,” he starts, drinking a sip of wine. “There nothing more important than love in life. Money, women, success…all bullshit. You can do without most anything, but not the arms of the person you love. Don’t make the same mistakes I did, don’t make music the only thing there is in your life. Don’t concentrate everything you have on yourself. Don’t refuse others, and more than anything, don’t deny yourself love.”

  Is this really my father speaking?

  “I can’t afford it, Dad. It’s too complicated.”

  “Life is complicated, Jason, but that’s not a reason why we should refuse to live it.”

  I shake my head to chase away the idea that is creeping into my brain.

  “Who is it?” he asks me out of the blue and I pretend not to understand.

  “Who is who?” I reply, chewing quickly enough to make me choke.

  “I wasn’t born yesterday, Jason. I know that look.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about…” I say vaguely.

  “Have you seen her again?”