Ryan
By the time he got home the house was completely silent. To be honest, he was grateful that Emmy was asleep, especially considering what was happening between them at the moment. Every single time they were in the same room, something bad inevitably transpired. Or more to the point, he seemed to do something that would anger/upset/irritate/infuriate (take your pick) her. He didn’t know how much of that was teenage hormones, or how much of that was because of her mother’s death.
It had been almost two years since his twin sister, Rachel, had passed away. Motor neurone disease; he hadn’t even known what it was until her shocking diagnosis. It had taken only eighteen months from the time the doctors had told them to the day she passed away. He’d been sad that day, obviously, but the overall feeling had been one of total relief. Believe it or not, there are worse things than death. He’d watched her muscles waste away until she was wheelchair bound, unable to feed herself, swallow and even talk. She and Emmy had moved in with him soon after the diagnosis. He’d hired the best nursing care possible for her, but even with all the money in the world for the best doctors and nurses, she’d still gone. Money can buy you many things, but it cannot buy life. Sometimes he didn’t know what was worse: seeing your sister die, or watching your sister suffer like she had. In many ways, it would have been easier if it was a sudden death. One moment she was there, and then the next she was gone. But it hadn’t been like that. Because she was already gone, before she was dead. That had been one of the hardest things to deal with. She had physically been there, sitting in her wheelchair, but the Rachel he knew was long gone. The cruel truth of the disease is that, in some cases, like his sister’s, once it’s finished stealing your muscles, it steals your mind too.
He walked up the stairs and passed Emmy’s room. He stopped momentarily and put his ear to the door. Her lights were on but he had no idea what she was doing. He placed his knuckles on the door, about to knock, but stopped himself. He wanted to reach out to her, but honestly, she felt so far away from him right now that he didn’t know how to. So he kept on walking into his room and closed the door behind him too. He peeled his clothes off and looked at himself in the mirror. He hadn’t been to the gym in a while and could see his middle section wasn’t looking as good as it used to. In fact, he was definitely filling out in a few places. He ran his hands up his arm and over his tattoo. He smiled to himself. He and Rachel had gone to Thailand after school for a holiday. They’d been young and wild and spontaneous and had drunk too much and landed up at crazy island parties where they’d gotten matching tattoos. It had been fun. But now, that life seemed to belong to a totally different person. He didn’t even know that guy anymore. Because soon after coming back from that holiday, he’d gone to business school like his father had wanted, and then began running the company, also like his father had wanted. It had been expected of him, since his name was on the building, his father had always said. Truthfully, if he had done what he’d wanted with his life, he probably wouldn’t be running the company at all. Not that he knew what he wanted to do, but still. Rachel had never done what their father had wanted, though. He’d always admired that about her, and been envious too. She was a much stronger person than him. She did things differently. She moved to the beat of her own damn drum. He climbed into his bed, and his thoughts immediately drifted towards Doris. He’d come so close to letting go tonight.
Too close.
There’d been a moment with her when all he’d wanted to do was be wild and spontaneous again. Where he’d wanted to rip her ugly clothes and glasses off. There was something about her that was getting under his skin. Clearly, she was dangerous for him. Which was very surprising, since she’d pissed him off no end today when she had single-handedly disrupted the entire working day of 300 staff members and forced them all out of the building.
He looked up at his ceiling and suddenly found himself wondering what her ceiling looked like? Judging from that corridor in her building, it probably didn’t look like his. That bothered him. It bothered him more than he could explain.
Fucking hell, he needed to sleep, but Doris bloody Granger was running through his mind, shuffling on her stupid thorn-infested feet. Every time he thought of something else, he came straight back to her. Doris with those stupid glasses. Doris with those hideous clothes and irritating stutter and those grazed knees. Doris who had a terrible habit of sticking her tongue out of her mouth when she wrote and had a nose that made squeaking noises when she slept and did forward rolls into his office. She was absolutely everything that irritated him, and more.
So why was he thinking about her?
CHAPTEREIGHTEEN
Poppy
I paced around my tiny apartment. I felt strange and unsettled. In fact, I hadn’t felt this damn odd in a long time. I pulled my stupid wig off and threw it to the floor. It had been making my head itch all day and I was mentally kicking myself, at least every few minutes, for deciding to wear the stupid thing in the first place! I released my long auburn hair from the tight braid that I’d put it in this morning and scratched my scalp. It was so itchy that I was sure I was going to scratch bits of my head off. But taking the wig off still hadn’t made me feel any better.
“How much do you think you’re worth?”
Something about that question had cut me to the quick. It did something deep inside that felt fundamentally uncomfortable. My stomach twisted itself into knots as memories and moments and phrases from my past started running through my head . . .
“I never wanted a fucking kid in the first place!” The words I’d heard my father say the night he’d walked out of the house for good. They’d played in my head over and over again through the years, and I’d always wondered what I could have done differently to make him want me.
“She’ll never amount to anything,” one of my teachers had said after I’d failed a test. I’d never been good at school. I was far too much of a dreamer to be present in the classroom, and as a result, I’d barely made it through high school. Academic learning had never been my strong point.
Sports hadn’t been my forte either. The only time I’d attempted to play tennis, I’d been knocked in the face with a racquet and rushed to the hospital with a broken nose . . . I’d hit myself while trying to serve. I’d joined the chess club, but realized I didn’t have the patience or the skills to think strategically. I’d tried to play a musical instrument, but blowing into a flute had just made me feel dizzy. I’d never quite been pretty and confident enough to be one of the popular kids, growing up, and had never been ambitious or smart enough for college and a big fancy career in a designer suit. The only time I could ever remember standing out at anything was when I’d acted in the school play, and everyone had laughed loudly and clapped for me. That was the one moment when I’d felt like I was worth something, or had been good at anything.
The only person who’d had faith in me had been my mother. But now she was dead.Cancer!I still couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that someone so nice and good should get sick like that. Surely, only bad people should get dreaded diseases, not kind ones who made a difference and lit up the world with their smiles. Life was unfair, wasn’t it? At least I’d had time with her, and she had been there for me growing up.
My childhood had been a happy one, my mother had made sure of that, even though we didn’t have as much as others. My mother had been a florist, and we’d lived in the flat above her flower shop. Correction, she was so much more thanjusta florist. My mother had been an artist and flowers were her medium. I’d loved living above a flower shop, there were so many flowers and plants downstairs that they often made their way upstairs into our small flat. When I was younger, I’d thought I lived in a jungle, like in the picture books I read. I used to have so many adventures behind the big ferns and pot plants that covered almost all the surfaces at home. And when I was older, I would work in the flower shop over the weekends, helping my mom make the most beautiful arrangements for clients. She once landed a huge celebrity wedding and the two of us had worked for days making the most spectacular arrangements of sweet-smelling lilies together. We’d stayed up all night making the bouquets, listening to old Janis Joplin records and drinking sweet hot chocolate with marshmallows in. And then the next day when it was time to go to school, she’d called in sick and the two of us had sat on the couch watching soap operas together. Another one of her favorite things. I just wish she’d lived long enough to see me get a role on a soapie—even though it had been so short-lived, she would have been so proud. I’m not so sure how proud she would be now, though, considering the blatant liar that I currently was.
I marched over to the fridge and opened it. Nothing to eat other than some peanut butter; I’d finished the last of the stale crackers this morning. I pulled the jar out and stuck a spoon into it. I scooped it out and shoved it into my mouth. I know keeping peanut butter in the fridge seems odd, but with windows that don’t open and no aircon, a summer’s day here soon turns the small apartment into a sauna, and let me tell you, runny peanut butter oil is a very hard thing to get out of the carpet.
I walked over to the tap, poured some water into my watering can and started watering all my plants. When my mother had died, I’d taken possession of every single one of her pot plants. There were far too many of them, and they filled my entire apartment—even more so than my childhood home. But I refused to get rid of any; my mother had loved them, and I intended to honor her memory by keeping them alive. I got to the pot of daises and looked at them carefully. My mother had loved daisies, and poppies, hence my name. Bright like a daisy and bewitching like a poppy, she always used to say. One of the daisies was drooping. I plucked the flower and held it in my hands. My thoughts drifted off to Ryan Stark again and that poor plant that was busy dying in his office. I had to do something about it. I couldn’t sit there and let it die, my mother wouldn’t do that either. I was about to throw the daisy away when a thought hit me. I took one of the petals between my fingers and . . .
“He hates me, he hates me not. He hates me, he hates me not . . .” I said out loud as I plucked the petals out. I continued to do it until I came to the last one. I burst out laughing when it ended on a “he hates me not.”
“As if,” I mumbled to myself just as I heard a loud scream. I looked up at my ceiling. The light was swinging again, which meant that the upstairs neighbors were fighting, again. This meant that the police would probably be here soon, which meant that all the drug dealers would start running up and down the stairs hiding their stash as the sound of sirens came closer.Great!Just another night in paradise. I really needed to get out of this place. It was a bloody miracle I hadn’t been mugged yet, or worse. I went into my small, pokey bathroom and started brushing my teeth. I looked at the bills that I’d stuck on the grimy bathroom window. Not because I needed reminding of them, but because I’d once caught my creepy neighbor leaning over his balcony, trying to look at me. I didn’t have curtains, so I’d used the only other thing I could, the stack of bills that the bank and medical aid kept sending me. At least they were good for one thing. I spat and gargled and then gave my hair a quick brush.
I walked over to my mirror and pulled my clothes off. I looked at myself. My pink cotton panties certainly didn’t match my bra, but I’d never been one of those people that believed in matching underwear. I ran my hand down my stomach and pulled my underwear down slightly, exposing the ill-fated tattoo on my hip. It read “on.” I sighed. Not my finest moment. In high school I’d thought I was very in love with my boyfriend Leon. We’d rushed off to get matching name tattoos, only to break up three weeks later. I’d tried to get it removed, but it had been so damn painful that I’d only made it through the “L” and the “e”. And now I looked like I had an instruction tattooed on my hip bone. Some guy had once suggested that I put the word “turned” in front of it. His comment had turned me off so much that I had sent him packing.
I walked across the room and climbed into bed. My apartment was so tiny that the lounge, dining room and bedroom were one small “open plan” space. There was a tiny shelf with a microwave on and a bar fridge underneath it that constituted the kitchen, and then a tiny bathroom with a shower that had no water pressure whatsoever.
I tried to get comfortable on my small, squeaky bed. But it wasn’t easy, because now I was suddenly thinking about that look Ryan had in his eye just before he’d put the cream on my knee . . .
I knew that look. But the guys that usually gave me that look were the kind you picked up at dive bars, or at a flea markets, and still lived in their mothers’ basements. A guy like Ryan Stark had never, ever, given me that kind of look before.
I chuckled to myself. I was probably imagining it. The guy basically hated me.Or not?I couldn’t work it out. Bandaging knees and extracting thorns was almost kind, but then he followed it up with that stern grumpiness, and I was just plain confused. I looked over at the clock on my wall. I better get some sleep, because boss man would be here in a few hours to pick me up.
CHAPTERNINETEEN
Ryan
