Page 55 of Cuts Like an Angel: Part 2

Chapter Twenty-Seven

William

The smell of bleach blasted William in the face as he opened the front door. Rosie stood behind him and it was a good job too. She didn’t need to see the look of total and utter shock on his face.

“Shit,” he spat out when the smell coated his nostrils and lungs, making him nauseous.

“I’m sorry. We can fix it,” she said, dashing around him. “I …” She was panting, her face stark and her eyes filled with wild panic. William’s thoughts echoed around his head, screaming out all the things she’d disordered, the pathetic control she’d unhinged, the sick safety nets he’d carefully laid out in his life. But the fear-filled look on Rosie’s face pulled at William, and fuck, he could never see that expression on her.

“It’s okay,” he said, not to Rosie, but to himself. Josh to William. “It’s okay.”

He clenched his fists by his sides, not in anger, but control. Holding in that very part of him that wanted to let loose and scream at what was done. It was just a house, but his eyes went to every spot. To everything she had pulled down and taken away. The change in it had him wanting to cast his eyes around, reminiscent of someone in a horror film staring at an array of mutilated corpses and laughing heads.

“We can fix it,” she said desperately. “I’ll get someone in and fix it. I’ll put it back just the way you like it. I’ll sell my car and get money and-and make it better than ever.”

He lowered his eyes slowly to Rosie, homing in on her and trying to block out the hallway around him like a camera focusing. “I just need.” He stepped back out of the house, without even realising it. He was shaking his head, his eyes on the walls again as William. “It’s not …”

“Please,” She said, her voice desperate. “Don’t go. Don’t do that again.” She grabbed for him. Grabbing his arm, and making him jump immediately from the pain of it. “Oh, shit. God …”

Tears came then on her sweet face. “I’m so sorry. I’m such an idiot. Please don’t tell me to leave. Please.”

“Leave?”

The world was moving in some kind of slow motion and if William reached out, he could probably grab the very air itself. “Just give me a minute, okay?”

“Inside, though. Please come inside.”

He nodded. “I’m just going to go upstairs.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” she whispered.

“Up there too?”

As they came in, she closed the door behind them, locking it. “I’m sorry. I’m such an idiot.”

William held on tight to his calm facade, a stark difference to what he was feeling inside. His anxiety crawled under his skin demanding he take it off. If he could have dropped right then to the ground, clutching his head, he would have done it. “Do you want to make coffee or something?”

“Coffee? Yes. I can do that.” She hurried off, and William caught sight of her quickly wiping her eyes. Guilt raged in his stomach. Fuck. He never wanted to see her cry. Never wanted to be the cause of it, but standing there, in the middle of his half-destroyed hallway and home, he could hardly hold himself together. It didn’t matter that the thing he protected was a huge part of the cause of it all.

It pulled violently in his gut to make himself walk up those stairs to his room, but he needed calm. Rosie needed calm, before he said something that was more hurtful than I need a minute. Damage control.

What was it Carly had told him to do when he had this burning feeling in his soul and his rage wanted to come out, usually at himself … Ground and then think.

“Ground and then think,” he mumbled, saying the words aloud to make them more real.

“Oh bollocks,” he said, going upstairs and stopping at his room. He took a breath and pushed open the door, seeing that Rosie the Whirlwind had struck there too. She had stripped the top layer of all the wallpaper. The curtains were down. The whole bloody place looked burglarised. “Shit.”

He sat himself on the edge of the bed, head in his hands. Ground and then think.

This day could have been worse. It could. Rosie could have been leaving. “She could have left,” he said. “She could have left me, and I would be all alone, right here, right now.” He repeated it to himself. Josh calming William inside and calming that fire in his gut. It was just wallpaper. That was all.

But when Maria saw it? William rose inside himself, forcing him off the bed. The child of his past, fuelled by the fear of what his mother would do when she saw something bad, even if it wasn’t his fault. She’d go spare. Shit, she’d probably have another stroke at this rate.

“And here you thought you were the crazy one,” Rosie said from the doorway.

William didn’t want her to see his expression and sat back down on the bed. He didn’t want her to feel the bad way he felt his whole damn life when he had done something stupid. He felt her moving, listened to the sound of the air shifting around her as she came over and placed the mugs on the side table. “I’m sorry,” she said, the hint of a sob in her voice. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I just …”

He kept his head down, but he reached a hand out to her and rested it on her thigh. “I’m sorry,” he said, sighing.

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