Page 95 of Before You Say Goodbye

“Hungover to fuck,” was his immediate response. She smiled. His skin was pasty, he looked utterly exhausted and Autumn could see that he was shivering. He swallowed a few times, his mouth obviously dry, and rubbed his lips together. She poured him a glass of water, but he struggled to hold it when she offered it to him.

“Here,” she said, holding it to his mouth.

“Thanks,” he mumbled, taking a sip. He looked down at his bandages. “Well, that was a botched job.”

“I’m so glad.” She sat down in the chair by his bed.

“Me too.” He nodded, closing his eyes. “When I used to threaten to kill myself when Bowie was dying, I really thought it would be easy. I had all these ideas in my head about how I would do it. There was never any mess the way I imagined it. Or fear. Or pain. It was never going to be painful. Turns out, it isn’t like that.”

She reached out to touch his hand. He wrapped his fingers around hers, opening his eyes.

“This isn’t a movie,” she said. “If you try to kill yourself, you leave a mess.”

They sank into an awkward silence. She could feel his pulse in his hand as she held it. She marvelled at the strength of it. Yesterday, for more than a minute, she had been quite sure that he’d died in front of her on her living room floor. She’d held his wrists together and felt his heartbeat fade to a point where she couldn’t feel it anymore. She had gone insane with hysteria. Losing Marley, watching him die so soon after Bowie, would have been too much for her to live through, she was quite sure of it.

He was staring at her. She knew what he wanted to talk to her about. She narrowed her eyes at him sadly, urging him to talk. He fidgeted uncomfortably under her gaze.

“We never have to tell anyone about what happened,” he whispered.

“Marley—”

“I know it might not be the right thing to do. I’m just telling you that we could keep it between the two of us. Everyone would just think it was Bowie’s—”

“It might be Bowie’s,” Autumn said. “You do know that, don’t you? Close to the end, a couple of times . . .”

Marley paled, so Autumn stopped. The last thing she needed was him fainting on her. She wondered if he’d suspected she and Bowie had managed to make love in the days before he’d passed away, and concluded he probably hadn’t. His face confirmed her suspicion. He was learning for the very first time just how complicated this really was. She eyed him sheepishly, allowing him a moment to come to terms with everything.

Eventually, he shrugged. “It’s still an option.”

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “This is an actual person we are talking about. We can’t do that to them.”

“He’d be so loved. He’d never want for anything. Do you know how rare that is?”

She did know, all too well. Her baby would never yearn for a safe place to sleep or know what it felt like to be hungry or wonder whether anybody actually cared for them. Regardless of which twin was the father of her child, Autumn thought this must be the luckiest foetus that had ever existed.

“What about you?” she asked. “How could you pretend to be its uncle when you might be its father?”

“I could do it,” he said. “It would be hard, but I would do it.”

“Well, just because we could doesn’t mean that we should,” she said. He sighed and shook his head, pointedly drawing his hand away from hers. His head dropped back onto his pillow in defeat.

“Don’t you get tired of doing the right thing all the time?” he asked after a minute. “Can’t you just be a dick for once like everyone else?”

Autumn laughed, covering her face with one hand and reaching out to grab his hand gently again with the other. He accepted her gesture but couldn’t raise a smile for her.

“I was a massive dick the night I got us into this,” she whispered. Between her turmoil over what to do about her pregnancy and her grief over Bowie, for a while Autumn had found their betrayal shamefully easy to forget. She’d realised more than once, to her horror, that she’d even felt sorry for herself. She’d had to remind herself that she’d been irresponsible and deserved the torture that came with the consequences of their mistake.

“We,” he said, correcting her. “There were two of us there, remember?”

“I kissed you first.” She forced herself to stare into his forlorn eyes. She couldn’t remember making that first move, but she had always trusted that Marley had been telling her the truth when he’d spat those words at her the morning after their indiscretion.

“I’m so sorry, Marley.”

“We were both to blame.” He shook his head, his eyes fixed on hers. “I practically asked you to kiss me. I was a split second behind you. It was just mutual stupidity. Autumn, please. Please don’t cry.”

She held her face in both hands, shaking her head and sobbing inconsolably. She was overwhelmed by a sudden want for Bowie. She was frightened of how strongly she felt it. Nobody had warned her that her heart, to protect her, would, in quiet moments, force her mind to forget that he was gone every time she thought about something else for even a minute. The gut-wrenching, terrifying realisation of his absence she’d spent weeks trying to accept so that she no longer had to feel the shock of his death over and over again had been halted almost as soon as she’d realised she was pregnant. Now, she felt devastated all over again. He was really gone. Marley had misinterpreted her distress and she was glad.

“Only you can decide,” he said. “But don’t make a rash decision just because you’re scared of being on your own. I’ll be there. I’ll get up in the night and change nappies if that’s what you want. I’ll teach him to play the guitar. I’ll help him to become a good person. I’ll be there all the time for you both, I promise. You won’t ever be alone, Autumn.”

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