Page 30 of Rewrite the Stars
I, in the meantime, looked around the living room, wondering what excitement there was to inform him of. I longed to be able to run to him, but I knew it was already too late – the moment I had dreaded, the moment I knew would challenge us one day, had come.
‘Well, Kirsty’s on a date with a sailor,’ I said, keeping it light, and he laughed at the very idea of it. Kirsty’s love life always did entertain us, no matter what else was going on in the world. ‘Only Kirsty could go to the gym and meet her very own Popeye.’
Tom paused for a moment.
‘I miss your humour,’ he told me from his apartment in London, which looked very white and smart from what I’d seen on video calls. ‘God, this is really shit, isn’t it, Charlie? We’re just going in totally different directions and it’s killing me inside.’
I knew what was coming.
‘I’ve met someone, Charlotte,’ he said to me suddenly. The fact he called me Charlotte made the gap feel even wider. ‘I wasn’t looking for someone, but it just happened.’
I wasn’t surprised at all, but it still wasn’t easy to hear. If truth be told, I’d been enjoying my daily chats with Jack, and although I knew it was nothing more than friendship, it had made me realize that Tom and I were going in very separate ways.
‘It’s that girl, Claire, isn’t it?’ I said to him, grasping a soft woollen throw from the back of the sofa and pulling it towards me for comfort. ‘The one from the record label who took you all to the States in the summer?’
More silence.
‘I’m not mad at you, Tom,’ I whispered as my heart cried sore for what we were facing up to at long last. ‘I don’t expect you to wait for me forever. You’ve been so patient for so long, but I can’t hold you back any longer.’
His voice cracked a little, just like it did that day when we first met, which told me he was nervous.
‘She’s a really nice girl, Charlie.’
I closed my eyes tight and was so glad he couldn’t see me.
‘I’m sure I’d really like her.’ I forced out a fake laugh as I blinked back tears, feeling like my whole insides had just been ripped in two. ‘Look, we don’t have to kid ourselves any more.’
‘I’m not saying it’s anything serious, Charlie,’ he said, clutching at straws. ‘I mean, it’s been six months since we saw each other and I didn’t want to even like anyone else, but it’s a big lonely place here and—’
I just wanted this conversation to stop already. ‘Tom, please!’ I begged him. ‘You’re thirty-three years old, you sing in a band that’s going places, you’re living your big dream and I live in a different country. Like you say, we’re going in different directions. I think the world of you, Tom, but I can’t keep this hold on you. You deserve more.’
I still love you and always willwas what I really wanted to say, but I wouldn’t make him feel any worse for what was going on in his life right now. We’d come to a natural ending, led by circumstances and odds stacked against us.
‘You’ll always be the one,’ he whispered to me and my stomach flipped. ‘I mean it, Charlie Taylor. No one will ever come close to you. You know that and I do too.’
I dabbed under my eyes with my pyjama sleeve and focused on the glitz and glamour of theStrictlyperformers on telly. They all looked way too sexy and glamorous for my mood so I turned it over to theX Factorwhere someone was singing an Adele song about how ‘we could have had it all’.
Wonderful. I turned the TV off.
‘If you tell me not to do this, I won’t,’ he said, giving me one last chance to salvage the crumbs of our so-called relationship, whatever type of relationship it even was to begin with. I could feel his longing despite the distance. He wanted me to tell him to wait just a little bit longer. He wanted this mention of another love interest to buck up my ideas and move me to take action at long last.
I never wanted to make this final call, but I knew, no matter how much my heart was breaking, that I couldn’t switch off from the deep, raw guilt that lay within me. I couldn’t rub Matthew’s nose in it by bringing Tom into our lives again, no matter how much I wanted to be with him. It was out of my hands, or at least that was what I was trying to convince myself.
‘I can’t tell you to do that, Tom,’ I whispered, gripping my sleeve as hot tears poured down my face. ‘I wish you well with everything in life. I wish you all the love in the world, always.’
‘No, Charlie,’ he pleaded. ‘You don’t want this. I don’t want this. I won’t even go out tonight. I’ll wait for you, even if it takes forever.’
I pictured Matthew in his wheelchair, his whole life wasted over feelings he couldn’t control, an identity that he hadn’t been able to face up to for so long, and now a life of suffering over a bad decision he had made because he was so upset at me and Tom.
‘I’m sorry, Tom,’ I told him. ‘I can’t hold you back any longer. Goodbye.’
He hung up at that and I spent the entire evening wailing like a banshee over how life was so shit and so unfair. I wanted to jump on a plane and interrupt his evening with the ‘lovely Claire from the record company’ and just be with him once and for all. But I couldn’t do that.
The phone calls stopped. The emails stopped. And in the meantime, Dr Jack who had coaxed my brother into a wheelchair in public for the first time, who read inspirational books aloud to him when off duty, who sat with him when he cried and held up a pillow for him to feebly punch out his frustration, became more and more involved in my daily life.
And now my parents are mad about him and I might quite like him too. And deep in the back of my mind is that Matthew ended up in a wheelchair because of me and Tom Farley but, because of Dr Jack Malone, he is learning to live with it.
In some strange way, being with Jack helps to ease the guilt I’ve held onto since this whole sorry accident happened, and for the first time in a long while, my parents, it seems, are proud of me. I have a place in the family that extends beyond my title as a teacher, or the quirky baby of the house. I am Charlotte, the caring one who is seeing Dr Jack Malone, the man who will be forever credited with getting my ailing brother back on track at long last. I have a well-respected, reliable man by my side with no turbulent historical connection to my family. Something I could never have had with Tom, so I’m on the right path at last and the guilt I’ve been feeling is slowly settling, or at least simmering for now.
