Page 23 of Let Me Love You (Excess All Areas 5)

“Wow. Really?”

Ben grinned. “Yeah. Really. Call it my get well soon gift.”

With details exchanged, he said his goodbyes and headed to Nan’s room.

“Morning, cuz,” Jase said as Ben entered. Cerys sat next to him, yawning as she waved.

“Morning. How’s Nan?” He leaned over the bed to squeeze Nan’s hand and kiss her forehead. She felt cool to the touch, and he hated it.

Matt stood near the window. “She’s comfortable. Not a whole bunch of change, but the swelling in her brain has gone down, so that’s apparently a great thing. I guess it’s just time. You just missed Luke. He and Willow are heading down to Brighton for a couple of days for his mum’s birthday. Now you’re here, I’m out. Said I’d give Iz a hand unloading all the stuff from an event she was involved in yesterday.”

“And I’m getting this one home,” Jase said, sliding a hand over Cerys’s shoulder. “She worked through the night with a band and came straight here. You okay by yourself for a couple of hours until Auntie Pat gets out of work?”

Ben nodded as his friends headed for the door. “Yeah. I’ll message if anything changes.”

He pulled out his guitar and began to strum, singing along to choruses he could remember. Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”. One of the earliest songs he’d learned, thanks to Nan, was Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May”, with its great guitar intro. Same with Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds”. He kept the volume quiet, sitting really close to the head of the bed, not wanting to disturb other patients or the nursing staff. While the song was about jealousy, the lyrics about not being able to go on together hit home.

He ached down to his bones.

Standing, he placed the guitar on the table and then sighed in the silence. He felt agitated.

Unsettled.

“I don’t get why my life feels like it’s going backwards, Nan. It’s like sand slipping through my fingers. It’s like, whatever I want, the opposite happens.”

He re-organised the things on her small table. A tissue box. Some flowers Willow had brought. Cards.

“But I have to believe there’s some divine timing or something at play here. Because I’m so close to the fucking bottom, that I don’t think I can get any lower. And when you get to that place, there’s only one way you can go, right? Up.”

He pulled out the plastic chair and sat down next to the bed, reaching for her hand.

“So much has happened in the last eighteen months. We’ve gone from being total nobodies to being recognised everywhere we go. The night Jase and Matt had that massive fight at Izabel’s fundraiser, I checked my bank account and I had four hundred and eighteen quid in there. Today, I pulled out fifty quid from the bank machine and it said…hang on.” He reached for his wallet and tugged out the receipt. “It says I’ve got one million four hundred and eighteen thousand. Which, holy shit, that’s a lot of cash. It echoes the four hundred and eighteen quid. I didn’t notice that earlier. It’s a sign, right? And you need to wake up and tell me angels exist like you always do. How angels send us signs.”

Ben squeezed her hand, waiting for a flicker of recognition, the movement of her eyeballs behind her eyelids. Anything.

She remained still.

“Anyway,” he continued, pushing down the hope that always rose when he spoke to her. “I guess what I am saying is that my whole world has been stood on its head and I’ve been there for everyone else, but I guess I feel like…” What analogy would Nan use? Something about baking, he guessed. “I feel like a sponge cake that’s so dry you need water to swallow it. I feel like life and everything else has been so sucked out of me that I’m just existing. Waking up, doing what’s expected, going to bed. I’m beginning to wonder if this is what burnout feels like. Because, before we got lucky with Willow using our song in her video, I worked the hardest. I paid the most. And I don’t want to dismiss what Matt did, because Matt definitely was the hardest worker in the band, but I did the most to keep us all afloat while he was doing it. It was Luke’s van, but I did all the work on it and paid for everything to keep it on the road. I worked all those shifts so I could afford to give Matt money for rehearsal spaces for us, to loan the others when they were skint, knowing I’d never get it back. When we didn’t have enough money to go on the road, I paid for our hotel room out of my own pocket. So, yeah, burnout.”

Ben stood and walked to the window, placing his head against the cool glass.

Burnout.

He’d said it out loud by accident, but now he’d said it, it felt right. He was pouring from the emptiest of cups and didn’t have a lot left to give anyone.

Especially himself.

But he didn’t even know where to begin fixing it.

Google would probably be a good starting point.

Perhaps an overhaul of what he ate. Or what he put into his body and mind, in general. Maybe build a daily routine for when he was home, put some normalcy back in his life.

But it was so much more than that. And it overwhelmed him. He wandered back to his nan and sat down on the side of her bed, taking her hand again. Her fingers were bare. It felt wrong. She’d worn the simple gold band of marriage every day her entire life, but it had been removed for her surgery. He guessed his mum had it for safekeeping.

“Matt asked me what I want out of life the other day, and I couldn’t answer him. And when I’ve tried to think of it since, the answer is everything. Every. Fucking. Thing. I want to go to Bali and get some sun and sleep. And I want to flip a van and turn it into a little retreat I can fuck off down to Cornwall in. I want to learn how to surf and do nothing for a month straight. I want to move houses and never want to leave the one I have now. And I can’t decide if it’s indecision or fear of choosing the wrong thing that makes me choose doing nothing. But I think I need to answer that question or I’m going to feel like a sponge cake in need of…shit. I can’t carry on the analogy, Nan, because I’ve no fucking clue what makes a cake moist.”

“Creaming,” Nan said, her voice dry and raspy.

---