Page 73 of Barre Fight
“Nah, there won’t be enough room in the car. I’ll go, and then… Well, I figured they could stay with us. At our place, I mean. I’d go to Beth’s to free up a bed. And since the couch isn’t really big enough to sleep on, is there somewhere you can go?”
“Um…” Justin thought. Ricky and Matty shared a small flat in Redfern, and he could crash on their couch. But god, his entire body was aching for a bed right now. He couldn’t impose on Marcus and Heather, not when they had a baby to deal with. Alice and Izzy’s place would be empty. Perhaps he could get a hold of Alice and ask if she had a spare key stashed somewhere? Had she become that kind of friend on this tour?
He must have been silent for a little too long, because Missy gave an impatient sigh. “You still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Just trying to think.” But thinking was so hard right now. His brain felt waterlogged, overloaded by fatigue and fear. He itched to get up and pace the aisle of the plane, but they were all the way back in row 53, and besides, after all these hours scrunched in a plane seat, his legs felt almost too stiff to carry him.
“Okay, let me know when you’ve figured something out,” Missy replied briskly. “I’m going to grab some stuff from the flat and then get on the road. I’ll be there in a few hours and we’ll call when we’re on our way back to the city. Sound good?”
Justin ran his hand through his hair again. “Sounds good. Drive safe. I’ll… figure something out.”
The call dropped, and Justin put the phone back in his lap.
“What’s going on?” Ivy asked.
“Their houses. Gone.”
“Oh, god. I’m so sorry.”
He nodded in acknowledgement, but he couldn’t accept hersympathy at the moment. He felt as though, if he took it in, if he really held on to it, he’d break down right here on the plane. “My parents and my aunt are going to stay at our place until they can go home. I’m trying to figure out a place to sleep. I’m going to try to get a hold of Alice,” he went on vaguely, but he stopped when he saw the way Ivy was looking at him, her face awash with warmth and tenderness. He’d seen that look before, when he’d ventured cautiously through the adjoining door and told her the truth about why he’d refused to apologize to a bully. It had been the moment he’d truly understood that Poison Ivy, the woman he’d thought was cold and pitiless, was more compassionate and protective than he could have fathomed. She looked up at him—lookedintohim, it felt like. As though she could see all his guilt, and his fear, and his desperate need to know that his home was safe, and his equally strong desire to never set foot in the place ever again.
“Stay with me,” she said. The words were quiet, but matter of fact.
“What?” Around them, their colleagues were packing up their stuff, eager to stand and deplane, but he kept his voice low in case someone heard them.
“Stay with me,” she said more quietly, and with less certainty this time. She raised her eyebrows in insistence, or perhaps in self-doubt. “If you want to, I mean. If you don’t have anywhere else to go. We can even stop by your place and get you some clean clothes and whatever else you need. And obviously we’re tired and you’re upset and we don’t need to… do anything.” He didn’t say anything, and she kept talking, sounding less and less sure of herself as more and more words spilled out of her. She must have been tired, too, because she was not her usual certain, incontrovertible self. “It wouldn’t have to be for a long time, I mean, your parents won’t have to stay at your place forever, will they?”
Justin managed a small smile. He had to put her out of her misery. “I have somewhere else I can go,” he said, voice still low. And it was true, he did.
She gave a little nod of assent. “Right. Of course you do, I just thought I’d offer, in case?—”
“But I want to come home with you.”
Ivy shouldn’t feel strange about having Justin Winters in her home. He’d been here before, after all, she told herself, as she dug her keys from the bottom of her bag and unlocked the front door. They pulled their suitcases in behind them, the silence between them awkward and heavy as the humid March air that had greeted them as soon as they’d left the terminal and headed for the cab rank.
But this time was different. When he’d come here a few weeks ago to all but beg for her help, he’d been her enemy. Or at best, a grudging colleague who barely tolerated her. Now he was… what was he, exactly? What was it that they’d agreed to that final night in New York City, tangled up in hotel sheets and each other? Ivy didn’t know for sure. All she knew was that on the plane this morning, when he’d gotten off the phone from his cousin, Justin had looked lost. And that the sight of him afraid and at loose ends had made her heart twist in her chest. There was nothing she could do about the fires that had engulfed his hometown and left his family without a place to live. But if crashing at her place—and they truly would be crashing, because good lord, she was so, so tired—could make him feel a little less lost, then of course he should come home with her.
In the cab on the way back to her place, he’d told her what they knew so far. The town had been hit hard and lots of structures hadn’t survived. His family and many of their friends werein a shelter in a mountain town, with their pets and whatever belongings they’d managed to fit into their go bags and shove into their vehicles before fleeing. The fire had swept through after nightfall, so they’d had to evacuate in the dark. For some reason, Ivy had shuddered when he’d told her that. Something about fleeing your own home under cover of darkness, because it was too dangerous to wait for morning, made something cold and prickly skitter down the back of Ivy’s neck.
She’d thought of her grandfather, as she had so often lately. He’d never told her about the day he’d fled his childhood home in Vienna—or had it been at night? She didn’t know. He’d only ever said that the train spirited him out of the country, like it did for so many other children. His story always began there, with the train. Perhaps he didn’t remember the details of leaving his home for the last time. Perhaps he remembered them and couldn’t bear to talk about them. However it had happened—daytime, nighttime—Ivy knew he must have been terrified.
“Shower and nap,” she groaned, abandoning her suitcase in the living room and flopping down onto the couch.
“Shower and nap,” he agreed. He didn’t join her on the couch, just stood next to his suitcase, a little stiff despite his obvious fatigue, and looked around the room. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one who felt it was a little weird having him here. But this was whatI want more of youmeant, wasn’t it? Or maybe he’d meant “let’s go on more dates” and not “I’ll basically move in with you the second we land”?
“Any preference on the order?” she asked.
“Shower first, I think,” he said on a yawn. “The trick with coming back from tour is to stay awake all day if you can and go to bed at a normal bedtime, to kick the jetlag.”
“There’s no way I’m”—Justin’s yawn was contagious—“staying awake until a normal bedtime.”
“Mmm,” he said distractedly, pulling his phone from hisback pocket and checking it for the hundredth time since they’d gotten off the plane. Ivy felt awful all of a sudden. Of course he wouldn’t be able to sleep when he and his family were still waiting on news about their home, their neighbours, their town.
“Spare towels are on the shelf over the toilet,” she said. “I’m going to go lie down.”
He nodded, and once he’d disappeared into the bathroom, she pulled off her boots, heaved herself on the couch, and fell into bed.
When she woke up, it took a few minutes to remember where she was. Home in bed, the midday summer light sharp and bright even with the blinds closed. She lay there, eyes closed, and listened as a bus trundled by on its way to Coogee Beach. She’d missed that light, and the relative quiet of this place. As thrilling as New York City had been, perhaps Justin was right that it was a bit too much to handle for more than a week or two at a time. It was true that the city seemed to pulse with a unique, exhilarating energy. But in return, it seemed to have sapped all of hers.
