Page 38 of Refrain
It made it sound simple. It wasn’t though. It would involve testimonies, and trawling over their shared past again in the kind of detail that made him want to rip his veins open and bleed out over the duvet.
“What did you do about the staples?” Xane asked, presumably because he was looking at the bald patches where the scars remained, or maybe it was just the memory of the hospital. Some of Spook’s hair had begun to grow back, enough that it would eventually disguise the wounds. But he’d always know the scar was there—a jagged line that ran from above his ear towards the crown.
“Probably best not to get into the details of that.” He smiled grimly. It’d been messy. “Don’t give me a lecture.”
“You stupid bugger,” Xane muttered under his breath, though plenty loud enough to be heard. Then he squeezed him tight. “We’re going to make this right, Spook. I’m not leaving you here to kill yourself with whisky and Wotsits. You have friends, a girlfriend, who all miss you and lo—”
“Oh, yeah! I am so fucking loved. And you can mutter about the band, but we are not fucking talking about her.” That was apparently where he was drawing the line, accepting one inevitability in order to defray the pain of facing the other.
“She’s been—”
“Don’t…. And don’t even think about saying her name. I don’t want to hear it.”
That gained him a few moments of totally hideous silence. He’d forgotten what an expert Xane was at using the absence of sound to make his case. He was easily as proficient at it as he was warbling his vocal cords. Fuck it, he had his back to the bugger, and he could still feel the weight of everything that Xane was thinking.
He shuffled irritably, peeling himself away from the warmth of Xane’s embrace to stand. For want of anything else to do with his hands, he shoved them into his hair and scratched at his scalp. It’d been furiously itchy after he’d taken the staples out, and while the scabs healed over. That had been an age ago. Three…almost four months. Aeons, and simultaneously, the blink of an eye.
“What the heck did you do to your hair?” Xane asked.
“Nothing.” He lowered his hands, and rubbed at the forest that covered the lower half of his face instead. His beard had long grown past the point of being stubble. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d shaved. What was the point? It was just him here.
“Yeah, that’d explain the bird’s nest.” Xane swiped the hairbrush from off the top of the doily-covered chest of drawers beneath the window. “Sit the hell down again and I’ll sort it.”
“For fuck’s sake, Xane, I can brush my own h—”
“Sure, you can. Sit.”
He sat. It was easier than arguing. If Xane wanted to play stylist, then he might as well let him get on with it. Whatever. At least it would save him the bother of detangling it.
His friend worked through the knots in silence for several minutes, parting the lengths into sections and forcing the brush through them until the strands were silky smooth. While he wasn’t precisely gentle, the process was relatively painless, maybe even soothing in a somewhat distressing way.
“She’s been a mess—”
“Fucking stop it,” he warned, “or I will kick you out in the cold and leave you to die on the hillside.”
“Fine,” Xane agreed. “For the moment. But I’m not going anywhere. Kick me out and I’ll find my way back in again. Just see if I don’t.”
That was a threat he absolutely believed. Xane could be relentless in the same way that time was. It caught up with you eventually, no matter how hard you fought. Better to just accept its inevitability.
-16-
Spook
“I’m going to make us something to eat.” Xane announced after they’d both sat ruminating for far too long with the hairbrush forming the only damned connection between them, and even it was crackling with static electricity.
“I’m not hungry.”
“I’m going to make it anyway. Whether you eat it or not is your prerogative, but some decent nosh might actually help. Wasn’t it you who told me a good portion of our mood is based on what we had for breakfast?”
“Maybe.” It was possible he’d said that. It sounded like something he might have said once, maybe on a day when Xane had been ready to fuck whoever made the mistake of looking at him. Had Xane wanted him to poof out of existence in the same way he wanted his friend to do so now? Things had been calm, steady here on his own. Now, all the monsters were rattling their cages. Not that they hadn’t been rowdy before, but the whisky had done a good job of deadening the noise. That and sleep. Maybe he’d just curl up, and when he eventually woke, he’d realise he was still alone, that Xane wasn’t here and set on fixing him, and he could carry on drinking himself into oblivion.
Ha, ha, yeah! The rest of his brain was yelling at him in Xane’s voice that it was time to stop wallowing in his misery and find his bloody spine. Problem was, he was beginning to think Flynn Hutton had permanently broken it.
“When did you become a whisky man anyway?”
“Dunno.” He shrugged, staring at the discarded hairbrush, contemplating picking it up and throwing it, mostly in the hope that it’d bounce back off the wall and knock him out. “I just figured when in Scotland, do as…”
Xane squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll be in the kitchen. I’ll call you when food’s done.”
