20: Rottweiler
Georgia transferred Fluffy from his tank to a water jug. The tank needed a clean and she needed something to do. She’d already scrubbed the bathroom, done two loads of washing in the shared laundry, swept the floor and remade the bed with fresh sheets. That last activity was a
leftover from a weekend with different expectations. Now her only expectation was a clean fish tank, because the clean sheets weren’t going to be seeing any action beyond her own tossing and turning.
She took Fluffy’s bridge out of the tank and tipped the pebbles onto the draining board. She scrubbed the glass. But no amount of elbow action was going to be enough to erase the fact she’d let Damon get hurt. She’d had a call from Angus, another from Jamie, a badly mistyped text from Sam. Damon was allowed home this morning, no lasting consequences, but he was still badly knocked around. He could be dead. Only the fact that the traffic was moving so slowly and the truck was near stationary, the taxi driver on the ball, had saved him from being run down. And she’d let that happen, because he’d kept the truth from her.
She’d seen him to a taxi many times by now. It was easier outside her flat because cabs were able to pull up at the kerb. At Avocado it was a little tricker and involved the taxi double parking. But he was always aware of the movement of vehicles, he never made her doubt. Until he stepped straight into the path of the truck. She thought he’d done it because she’d distracted him, because the traffic crawled forward and he simply misjudged. She nearly ate her own heart when he crumpled to the road, effectively king-hitting himself. There was blood everywhere from the cut on his face and his eyes had rolled into the back of his head. He never made a sound. The truck driver stopped the traffic, the cabbie phoned for an ambulance and she sat on the road with his head in her lap and a corner of her shirt pressed to the cut on his forehead, calmly wondering if she’d killed him.
After Angus’s call she knew Damon did it because he no longer had his remaining sight and he’d kept that a secret. So he’d lied by omission and he’d put himself in danger. He’d lied and that made her rethink everything.
And whether he acknowledged it or not, irrespective of what he might want, Damon was going to need more help. And that wasn’t an opinion, not a judgement call, it was a fact.
It wasn’t her plan to fall in love with a man who’d need her in that way again. And it wasn’t hard to figure out that one of the reasons he hadn’t told her was because he knew that.
Angus was angry with Damon. Georgia was like soap scum on the shower curtain. She’d wanted a clean start, and she’d scrubbed her life to get it, but there was a howling inevitability to finding herself in the same place again. Soap scum always reappeared no matter how you tried to avoid it.
She was angry with Damon too, but not like Angus. She wasn’t angry because of the lie, but because of the new twist it put on things. She rinsed the fish tank and set in on the draining board to dry. Fluffy looked at her through the lemon and orange slices painted on the water jug. She was angry because she was going to have to decide all over again what to do about Damon.
Starstruck, then arm’s distance, then on, off, hot, cold, insecure, delighted, fallen, jealous. He made a mess of her, without needing to do anything to inspire it. She had the experience to coolly hold and protect his comatose body, but not the worldliness to deal with the phenomenon of him or the impact he had on her.
And she ached for him in his new world of permanent darkness and for the fact he’d chosen to meet that moment entirely alone.
She loved him. And that was a problem. Because it wasn’t the plan, because it didn’t make sense she would find someone to love so soon, so deeply, and want to push aside all her fears about being needed as a helpmate and not a lover so quickly. What if she did that in the flush of lust, simply jumped in and damn the consequences and she tired of it when the flush fell flat? She’d be stuck again. She’d have done the wrong thing by herself, by him.
She loved him and that might only be a this week, this month, this year thing. She loved Damon and she hadn’t told him that, because it would be as idiotic as staying with Hamish all those years when they didn’t love each other was. And hell, he’d told her she was important to him, not a fly-by-night romance, but she’d known him for two seconds in the scheme of life and that wasn’t near long enough for anything to be anchored in reality.
She also knew what Carmella would say, or rather what Carmella would want Georgia to say in answer to her probing questions, her irritating little therapist nods that gave nothing away, but were designed to prompt a re-evaluation of everything you thought was true.
It was gospel that she’d always been the fix-it girl, but she had a new commandment: to move on from that behaviour because you couldn’t fix people and you shouldn’t try. An alcoholic father, Jeffrey, and a bad marriage should’ve taught her that, and then there was the fact that Damon didn’t want to be fixed. He didn’t need to ask for help, so why was she freaked out about his state of dependence?
It wasn’t rational, but it was real. It gave her an upset stomach and no tolerance for food.
Carmella would say Georgia was taking this all too seriously. That she should step back to gain perspective. That it was important to make new friends and reconnect with old ones. And there was no reason she couldn’t have a good time with Damon as his friend, even a lover, and those things didn’t need to mean it was a lifelong commitment, didn’t make her responsible for him.
And Georgia agreed. Everything Carmella said was sensible, a good plan to live by, sensitive to her triggers and designed with her welfare in mind. Irritating nods aside, seeing Carmella was good for her.
Damon was not good for her, because it wasn’t possible to be so casual, so detached about him. Not from day one, and since then there’d been fish and hot kisses on the gantry, Princess dresses and the kind of sexual attraction that took everything she understood about human emotion and made it do backflips; took everything she understood about being disabled and made it run away and join the circus.
She didn’t care how new this was, how complicated by her background, by Damon’s. She didn’t care that going slow was wise, practical and advisable. Damon wasn’t Hamish. Disability wasn’t one size fits all. She loved Damon in a way that terrified her, because it wiped out every coherent argument she had against their match.
She gave the tank a once-over with a tea towel, rinsed off the pebbles and placed them inside. Next came the bridge and the fake foliage, then she refilled the tank and transferred Fluffy back inside. The fish swam a couple of laps, then went to hide under the bridge. Maybe Fluffy had more sense than she did.
She wasn’t going to hide any longer.
Angus had given her Damon’s address and his home phone number. His mobile had been smashed in the accident. He said Damon had wanted to call, but they’d all been so pissy with him they hadn’t offered him a phone to use. He apologised for that and so did Jamie. Sam volunteered to drive her to Damon’s.
He let her off outside a sprawling California bungalow with a wide verandah and a lush front garden. It wasn’t an ostentatious house, but it was in a good suburb, a lovely quiet street. Damon could’ve been showing this off, but he’d chosen to come to her pokey rental instead. The front door was ajar, rooms opened out either side of a hallway and she could see clear through to a large dining table. A battered suitcase stood in view.
She knocked and a voice called, “If you’re collecting for something we already gave. If you’re selling God, we’re devil worshippers. Go away.”
That had to be Taylor. Was it Taylor’s suitcase? Did Damon share the house, she’d never asked, he’d never said. Maybe he had a housemate. She knocked again and called out. “It’s Georgia. Is Damon home?”
A thump, bare feet on the dark wood floor, a swear word. Taylor appeared in the hallway in shorts, a bra top and a fresh baked scowl.
Georgia waved, smiled in a way she hoped didn’t telegraph fear. “Hi.”
“He’s asleep.”