Chapter - 4
It was gone two am before Naomi got home, and
it was half past ten the next morning when she was woken by an unrelenting rap
on her front door. Dazed, combing her unruly hair with her fingers as she yawned,
she dragged her unruly self to the door.
Her heart stopped for a moment
when she came face to face with a very drawn pale looking Conor. She instantly regretted not removing her make
up the night before, she could feel the mascara crusty on her eyelashes, and
wished she’d worn her new pyjamas instead of the tatty old vest and short
shorts, talk about revealing. Self consciously she tried to tug the fabric
further down her legs as she looked up at him. There was seeing your nemesis
when you were at your best and feeling a million dollars, and there was being
caught unaware and feeling like death.
Conor couldn’t take his eyes
off her. Over the two weeks that he had known her, he’d been searching for her
vulnerability, she was always strong, almost aggressive, yet he had the
constant feeling that he needed to protect her, look after her, but until now
he’d not seen a single reason why. As he looked down at her forlorn, tired
face, unruly hair and skimpy pyjamas, he felt a strong desire to scoop her up
and keep her safe. All animosity and anger towards her had long gone.
“I’m sorry about yesterday.” Naomi offered looking up
at him.
He shook his head gently,
dragging himself away from his rambling thoughts. “I think that was my line?”
She shrugged, “I shouldn’t
have hit you. I was just very angry.” She gestured him into the apartment.
“Come in. Do you want coffee?”
Conor shrugged, “I didn’t come
here for coffee and small talk, I just wanted to apologise for being such a
Neanderthal. I was out of order. I should never have accused you of that. Two
and two in my head obviously made five, and I regret my actions. I know that
doesn’t really come close to explaining or excusing...” he shrugged. “I’m
useless at this...”
Offering a half smile, she
gestured to the lounge, “Have a seat. I’m just going to go and put something more
appropriate on.” The need to gain some protective armour was greater than a
cheap snipe at this man.
“Don’t worry on my account!” He offered with a little
more enthusiasm than was appropriate, then he tried not to smile, he was more
than happy to follow those infinitely long legs into the lounge, but didn’t
want to create yet more animosity.
After a glare, and the
quickest shower in history, Naomi found her newest jeans, a bright red square
neck, sleeveless linen tunic, and a pair of low heeled sandals. He was glancing
through her CD collection when she finally emerged from her bedroom feeling a
little bit more in control.
Looking up Conor sighed, the
facade was back. Once again she was hidden away, all angst and disgust for
reasons that existed before he’d acted so ridiculously the previous day, that slight
intimacy he’d felt when she’d been awkward and vulnerable in her scant pj’s had
gone.
Sighing he offered, “Nice
tunes, you’ve got good taste.”
She nodded without answering,
instead standing with her hands on her hips in question.
Conor knew he had to speak
first, “Are we going to let all this animosity get between us? We’ve got to
work together Naomi. Like I say, I really am sorry for the presumptions I made
yesterday, my actions were...well disgraceful. But since I’ve arrived here
you’ve acted as though I’m the bloody Grim Reaper. Maybe I took your anger towards
me as guilt...I don’t know...I don’t know why else you’d hate me so much.”
Naomi knew he was right, she’d
done everything she could, bar sabotage his work directly, to make things
hostile for him, but she honestly felt she’d deserved that. He had hurt her
friend, immeasurably; it was his fault that she wasn’t here anymore. She
couldn’t forgive that, could she?
“I was
thinking I should take you out for breakfast.” He offered when she made little
attempt to reply.
She shook her head, suddenly
aware of her rudeness “I do a mean bacon sandwich, and I’ve got THE best
coffee! You’re right; we need to bury this hatchet...”
Conor lifted a hand to cover
his mouth as the words; “preferably not between my shoulder blades!” came out
in an uncontrolled rush, under his breath.
Bursting into laughter, Naomi
managed to struggle out the words, “you beat me to that. Ok, ok, I make you
breakfast, we take baby steps? Ok?”
Eyes wide with surprise at the
gesture which seemed against all odds, he laughed, “sold!”
So he spent half an hour
perched at the breakfast bar, watching her expertly make the coffee, and eggs
and mushrooms to go with the bacon in huge hunks of a fresh baguette.
Sitting opposite each other
silence prevailed as they attacked the mammoth sandwiches, silence that was
until she laughed.
“What?” he asked wiping a huge dollop of tomato
ketchup that had landed on his chin.
She shrugged, “just made me
laugh, Mr Serious hotshot lawyer, sat there wolfing my food down like a
starving man, tomato sauce everywhere.”
“I thought I was a fly-by-night?” When she scowled he
laughed. “Anyway, it’s damn good food, and most needed with the hangover I’ve
been fighting today.”
She stopped eating to look at
him, “did you go out last night then?” She was more annoyed that he looked so
good on lack of sleep and an excess of alcohol.
He nodded, “I needed at least
five pints of beer to get rid of my anger! Then another five to stop coming
over here to have it out with you!”
She laughed, “me too! Though
in my case it was to hide after my Mike Tyson impression!”
They both started to laugh,
and despite Naomi’s reluctance to like this man, she found herself enjoying his
company, the conversation was light, easy and neutral. They shared a lot of
common interests, horror movies, football, rock music; it was almost a natural
instinctive action when they walked to the local shop together after eating. With Sunday papers, the two headed back to
hers and sat reading them over another jug of coffee.
Naomi made a mental note that
since the arrival of this man in her life she’d spent far too much time
drinking.
“So why do you dislike me so much?” he asked as he topped
up their coffee cups.
“I don’t dislike you, I don’t know you, and I’ve
always kept myself to myself. Y’know?” She was deliberately evasive, she wanted
to confront him about the way he’d treated Maisy, but something stopped her,
she didn’t know what.
He took a long drink before
meeting her eyes, “I know what you mean. I used to find it much easier to relax
with people.”
“You’ve never looked anything less than at ease with
yourself!” she almost snorted.
He shook his head slowly,
“things aren’t always as they seem, just because I’m polite doesn’t mean I’m
comfortable.”
Silence swept between them and
Naomi instantly regretted being so aggressive. They drank quietly, awkwardness
wafting between them.
“Sorry,” she eventually offered. “I kind of ruined
the atmosphere.”
He shrugged apologetically,
“it was a mutual thing! It’s a long time since I met someone new, let alone
someone I actually like. Even if she hates me!”
“I don’t hate you...”she snapped quickly, only to see
his face break into a grin.
“Gotcha!”
A few days later she was
visiting Simon in hospital, he was bored and she promised to read his
horoscopes from his three favourite newspapers. When her mother died, her
workaholic Dad was hardly ever around, so she’d started to spend more and more
time at the Fisher house. Maisy was a flighty character, her mood so dependent
on the weather, the people she was surrounded by...she was delicate mentally
despite her feistiness and the trouble she caused, Naomi could see that looking
back. She’d taken to reading her horoscope in all the papers at the house
before climbing the stairs to find her friend; it seemed to help to know what
sort of mood she would be in. She’d honestly started to believe that the
predictions were real.
Simon had laughed when she’d
started to fret about Moon’s entering Mercury and bringing dark clouds for
Maisy’s Scorpio sign, or the alignment of fire and earth causing explosions in
her own star sign. Over the months,
years, it had become habit that she’d read both hers and Simon’s before Maisy’s
every day, after she died it had stopped, but somewhere in the last few months
of even years, they’d rekindled the tradition over a morning coffee break.
Simon the sceptic loved her interpretation of both the words and any activities
that might just tie in to the words.
Sat by his bed she lined up
the three sources and read first his – romance from the letter B, money when
Venus crosses the Sun, and the third stage of the moon meant he had a long
journey to make.
Simon laughed, “Well my nurse
today is Becky, do you think I may be about to be swept off my feet?” At that
he gestured at his horizontal legs in his hospital bed.
“Well they got the long journey right...even getting
as far as the bathroom must seem like a distant dream!”
He nodded, “you’re not wrong,
now read Maisy’s, I’ve never looked at a Scorpio since...”
Nodding her head slightly she
turned the page, neither of them had read her horoscope since, but somehow
today...it seemed right, and so she started to read, "'You may be
highly opinionated today so you need to be careful how you express yourself.”
As if Maisy would ever care!” She chuckled before continuing, “‘It's easy to
put so much intensity into your words that others mistake your passion for
anger. There's some bitter and some sweet late this week. The Moon's entry into
sensitive Pisces on Friday warms up your House of Romance until Saturday night,
inspiring imaginative ways to play. Yet loving Venus' union with your potent
ruling planet Pluto on Thursday is anything but mellow. Sharing intimate
secrets as kindly as you can may be hard work but is a powerful step toward
healing relationship wounds.’”
She closed the paper and
sighed, “I miss her every day you know Simon, still.”
He nodded, “I know she was
larger than life. I wonder what scrapes she’d get you dragged into, and if
she’d have finally found happiness. There was no one person out there who could’ve
handled her!”
“How can you be so friendly with him though? I don’t
understand that bit.”
He turned to look at her
surprise on his face, they’d never discussed Maisy’s suicide, the discovery by
a jogger of her body hanging from a tree a few days before her eighteenth
birthday, “Who? What do you mean?”
Naomi floated back to the last
time she’d seen Maisy, a few weeks after she’d slept with Conor at the party,
she’d been up and down since, high when he bothered to acknowledge her, low,
flat when he didn’t. That evening she’d floated into Naomi’s bedroom beaming
from ear-to-ear. She was going to London to stay with Simon, it meant she’d see
Conor and she’d laid out her plans in no uncertain terms. A party, followed by
a night of passion, she’d settled for nothing less.
The next morning Naomi had
woken to an answer phone message, Maisy crying, Conor had humiliated her in
front of her family, turned up to the party with another woman, flaunted this
raven beauty to everyone, then laughed out loud at Maisy’s ‘schoolgirl crush’. To Maisy this was
worse than anything; she was belittled, made to feel so insignificant.
The next evening she was
found, dead.
Shaking her head, Naomi looked
up at Simon knowing that there were tears in her eyes, “Conor...it was him
rejecting her, humiliating her that made her...do what she did.” She’d never
been able to vocalise the words ‘kill herself’, for some reason it sounded so
much worse.
“What?” Simon was struggling to sit up even though he
could barely bend at the waist. “What are you talking about?”
“He slept with her, a few weeks before she died, she
thought he loved her...instead he turned up to a party with another woman and
then proceeded to humiliate her, call her a child. She was devastated.”
Simon was shaking his head, “none
of that happened Naomi, I know that for a fact. Conor had got married a few
weeks before she killed herself; he was on honeymoon when that night.”
“But she TOLD me, when she lost her virginity to him,
then a few weeks later...she called me in the night crying, breaking her heart.”
Reaching out he took her hand,
“how have we never discussed this in the last six years? Look, she was sick, we
all knew that. My parents pretended she wasn’t, but she was so up and down
love, honestly. Things were crashing around her, I wanted her sectioned, taken
to hospital, assessed, treated...but my parents were living in denial and
wouldn’t agree to it. Poor Maisy, she was so troubled and at the end she didn’t
know what was reality and what was fantasy. YOU were the only one she seemed
consistent with, that’s why my parents were so keen on you being there all the
time.”
Naomi was stunned, Simon could
see that she was struggling to understand this different story, so he squeezed
her hand again, “go and see Steph, ask her for the fireproof box in my study,
you never wanted to read her journals at the time, but maybe now you should.”
She nodded numbly, “I’ve been
so awful to Conor...shit!”
Simon smiled, “he’s a good
bloke, and he won’t bear a grudge!”
As Naomi drove her tiny car
across town she wasn’t so sure. It was four in the morning when sitting cross
legged on her bed, she lowered the last of the five journals, she’d cried through
boxes of tissues. The books were no real insight into the rantings of her best
friend’s mind, but through the paragraphs in different handwriting or type, teh topics equally as erratic, she started to see some of Maisy's despair, her fantasy world,
her desperation. She couldn’t recognise events or people; everything was melded
together into a mishmash. Her poor, poor friend.
There was no coffee on his
desk, no pile of opened mail, and no smell of fresh yet floral perfume greeting
Conor as he entered the office, or rather unlocked the office with keys he’d
not had to use until that day. In the weeks since he’d been covering for Simon
Naomi had beaten him to the office every day, and the fact that the coffee was
always brewed and she was absorbed in her work seemed to indicate she had never
just arrived.
So the empty office at nine am
confused him.
He was wrestling with a
ridiculously complicated coffee machine when a waft of perfume hit his
nostrils. Turning he felt a smile grace his lips before he even saw her, and
when he did, he froze. She looked dreadful, puffy red eyes, her usual lustred hair
seemed lank, lifeless, scraped back into an aggressive ponytail. She still wore
those divine heels under her smart business suit, but today she stirred his
protective side as oppose to his sometimes wayward libido.
“Bloody hell Naomi, are you ok?”
She shrugged, “I’m fine.” She continued
bustling at her desk, and Conor turned back to the coffee battle. He appreciated
from his larger family that an upset woman is a dangerous woman and he was
happy to keep his distance for the moment. This didn’t mean he wasn’t concerned;
he just wasn’t after another crack across the face.
After a few grunts, Naomi
stood from her desk and paced across the office to the small kitchen.
“It’s just a simple coffee machine!” she hip barged
him out of the way and took over efficiently making the pot of coffee. Whilst
she was stern, almost aggressive, he knew it was a front, and he was happy to
play dumb arse if it cheered her up a bit.
He was engrossed in some
paperwork when she brought in the mug of coffee he really needed to get the day
going.
“Thanks. Are you ok? Do you want to take some time...?”
“I’m fine. But...” She owed him a huge apology, she
knew that, and that was what was making her so prickly. When she was wrong she
admitted it, but it wasn’t as simple as that.
“I’ve got the Owens coming in any minute for a quick
catch up on their case. Shall we take a slightly longer lunch and just chill a
little?” When she raised her eyebrow he chuckled, “we won’t be skiving, and if
it makes you happy, I’ll work late to make up the time?”
