Dating Down Page 20

  “Gary, you’ve got to stay awake!” I tell him.

  His eyes fly open, but they’re glazing over.

  “If I’m not going to leave you, you can’t leave me.”

  “Okay.” His hand moves over mine.

  My tears fall onto his hand and mingle with thick, sticky blood that covers both our fingers. I try to smile, try to give him hope, but he knows he hasn’t got much time.

  “Tammy.”

  “Yes.” I move my ear towards his lips so I can catch his words.

  “I love you.”

  I kiss his forehead, hoping that special connection we share will infuse him with energy. But he’s failing fast.

  I look towards the street and see the man pacing up and down nervously. He shakes his head and shrugs, and I force myself to smile once again. I don’t want to worry Gary. I’ve got to keep him calm, keep him calm and warm. I’ve got to do everything in my power to keep him alive.

  “Not much longer.” I pant, my arms straining with the effort of pressing down hard on his stomach.

  “Tammy, you need to tell the cops what happened.” Eyes full of tears, his breathing shallow and frantic, he looks right into me.

  “Gary, you need to relax.”

  “Promise me you’ll tell them the truth.” Gripping my arm to make his point, he awakens the guilt in me. “If anything happens to you, Bill, or Jack...”

  “I’ll tell them,” I assure him. “And you’ll be with me to hold my hand.”

  He manages a smile, and I risk glancing back towards the road. The man shakes his head a second time, and my heart sinks into the pit of my stomach as Gary coughs up even more blood.

  “It’s all right.” I raise his head a little and wipe the strings of bloody bile away with my fingers.

  “Sorry,” he weeps.

  “You haven’t got anything to be sorry about.” He’s giving up. I can see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. “It’s me who should be sorry. It’s all my fault you’re in this mess.”

  “No,” he coughs. “You put me back together again.”

  I can’t stop myself from smiling. Even facing death, he is so utterly perfect, and once again I find myself wishing I could turn back time so that none of this had to happen. Unable to find the words, I lean forward and kiss his bloody and swollen lips to show him just how much he means to me. When I look up, there is a blaze of red and blue lights, a panic of sirens, and squealing brakes.

  “Gary, they’re here!” Crying and laughing with relief, I look down at him. “You’re going to be all right.”

  He blinks and manages a weak smile.

  “I told you. Didn’t I tell you it would be all right?” Some of the panic starting to subside, I continue to talk to him, to keep him with me.

  His eyes close and open again. He can’t talk, but he’ll be all right. The ambulance is here.

  “I’ll visit you in hospital every day,” I tell him. “And I’ll look after you when you come out.”

  Eyes filling with tears, he nods.

  “I don’t care what Mummy says. We’ll be together for the whole summer. I’ll stay with you every night and... Gary?”

  My heart stops when I look down and see his eyes stay shut.

  “Gary?” I call to him again, but his eyes remain closed.

  “Gary...” I break off as I realise he can’t hear me anymore, and this strange numbness washes over me. “Gary?”

  “Let us through!” The ambulance men push me aside. Withdrawing into myself, I watch them try to revive him.

  His eyes stay shut as the two ambulance men start to press down on his chest and pump air into his mouth. His body violently convulses, but his limbs remain lifeless and outstretched.

  Someone, I don’t know who, wraps a blanket around me and takes me back to the street. More people come out from their houses to see what’s happening. More sirens, more noise, more commotion, and more black uniforms whirl around us.

  “Come with us, love,” says the policeman, leading me to his car. “We need to know what happened.”

  I watch, helpless, as the ambulance men lift Gary onto a stretcher, a drip in his arm, some kind of oxygen mask covering his face.

  “Later.” I pull myself free. I promised him I’d stay with him, and that’s what I’m going to do.

  “Where are you taking him?” I demand as the men lift him into the back of the ambulance.

  “St. Mary’s,” says one of them. “You family?”

  “I’m his girlfriend.” I clamber into the ambulance, but they hold me back.

  “Family only!”

  “He wants me with him!” I shout, the fear they are going to keep us apart making me brave.

  “You need to come with us,” says the policeman, grabbing my arm again.

  “NO!” I shake him free with a force that amazes me. “I promised Gary I’d stay!”

  I’m vaguely aware of the policeman telling me I can stay, and then we’re off, racing to the hospital in a whirl of sirens.

  Just hang on a few more minutes, Gary, just a few more minutes. You can’t die. You’ve got too much to live for. And don’t, don’t worry about anything, because I’ll look after you. I’ll look after you, Bill, and Jack. And when you’re feeling better, we can go away on holiday, just you and me. All you’ve got to do is live.

  September

  I don’t want to talk about the last few months. I’ve talked about them nonstop to the police, my parents, Daddy’s lawyer, another therapist and Carrie. Weird thing was, talking to Carrie was the hardest conversation, even though she was the nicest. After all, none of this would ever have happened if I hadn’t been so jealous of her.

  “Do you want me to wait?” Carrie asks as she pulls up outside the hospital.

  “It’s okay. Dave’s coming at seven.”

  “Does that mean…?” She hesitates.

  I shake my head. “It’s Dave’s day off. Mummy’s made it perfectly clear she’ll never like Gary.”

  “Sorry,” Carrie apologises.

  “I’m not,” I say. “I don’t care what she thinks. I’m seventeen, and if I want to see Gary, I will!”

  “Your mum isn’t going to make things easy for you.”

  “Who says I’ll make things easy for her?” I give Carrie a quick hug. “And if she won’t buy me a car or let Dave drive me, then I might just move in with Gary!”

  Leaving Carrie doing an impression of a shocked goldfish, I run up to his hospital room to find him sitting up in bed and sketching.

  “Hi.” I go to kiss his cheek and get a sneak peak of what he’s working on, but just like he always does, he closes his pad.

  “Not till it’s finished,” he says, now letting me kiss him. “Did you bring some crisps?”

  “Yes.” I hand him the bag of crisps and everything else he asked for and watch him eat. His face still shows signs of the beating, his left arm’s in plaster, and he walks like my grandfather, but I still go all giddy when I look into his eyes.

  “Want one?” he asks, offering me the half-eaten bag.

  “Thanks.” Taking one, I snuggle in next to him as some film plays out on the TV.

  “Doctors said I can go home next week,” he tells me.

  “That’s great!”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  I twist round to see what’s wrong, but his face gives nothing away. “They’re in prison, Gary, and not getting out – not for a long time.”

  “I know,” he agrees, still sounding vague. “It’s not that.”

  “Oh?”

  There’s a hint of mischief in his gorgeous brown eyes as he pulls out the Trudy Kensington novel I thought I’d thrown away. “Is this jerk really your dream guy?”

  I snigger, and so does he.

  “Your life must have seriously sucked if this is what you wanted,” he continues, handing me the book. “And before you ask, I am never going to sing to you beneath your window, even if that mother of yours didn’t want to kill me.”

&n
bsp; I shudder as I remember how close he was to death.

  “Sorry,” he apologises, being quite serious. “Bad choice of words.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Truth is, if you hadn’t come along when you did, I’d have probably drunk myself to death.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why? It’s the truth.” He looks right into me, his brown eyes so intense I can’t move. “Which is why I don’t want you staying with me out of guilt or nothing.”

  “I’m here because I want to be.” I smile, and just to make sure he doesn’t have any more doubts, I add, “I even took a bus here yesterday because Carrie couldn’t give me a lift, and I had to stand all the way, with some man’s smelly armpit in my face. So if that isn’t proof…”

  He laughs and shakes his head, stopping me mid-sentence.

  “What’s so funny?”

  He looks at me, and despite the fact his hair is now the same brown as his eyes and he’s ditched the naff bangles and earrings, he looks just like he did in the park when we were sitting on the bench after he rescued me: honest and kind. “You go out with me, you’ll be walking all the time. Busses are a luxury.”

  I shrug. “No problem. I’ll by a pair of trainers.”

  “And there won’t be any fancy parties or tennis clubs. I’ve got to somehow fit in work, uni, Jack, and –”

  “I don’t care!” I give him a kiss to stop him listing out all the other obstacles that will stop us being together. “Anyway, I like spending time with Bill and Jack. It’s nice.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure,” I tell him.

  This may not be the picture-perfect ending Trudy Kensington is used to. Ralph never ended up in hospital with months of healing ahead of him. He doesn’t have money worries and a kid brother to look after, and Trudy’s mum isn’t threatening to send her to boarding school in Switzerland to keep them apart. But that doesn’t mean Gary and I can’t have a happy ever after, does it?

  The End

  Thank you for reading Dating Down. If you enjoyed this book, why not join Ella Lewis, assistant to the Demon Magician, as she tries to stop her ex-boyfriend Jonathan from becoming an immortal demon and taking the souls of everyone she loves to Hell, or sixteen-year-old Ben Howard, who is trying to find his way back to the Gray World to save the girl he loves in Crazy for Alice.

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  Thank You

  The Demon Magician

  We’ve all made a wish we’ve regretted, but what if you’ve asked an archdemon like Belphegor to grant it?

  When Ella agrees to help fellow student Jonathan Trent with his audition into a mysterious magic, she never thought she’d fall in love with him. Nor did she ever conceived the three freakish judges named Hellmouth, Brimstone and Blackheart were actual demons, sent by Belphegor to recruit Jonathan.

  Seduced by the lure of riches, his own Vegas show and not having to care for his aged grandparents, Jonathan enters into Belphegor’s service, and despite her own reservations Ella goes with him, in return for Belphegor making her disabled sister walk. Then when Jonathan starts to behave like the ‘The Demon Magician’ offstage and Ella learns the true price of his gruesome magic tricks, she knows she has to stop him, but what can she do? Jonathan, has the power of Hell on his side and all she has is Matthew, her mum’s hunk of a gardener, who has no idea the demon world exists.

  School Monitor

  Richard refuses to believe his socially awkward twin Chrissie has an unhealthy obsession with him. He’s too busy making films and having fun with his best friends, but when the twins are sent to St. Bart’s boarding school, Richard finds himself trapped in a real life psychological horror when he’s framed for stealing, and on a mission to clear his name, discovers he’s not the only actor in his family.

  Crazy for Alice

  Donnie Darko meets Pleasantville in this dark urban fantasy about sixteen-year-old Ben Howard. When Ben accidently kills his father and is sectioned after a failed suicide attempt, he escapes the guilt by seeking solace deep within the recesses of his own mind.

  Waking in a strange ethereal black-and-white world where most people exist as living statues, Ben leaps from New York skyscrapers into African jungles without fear of injury, severed from his emotions, until he meets and falls in love with Alice. But, no sooner does he settle into this strange, new existence than he’s traumatically catapulted back to the brutal reality he left behind.

  Nobody believes he’s spent the last six months in a Gray World. Not his neurotic mother, his policeman brother Gavin, or his friends Mitch and Wendy, and certainly not Dr McKenzie, who’s threatening to give him even more pills. They all think he’s crazy, and why wouldn’t they when he’s been in some strange coma while locked up in a mental asylum?