You Mustn't Give Your Heart To A Wild Thing

The bakery smelt sickly sweet, as though a sugar coma was guaranteed if you so much as glanced at the various pastries behind the glass counter. It tickled at my nostrils, raised my eyebrows and sent my mouth into a frenzy.

“Just the one?” She was short, too short for me to have noticed, and her accent reminded me of those I’d heard in the crazy busy delis in New York City, or in gangster movies. It was thick, broad and brash. Why didn’t they have Verity out here welcoming the customers instead of this troll? “Hey, mister”

I jumped from staring blankly at her scrunched face as she swatted me with the menu in her hand, and nodded manically, at what, I wasn’t quite sure. “Just the one?” She questioned again, her small pinprick eyes fixed on me.

“Uh, table f’ one, yeah, plea…”

“Singles are up at the counter” She interrupted swiftly, setting off across the room. Was I supposed to follow or was she…”Before you start complaining or spinning me a load of bullshit about how important you are, or you need an extra seat for your invisible friend or…whatever. It’s singles at the counter, always. We can’t have you taking up space eating one slice when we could have a family eating the whole damn cake, capiche?”

I choked a little at the ‘capiche’, I wasn’t even aware people said that in real life. ‘This broad is something else’ I smirked silently, in my best Robert De Niro voice, in my head.

“Singles, at the counter” She repeated, for what felt like the hundredth time.

“D’ye reckon ye could say single one more time, ‘ve not quite got it yet”

Her face twisted more than I’d ever thought possible; even for her, and the strangest little noise slipped from between her puckered lips. It reminded me of the kettle boiling on the stove at home and from the beetroot shade her body seemed to be turning I wouldn’t be surprised if she shared her temperature with a kettle, along with its noise.

“Sit down” She seethed, flapping the laminated menu in my direction as though to fan me toward the desired seat. “And quit being a pain in my ass, kid”

I did as I was told, eventually; the wooden stool creaking beneath me as I climbed up onto it. “You break it, you pay” Maybe the overly sweet scent of the bakery was to make up for her sour attitude.

“Before you ask, yes, she’s always like that” I glanced up from the menu and met an old pair of gray eyes, peering over a pair of thin framed glasses that sat on the very tip of a long, prominent nose. He was wearing a light blue button down shirt with ’Richie’ on the nametag, and holding a steaming pot of coffee. “Has been since the day I married her, and after forty two years I don’t see it changing anytime soon”

“Ye’ve put up wi’ that f’ forty two years”

He chuckled heartily and pushed his glasses back up to his noses bridge. “Forty six actually, it took me a while to woo her”

“Four years”

“Four years” He agreed, “Would you believe I travelled half way across the country for her? I had to go and fetch her sorry ass from New York; she kept running home when things got a little difficult ”

I couldn’t keep the smirk from spreading across my lips and lifting my entire body. “I’d believe ye travelled half way round the world if tha’s what ye told me. Love is completely senseless”

“You sound like you’re talking from experience” He mused, fetching a mug from the shelf behind him and pouring me a steaming cup of black coffee. “and you look like you could do with a strong cup of coffee”

I nodded appreciatively and cupped my hands around the warm mug he was passing to me. “Thanks”

He shrugged, “It’s what I’m here for” He reasoned, “That, and to schlep around after her all day; my little sweet potato over there”

Through all of his disgruntled musings and complaints he still looked at her in a way I couldn’t describe. She was acidic, sharp and pointed on the outside, but his dusty charcoal eyes told me there was a secret something-something. She was his world, no matter what, and he was still delighted to be there. After forty six years.

“Ye still in love with ‘er” I observed, with no hint of doubt or question.

“She’s my wife” He stated simply. As if it was that simple, that black and white. An understanding of what marriage should be was something older people could lord over the young and inexperienced. I imagine when Richie had said ‘til death do us part’ he’d meant it; he’d vowed that he and his sweet potato would be together forever and that was that. Things were different now.

Now people get married because they’re drunk, surrounded by bright lights and a constant buzz of something widely mistaken for excitement, or now people get married because they think it will repair unforgivable mistakes, slip ups, trips and falls. Love is there, but it isn’t paramount. Instead of wanting to get married, they think that they should. Instead of ‘til death do us part’ it’s ‘until we can’t bare to look at each other anymore’

“You’ll appreciate this”

I watched, fascinated, as he tugged at the sleeve of his shirt. “You look like a guy who would…damn thing” He cursed as he fumbled clumsily with the tiny button. “I don’t know why she even insists on me wearing this goddamn shirt. I’d make just as good pastries in a vest”

I nodded silently, avoiding commenting. He was making a complete hash of undoing the button that was holding his shirt sleeves to his wrist and I was still a little concerned about what exactly I was meant to appreciate. “Here” He exclaimed triumphantly, tugging the blue cotton up past his elbow and thrusting his bare arm toward me.

The ink had faded to a pale navy and the curves, the flicks and the lines of her name barely resembled more than a series of dots scattered about his skin, but it was there. Surrounded by a misshapen heart and pierced with a crooked arrow, it was there. “ ‘er names Juliet?” I mused, biting back a chuckle.

“Everyone has that exact reaction” He smirked knowingly, twisting and turning his arm so as to catch a glimpse for himself. “I did it myself, with the help of an old sailor buddy of mine, Jimmy. It was our one year anniversary” He chuckled lightly to himself, “Not Jimmy and me, Julie and myself. We’d been together a whole spring, summer, autumn and winter…that was longer than anyone we knew, bar our folks. I thought it would be a nice gesture, y’know, getting her name on me and Jimmy told me that, well, if you’re gonna get the name of someone you love on you, you should…”

“…tattoo it ye’self” I finished, cutting him short.

A smile jumped upwards from the curled corners of his lips and danced from his right eye, to left and back again. “Again, you’re speaking from experience” He stated, with the same lack of doubt and question as I had had just moments before. “Where’s yours?”

I shook my head in protest but my hand instinctively moved to the small patch of skin just beneath my watch. “ ‘ve not got one, I…”

“You’ve got an itch, right?” He eyed sceptically. “That’s what that is, just there, an itch?”

A pang of guilt shot through me, but I couldn’t risk joining in with the show and tell. I was just here as an observer, a fly on the wall…or something. I hadn’t shaved because I’d stupidly thought that a slight moustache might fool her if worse came to worst , and I’d avoided wearing anything bright, anything bold and anything Drop Dead, just because. Just in case.

I’d heard Sam telling Tom that Tuesdays were the days Verity worked back of house; I wasn’t eavesdropping as such, it was just that my ears would prick at the mention of her name. Those three syllables, those half dozen letters. Regardless I’d taken today, Tuesday, as my day to scope out the place. I wanted to see her, but only from afar. A safe distance. I wanted to see if she looked as happy as I knew she could.

“If you deny her what’s to say that she has to believe in you?”

I’d never met a more intuitive bunch of people than I had in my short time in Los Angeles. A late night pie had become a half dozen little epiphanies; the hotel receptionist had brought around a revelation that I’d only expect from my closest of friends. And now I was here, in a bakery, talking to a man that could well be the future me. A man dedicated to one woman. A man with a special girls name forever on his arm. “It won’t do you good to pretend she doesn’t exist. Heartbreak isn’t silent”

“Who’s to say ’m ‘eartbroken?”

“Your words aren’t that of a contented man” He reasoned with a slight shrug of his shoulders, “Love brings contentedness; above all else It makes you feel like to be on the very top of the world, all you have to do is remember to breathe”

I was stunned into silence; amazed to the point of being left utterly speechless. Great philosophers, poets, writers, singers, playwrights, dreamers, romantics, had spent their entire lives trying to explain; or at least help me understand, love and all of it’s fireworks and bullshit, but they needn’t have bothered. Not one of them, not one rhyming couplet or one chord progression, not one final scene or one far fetched theory, had ever come as close as the man stood in front of me. Richie in his cornflower blue shirt with one sleeve rolled up, Richie with his wide grey eyes and ill fitting glasses, had made sense of the most senseless thing I’d ever known in one simple sentence.

“If I were a betting man I’d say that your worries are a hell of a lot bigger than simply breathing”

“When ye met Juliet” I mumbled, trying to shake the attention from myself; I could feel Veritys name poised at the tip of my tongue, and that definitely was not the plan. “…’ow did ye know that she were the one?”

“She was the only person that could keep up with me” He grinned, his entire face lighting up. “I was like a tornado back then, a real piece of work. But she was just as wild, if you can believe that looking at her now”

I stole a quick glance at her over my shoulder; she was hunched over a table in the far corner, her pointed finger waggling just an inch or so from some kids nose, whilst her other hand was planted firmly, sternly, on her hip. “Yeah, I imagine she were a real firecracker” I smirked, turning back, front and centre.

“I don’t need a firecracker kid. I need my woman, and that there, is her” He proclaimed, throwing a dishcloth into the air and watching it fall to the counter. I observed as he placed an open palm to it gently and began to push back and forth, cleaning the already spotless surface. “Sure, she’s a thorn. But she’s every beautiful, delicate petal of the rose as well”

I pinched my tongue between my teeth and kept my thoughts on his wife to myself; there was unquestionable adoration hidden in every etched wrinkle of his weathered face. Who was I to cast doubt?

“Were ye’s two ever not t’gether?”

“Were Julie and I ever apart?” He asked, re-arranging.

I nodded slowly, watching his face with a concentration I rarely managed to conjure up. “Weren’t you listening when I said I had to drag her back from New York?” He mused, rolling his eyes at me. “What did you think we both went there for a vacation, that we…”

“I mean, did ye…” I fumbled, “was there ever a point when ye’s weren’t everythin’ to each other? When ye weren’t each others worlds? Didn’ even live in the same world…really”

“I don’t think we’re talking about me anymore”

I refused to answer with neither words nor a meeting of his gaze. “Did ye ever think that maybe ye’d lose her t’another man? Or that she’d be ‘appier with someone…”

“Oliver?”

The shiver that ran the entire length of my spine had me frozen to the spot. I daren’t turn away from the counter, I daren’t turn toward the voice. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

I hadn’t expected such hostility, well not so quickly anyway. “I uh, I fancied something t’eat, an’ uh… here I am. Well, ‘ere this café were really, I…”

“Do you ever not spew bullshit?”

My fists balled automatically, my knuckles catching awkwardly on the edge of the countertop as I turned. I hadn’t counted on this; the last thing I needed was to cause a ‘scene’. Scenes aren’t inconspicuous, they’re not discreet. Causing a scene isn’t the behaviour of a fly on the wall. “Sometimes I hurl it instead” I muttered, looking him up and down slowly. His pale grey skinny jeans that hid just as scrawny legs as my own, the V neck in a sky blue shade that was kind to no one under the armpits in this heat. The guy to his left was a little shorter, a little scruffier, but he too was wearing the V neck and skinnies combination; just in shades a touch or two darker.

“I think you should leave”

“D’ye have a reason, or are ye just worried that…”

“She won’t want you here” He interrupted, his flat tone smacking of just how simple he thought all of this was. That was, until he’d realised his slip up. “I don’t mean that I’m worried she won’t want you here, I…”

“Ye havin’ a problem talking?” I smirked, watching him stumble and tumble over his words with amusement. “Maybe it should be you leavin’ mate? Go ‘ome and practice what ye gonna say in front o’ the mirror first, it might ‘elp, might stop ye soundin’ like such a fuckin’…”

“What are you doing here Oliver?” He repeated, dropping the obscenity; an action I imagined to make him feel a little more adult. “You shouldn’t be here, she doesn’t want you here”

“Ye mean you don’t want me ‘ere”

“One and the same” Alex smiled small. “I don’t want you here, she doesn’t want you here. You’re not wanted”

“I don’t believe ye” I scathed, sucking my lips back against my teeth in a snarl; anger coursing through my entire body in waves and crashes. “Ye can’t speak for Verity, nobody can. I thought ye would know that by now, I mean ye seem to think ye know everything else about ‘er”

“I know that she want’s nothing to do with you Oli” He retorted, “In the beginning I thought I’d help you find her; y’know, be the gent, do what’s best for Verity because I love her. But now I know what happened between you guys in Paris, how you reacted and what it did to her…I think you’re the worst thing to happen to her, and I’ll do anything to keep you away”

“Ye don’t seem t’ be doin’ much right now” I observed, “Am I not stood right ‘ere, where she works, probably a room or two away from ‘er”

“I thought I’d try the polite approach first, just give you a warning” He shrugged, flicking his fringe from where it had fallen in his eyes. “But there’s no point with some people, is there?”

“I don’ usually fit into the ‘some people’ category. I’m one in a million”

“I won’t disagree with you there” He smirked, his eyebrow crooking as his lips curled upward distastefully. “I’ve definitely not met anyone else like you”

I’d spotted Juliet making a beeline for us from the corner of my eye the moment our chests puffed and our shoulders grew bolder, but until now she’d remained completely silent, at our side. Something I wouldn’t have expected in the slightest.

“Do you boys have a problem?” She asked, looking directly at Alex and his companion as if I wasn’t even there. Her face looked soft and placid when she looked at Alex. If I hadn’t experienced her brash tone just minutes before, I would have no trouble believing that her voice always flowed like silk. “I was wondering when you were going to show up to whisk her off for lunch. It’s all she was talking about this morning when we were making the macaroons”

Alex was positively exploding and each intense beam bursting from his toothy grin, was concentrated directly on me. “I managed to get us a reservation at that new Thai place she’s been pining after” He enthused, speaking with careful eloquence to ensure that I heard each and every word. “Thai is her favourite food after all”

“ ‘s fuckin’ not” I guffawed before I had the time or intelligence to censor myself, three pairs of eyes fixing unmercifully, unflinchingly on mine. Watching me breathe in and out, watching my mouth open and close with the same interest and macabre amusement as a cat toying with a mouse between its paws. I took a deep breath, chasing it with a nonchalant shrug; I wouldn’t show the panic striking through me.

“Verity doesn’t ‘ave a favourite food” I said, answering their silent questions with as much conviction as I could muster. “She likes green curry jus’ as much as ‘s likes crispy seaweed, so she could ne’er choose between Golden Dragon or The Floating Lotus on a Sunday, when we’d order take-away an’ rent a film. If it were a scary film mind she’d prefer chips an’ a vegetable pasty from the chippy at the bottom of ‘er road, because it were less messy…less chance of ‘er gettin’ sauce down ‘erself at a jumpy bit, which ye know, she’d a’ways jump at. Come to think o’ it, if it were a comedy she’d do the same…order somethin’ un-messy, because y’know, when she laughs ‘s with ‘er whole body…she looks like ‘s ‘avin’ a seizure or some shi…”

“People change, Oli” Alex interrupted coolly. “What Verity used to be like isn’t how she is now, what she used to like…” He left his words hanging in the air for a dozen or so seconds; letting a spiteful smile curl the corners of his mouth upwards into sharp points. “she doesn’t like any…”

If I’d been thinking I would have cut his sentence short with an equally cutting comment, but I wasn’t thinking. My brain didn’t function when I was around Alex Gaskarth, my body, bar my balled fist, also became momentarily paralyzed.

“You need to get out of my store” Juliet screeched at an ear splitting volume; her hands turned into claws, her nails digging deep into my skin through my sweater. It had happened so quickly I wasn’t even sure what I had done. “I fucking knew you were trouble when you waltzed in here and gave me that cool kid cheek”

The pain flashing back and forth across my knuckles was unbelievable. Every single one of my fingers and the thumb of which they were tucked beneath, was tingling with pins and needles, right to their tips; the only feeling more worrying than that of their blinding, burning ache, was that of something trickling slowly but steadily through every tiny gap between them.

The deep scarlet liquid I tried to catch with a cupped hand beneath, matched that that was smudged in a prominent streak across Alexs face; originating from his nostrils and a small cut sliced at the left of his top lip. It seemed I had hit him with four years of passion, frustration and anger, but wash away the blood, and his smile, wide, huge and honest, and he would have you none the wiser.

He was happy, he was fucking ecstatic that I’d hit him, and I knew why.

I’d been painted as a violent, reckless, animal in more interviews than was fair; there was a wide, apparently worldwide, assumption that I was completely out of control, and Alex knew this. Alex knew this almost as well as he knew exactly which of my buttons to push to get me to hit him. He had wanted me to knock him out because if I did, I’d be knocking any chance of convincing Verity I was a changed man right out of the park. Despite the fact that it had been me punching Alex, it was he who had made the final crippling, murderous blow.

“You think Verity will ever give you another chance” He smirked as I was dragged toward the door by Juliet and the man I’d come to relate to, that would do absolutely anything for her. “after this?! You‘re fucking crazy man. You are out of your fucking mind.”

The grip on my left arm was slacker than that on my right, but I knew I’d overstepped the line; the line was barely a doubt on the horizon, the line may as well not even have fucking existed. “ ‘m sorry” I mumbled softly, quietly so that Alex wouldn’t hear and take it as his apology, but loud enough that Richie could hear and read the sincerity intended for him. I felt his fingers tap, one, two, in acknowledgement but he continued to haul me through the door and out onto the street.

It was loud, painfully loud. Speeding cars, babbling gabbing people, out of tune buskers and Hollywood hustlers, but I read the words that got lost on the way to my ears, from his lips; if only to have them get lost somewhere on their journey towards my brain.

If only to have them seem completely insignificant when I saw her, and him, and the expression on her face as she caught sight of me, mid embrace.

Alex had won the battle, but I was dead set on winning the fucking war.