Crush, Crush

I'd arrived at the Way's house a little before 7 but found I couldn't leave the car. I was staring straight ahead at the garage door, afraid to look in the rear view mirror. I'd caught a glimpse of my old home as I pulled in the drive and wasn't expecting it to hit me so hard. My whole adolescent life was in those walls. Everything I knew of my parents was linked to the rooms in that house. We never went out much, what given my mum's issues with her depression and my lack of other family to visit. All my memories of her were in that house. All the good ones, anyway. The rest were in the hospital. Admittedly, a few were here, at the Way's, when she used to take me round with her as her and Mrs Way had a coffee and a chat. Of course, I was never at the table with them to remember much of her here at all. I'd been too young. They would stick me in front of the TV with Mikey to watch the afternoon cartoons and we'd giggle together. Gerard had probably been somewhere in the background.

"Uhh, Alison? Are you alright?" Gerard stood awkwardly at the driver's side window, leaning down to speak through the gap I'd opened up for some fresh air.

"Fine!" I was quick to snap out of it. "I was just..." God, think. Say something. Anything! "... I lost a pen lid and was looking for it." Brilliant.

"Uh-uh... You gonna come inside?" He waited there as I took a few steady breaths before opening the door, stepping outside and facing the place I grew up in as it stared me down from across the street. Not a lot had changed. There were a few new plants in the garden and the window sills had been repainted but other than that... it was home. I felt Gerard's arm curl around me, his warm embrace more welcome than he could have known.

"A little old lady lives there now. She's 90-odd. My mum says they share their recipes."

"That's sorta cute." I let Gerard lead me into his house, the smell of curry filling my head the instant he closed the door. I thanked him as he took my jacket and dumped my bag by the coat stand where I used to throw my backpack after school. I smiled at the memory.

"Alison! Oh honey, look how much you've grown!" Mrs Way was holding back tears as she wrapped me up into her arms. "It's been so long." Gerard gently took the wooden spoon from her hand and put it back in the saucepan. "We have so much to catch up on."

---

Dinner was absolutely wonderful. Mrs Way had shown me the photographs of my mother and was right in that I had never seen them, though that came as little surprise to me. I'd never been one to bother digging up the past like that. I hardly ever found anything good to come of it.

We'd been chatting on and off in the lounge room over tea as the TV hummed softly in the background. We talked a little about what I'd been up to, with me admittedly not wanting to divulge too much, and then about her divorce. I could hardly remember Mr Way. He wasn't around a lot, back in the day, what with working so late all the time. I wondered if that was why they'd broken up in the end. Mrs Way seemed like the kind of person that needed those she loved close to her. I was about to ask but upon turning my head, I came to realise she'd fallen asleep, cup of tea still clutched in her hands. I got up to take it off of her before there was a spill and decided I'd call it a night.

"Hey, thanks again for coming over tonight," Gerard's voice sounded softly behind me as I went to place the cups in the sink. "It means the world to my mum to know you're safe and well."

"She fell asleep in the lounge room," I said, looking past him to check she was still there.

"She does that a lot, I find. She sits up and does the crosswords. I hear her head off to bed once the TV wakes her."

"Well, it was a pleasure to be here tonight, Gerard. I'm gonna head off."

"Do you wanna go for a drive?" His question had caught me off guard. A sickly sweat made its way down my spine. "It might be nice just to catch up a bit ourselves. I mean, if you don't wanna then that's cool..."

"It's not that, Gerard. It's just... well..." His eyes were burning into mine as he searched for the truth I wouldn't give him. "Where do you wanna go?"

---

I could hardly believe I'd agreed to this, I thought to myself, as Gerard drove my car to an undisclosed location.

"I used to come here a lot when I was younger. Just to think. People would park here on the weekends which sorta ruined it for me for a while, until I realised I could too when I could find a girl. People stopped parking when they found a body in the lake. It was somehow not as romantic as it was before." The car came to a halt and Gerard got out, walking a little way away where he lit a smoke. He held it out to me as I approached.

"Thanks."

"I took you here once. Do you remember?" I looked out to the lake. I remembered. I remembered he'd been crying that day. I remembered it had been the beginning of the end.

"No."

"I wasn't planning to fuck you or anything. I mean-" He paused to blow his cigarette smoke up at the night sky. "-It wasn't that I didn't want to, you know? Things were just so complicated."

"Why are you telling me this?" Gerard focused his attention back on me as he observed me with an uncomfortable intimacy.

"I think we ought to talk about it. It's been 10 years, Alison. We owe it to ourselves to get past all this, don't you think?" He was hurt; I could hear it in his voice, though I couldn't understand it.

"I don't know what you're talking about. I don't want to talk about this. Not now. Not ever. The past is in the past, Gerard."

"Only it's not. You've been dragging it around with you since you got to Jersey. You still hate me and I don't see why. I was a kid, Alison. Just a punk-ass kid with no direction in life."

"I don't hate you-"

"I was self medicating. I was starving myself. I slept around and spent 90% of my days drunk. You couldn't have met an unhappier person at that time. I took you here because I wanted to die. I wanted to be that body they found in the lake." Gerard was shaking now. Tears were beginning to fall from his eyes and catch the loose strands of his hair, melding them to his face. "I'd been so sure of myself too until I'd seen your face. You pulled me back that day and you don't even remember."

"I don't hate you, Gerard. I never hated you."

"I know. I'm sorry," he sniffled. He turned to face the lake, the little ripples in the water calming my racing nerves as I crept up behind him, placing a hand on his shoulder.

"I hope you didn't take me here this time for the same reason..."

"I'm a lot stronger than I used to be. You weren't here... you couldn't understand. Clarissa helped pull me out of a very dark place."

"She did the same for me." I watched Gerard's face flash 20 different emotions before he settled on inquisitive. "I was in a bad place. I fell in with the wrong crowd... with people like you. I can't tell you the number of close calls I had and none of them had woken me up until Clarissa had witnessed one. The last. That was the longest I'd been in hospital for. I think if I wasn't back in Jersey I'd probably be back in that bad place. I'm not as strong as you. I don't have family to support me or fans looking up to me. I only have me. It's a very lonely world at times."

"I had no idea. Clarissa never said it was... she never said you were in such a bad way."

"Would you have cared?"

"Absolutely."