Read Online Cinnamon Twigs by Darren Freebury-Jones - Free Book Online Page B

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    I lit a cigarette with my car lighter and turned to Lisa. Two days had passed since our night out, and we’d just been to the cinema. We spoke about old times and I asked her if she’d seen her father recently. She’d passed him on a street, but hadn’t spoken to him.
                  A memory filtered through my thoughts of when we’d been children, splashing about in her inflatable swimming pool on a hot day. Streaks of sunlight diffused in the rippling water, and the garden trees pitched thick shadows across the lawn. Cut grass and blooming roses scented the air. But the kaleidoscopic moment and its shifting colors became engulfed by the figure of Lisa’s father. He arrived home, cursing Lisa’s mother. Then he stormed into the garden and dragged Lisa into the house.
                  He pinned her down on the carpeted floor and hit her in the face. Lisa’s mother cried in the corner of the room, incapable of doing anything. I ran into the house and grabbed a knife from the kitchen drawer. It didn’t matter that I was a child, threatening a monster. I couldn’t let him do this.
                  ‘Get off her!’ I screamed.
                  He looked at me, his eyes lazy and drunk, and in that fractured moment he suddenly understood.
                  He packed his suitcases the following morning.
                  I let the memory fade away, dabbed my cigarette out and held Lisa’s hand.
                  ‘I’ll always be here for you.’ I delved into her watery green eyes.
                  ‘I know.’
                  She’d been thinking about the same moment. We’d stayed as friends through the good times and the not so good times. I thought we were meant to stay together, that our childhoods had prepared us and nothing could get in our way. But no, it had to end. There’s a lovely but poignant line in the song You’ve Got the Love that I’ve always felt defines what had to happen with that relationship: ‘Sooner or later in life the things you love you lose’.
     
    CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    Falling Rain
     
    My time with Lisa hastened to its end. She’d been accepted at the University of Kent. I would attend Cardiff University. We wouldn’t be able to see enough of each other to maintain our relationship. We didn’t mention our impending break-up. It just hung over us, refusing to wander away like the proverbial cloud. I couldn’t imagine life without Lisa’s smile, her laugh.
                  I savored every moment with her, listening to the calm rhythm of her breathing when she slept and touching her soft hair. Her side of the bed would soon be empty, and the familiar scent of her hair would gradually leave her pillow. Our futures came first. She’d always wanted to study at Kent and I couldn’t hold her back.
                  We embraced each other in her garden, under an uncharacteristically grey sky, on an August afternoon. She smiled and told me she loved me, but sadness filled her eyes.
                  ‘I love you too. You’ll never know how much,’ I said.
                  Soft rain fell from the heavy clouds. I wanted to hold her forever, to tell her to stay with me. The thought of being alone killed me inside.
                  ‘It’s going to end, isn’t it?’ I looked up at the sky as a gust of wind scattered leaves across the turf.
                  ‘What?’
                  ‘Us…’
                  She didn’t say anything. She just placed her delicate fingers on my lips.
                  ‘I’ll never care for another girl.’
                  ‘You don’t know that,’ she whispered.
                  ‘How could I, Lisa? How could I be happy in someone else’s arms, in someone else’s smile, when all I want to