Read Online Good Enough to Trust (Good Enough, Book 2 - Going Back) by Zara Stoneley - Free Book Online Page B

though she was afraid of saying the wrong
thing.
    “You know how
sometimes you have good times with someone?” I gazed into my glass and could
see the way he used to be, when we first met, his smiling face, clear,
uncomplicated. “And when it’s over you go back to a place you shared just half
hoping everything will be back how it was. That they’ll be there and you can
sort it all out?” I glanced up and she was watching me. “Well, I think it was a
bit like that in my head when I set off down here, but I didn’t expect to see
him. It was all too long ago, we were different, and I just wanted the feeling,
not to actually make it happen.” She half nodded, though I wasn’t convinced I
was making any kind of sense at all. “We came down here as kids, Holl, then it
happened and I rushed back and he never followed me. I thought he would, and he
didn’t. Oh yeah, I blamed him as well as me, and told him not to come, but
y’know I just thought…” I’d thought lots of things over and over again, but
mostly I’d just thought that he hadn’t cared after all.
    “He never called,
at all?”
    “Eventually, but
it was too late. It was far too late and I told him if he ever came near me
again I’d call the police.”
    “What do you mean
too late?” She knew impatient was my middle name, I just got on with things,
she probably thought I was talking about a week, two weeks.
    “I’d gone home,
sorted things and gone back to school when the new term started and it was like
several months later, when I was doing my ‘A’ levels and everything. I’d
applied to Uni and decided that whatever happened I was going to get qualified,
just, well just concentrate on work and make Mum—” I swallowed, tried not to
think too much “—make Mum proud, not be some bummer like he was.” Like hopeless
and trapped with a man who beat you up, like Mum had been. Except sometimes I
had a feeling she’d stayed because she wanted to, not because she had to. “Dane
tried to make me talk to him, but he didn’t understand.”
    “I don’t get it,
what has Dane got to do with all this?”
    “They’re cousins.
Dane and Ollie are cousins.”
    There was a
silence while she took it all in. “Cousins?”
    “Yup. I was
seventeen when I met him and he was nineteen, the same age as Dane. They were
buddies really, except Ollie was the bad boy, and I guess at first Dane was
jealous when Ollie started spending time with me. And he went off the wall when
I told him me and Ol were heading off for the summer. He’d lost his mate.”
    “Are you sure he
wasn’t jealous of Ollie? I mean you and he…?” She gave me a pointed look, which
I did my best to ignore.
    “Whatever. And
anyhow, he’d met Sal so what was it to do with him? He said I was too young,
and being daft and I didn’t know what I was doing. That Ollie was just out for
a laugh.”
    “Which made you
more determined?”
    “Well, yeah.” I
couldn’t stop the little smile that crept out when I thought about how Ollie
had wrapped his arms protectively around me and told Dane to take a hike. He’d
told me he’d look after me, he’d said ‘trust me’ and I had. And Dane had given
us a look that almost said he’d never forgive us. “But, part of it was that it
was so shit at home.” I stared down at the table and wished I didn’t have to
think about it. “Dad was getting worse, he’d come in pissed and be throwing the
dinner at the wall.” When we were little, Meggie and I would sit in our room
with our hands over our ears, but it didn’t help. Pain can get through any
barriers. Then my big sister Meg had moved out, and it had just been me. It was
always the same, shouting, hurling, abuse, muffled screams and then the bang of
the front door. I never could remember what it had been like at the start, when
we were young. Never remembered the good times that Mum insisted we’d had. “She
wouldn’t leave him, it didn’t matter what I said she’d just give me a