So Much to Learn (18 page)

I fished my
mobile out of my bag and held it at the ready as I began to walk
purposely towards my car. Any funny business and I was going to be
onto the police quick as a flash.

The guy caught
sight of me as I moved closer to him and pushed himself off the car
before beginning to walk towards me. My heart gave a huge leap of
alarm and then, as I realised who it was, sank down into my
shoes.

"Hello, Brad,"
I said, unenthusiastically.

"Hi, Talia."
His voice was subdued and, with his hands thrust deep into his
pockets and his head bent, he looked and sounded for all the world
like a guilty school boy in the principal's office.

Brushing past
him, I unlocked my car and threw my stuff onto the backseat, giving
myself time to collect my thoughts and get over the fright he'd
given me, before facing him once more.

"So, is there any particular reason you're skulking around my
car in the dark scaring the living daylights out of me?" I asked,
putting my hands on my hips and making sure I looked as
uncompromising as a rock. It wasn't hard to pull off, I'd spent the
last two days coming down on people like a tonne of bricks and
I
so
wasn't in the
mood to deal with Brad.

"We need to
talk," he said, looking pretty stony himself.

"Oh my God,
you're pregnant," I said with a fake gasp, putting a hand over my
mouth then lowering it and shooting him a contemptuous look.

"Can't you give
it a rest for a second?" He snapped and I folded my arms
mutinously, but pointedly closed my mouth. "Do you want to go for a
drink? The uni bar is still open." He gestured down the street as
if I didn't know where it was.

Seeing that a
reply was actually allowed now I looked at him scathingly and shook
my head. "Go in there with you? I can't think of anything I'd hate
more."

"Why do you
have to be so bloody single-minded?" I swear to God it sounded like
he was whining. "You can't see through one little screw up? That
has to ruin the really good arrangement we had going before? We
were good together, you know we were. We got each other, we kept
things light. I meant what I said when I called you, things were
good when everyone got along."

"Then you
should have thought a bit more carefully before you buggered the
whole thing up, shouldn't you?" I pointed out, thoroughly fed up
with him. I wasn't going to stand around in the cold listening to
his drivel any more. I moved round the car to the drivers’ side,
fully prepared to get in and drive off, but Brad grabbed my arm
before I got very far.

I looked at him
in astonishment then down to where his hand was gripping me just
above the elbow. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" I asked
incredulously. "Let go of me."

"See, now,
that
was the biggest problem with us, Talia," Brad said angrily,
still not letting go of my arm. "You didn't ever let me get near
you."

"And,
considering what a tool you turned out to be, thank God," I
snapped. "Now let go." I yanked my arm and he released me.

"But don't you
think I deserved a bit more?" He asked and I stopped dead at his
words. I must have looked pretty mad when I whirled to face him
because I could swear I saw him swallow nervously.

"Deserved?" I
spat. "We're not in the Elizabethan era, Brad, you can't demand
conjugal rights or whatever. You deserve nothing, not from me and
not from any other self-respecting girl." I was whipping myself up
to present a full on monologue but he held up a hand and butted
in.

"I'm trying to
get back together with you, why won't you listen?"

"Why
are
you
trying to get back together with me?" I countered. Then, suddenly,
I remembered the phone conversation I'd had with Simone two weeks
ago. Brad had been telling his friends…oh that was right, it all
made sense now! "This isn't about how sorry you are at all, is it?"
I asked, noticing, with some pride, that my voice sounded almost as
dangerous as my mother's had on Sunday. "This is about how you've
told your friends that even though we've broken up you're still
going to - how did Simone put it? - bed me before the end of the
year."

I could see by
his face that I had hit the jackpot.

"You're
disgusting," I hissed.

"Talia-" he
tried, but I talked over him.

"Look, I'll
make this simple for you. It's over, that's really all there is to
it, don't try to talk to me again."

I wrenched open
my car door, but, much against my will, found myself pausing as he
released a torrent of words at me.

"Over? Well sure, OK. Good luck finding any other guy who
won’t go running for the hills the second he meets your mother or
your brother. Sorry, I meant
brothers
. Fuckin' insane, the lot of
them." He was so petty and mean he seemed to drip poison as he
talked, his face so twisted by anger that he looked nothing like
the guy I'd first met.

I saw red.

"Don't you
dare
talk about my family like that." I obviously prefer verbal
assaults as I'm not exactly able to produce particularly convincing
physical ones, but at that moment I was prepared to rip him limb
from limb and my intent must have shown because he took a couple of
steps back. "Every single member of my family is worth ten of
you."

"Oh, gee, now I
feel bad," he said sarcastically. "Natalia Davenport doesn't think
I'm as good as her family, well what a big bloody surprise! Sorry
if I don't go straight home and kill myself because of my
unworthiness."

I know I've
said it before, but what the hell did I ever see in this guy?

"So what
happens now?" He was still speaking in that weird, angry voice.
"You go home and tell on me and Jack comes and smacks my head into
a wall again?"

"It'd be no more than you deserve," I snapped. "If I had his
upper body strength
I'd
smack your head into a wall!"

Although, wait a minutes,
again
? Wasn't it supposed to be Matt
who had thrown him against the wall?

I hesitated for
a moment and then said, my voice slightly calmer, "And, just to
clarify, when did Jack smack your head into a wall the first
time?"

But even before
he answered I knew what he was going to say.

"Don't act all
innocent, Talia. Despite your frigidity it doesn't suit you. You
know that Jack threw me against a wall the day after we broke up.
Everyone knows that."

And I guess, in
a way, I did kind of know that it had been Jack. He'd been acting
so suspicious that evening and he's always been an awful liar.
Great, the person who told Simone must have got their wires crossed
and thought it was Matt. Then Matt hadn't found out about our break
up overhearing Brad, he'd found out overhearing me! My mind was so
busy concentrating on the conversations I'd had two weeks ago that
I barely registered the fact that Brad was talking again. I tuned
back in pretty quickly, though, once I realised what he was talking
about.

"He's made it
quite a routine you know, Jack the hero. He threw Jeremy Symons
against a wall last year for trying it on with that girl that lives
below you, whatsername…"

I felt like
smacking my head into a wall myself. "Haley," I ground out between
clenched teeth.

"Yeah, that's
the one," Brad looked at me shrewdly. "You don't like her do
you?"

"Haley?" I
asked in pretend surprise. "I don’t care one way or the other about
her."

"Yes you do,"
he pressed. "You really hate her." He smiled, almost gleefully.
"Well, that must suck for you considering how obvious it is that
your precious Jack’s so massively into her.”

“He’s not
massively into her,” I said quickly. Too quickly.

“Careful,
you’re sounding a bit jealous there...” Brad said in a sing-song
voice that made my flesh crawl.

I had to
disengage from this whole stupid thing; anything else I said would
give Brad further ammunition and, besides, I had to get home. I had
to find Jack, talk to him, and then kill him.

"Well, this has
been nice," I said sarcastically. "What a good little catch up
we've had. Now, just to recap, you're the lowest scum ever to take
up valuable oxygen on this planet and I never want you to speak to,
or about, me ever again. Is that clear?"

But before he
could answer and trap me into another spat, I got into the car. I
slammed the door and turned the ignition on, fully prepared to get
the hell out of that car park even if it meant skittling Brad over
the bonnet on the way.

~*~

I made it to
the flat in record time by driving almost as erratically as I had
the night I had found Brad in bed with Allison. Slewing my car into
my usual parking spot, I noted that Jack's Ute was parked in
another spot a little further down. Thundering up the stairs, I
struggled for a few moments getting my flat key into the lock, but
eventually, burst into the main room and looked wildly about.

The place
looked pretty deserted, but I shouted Jack's name a couple of times
and stuck my head into each of the rooms just to be sure that was
the case. Jack’s jacket and bag were sitting on the bed in his
room, and his keys were on the kitchen table so he had to be
somewhere nearby.

Where was he? I
forced myself to stop staring around like an idiot, as if expecting
Jack to pop out from behind the fridge or out of the oven, and
think sensibly. Once I'd done that the answer came to me
immediately.

I ran out of
the flat and pelted up the next two flights of stairs until I came
to the big heavy metal door with 'Roof Access' spray painted on it
in a fluoro yellow. I pushed it open and immediately felt the cool
night air lift the pieces of hair that had fallen out of my
ponytail over the course of the day, and whip them crazily around
my head.

Peering through
the blonde strands, I saw Jack leaning against safety rails at the
far end of the roof staring out at the view. Not able to wait even
the few seconds it would take to reach his side I shouted, "Jack!"
And, although the wind tried to whip the word away, he heard me.
Lifting his hand in greeting he began to walk towards me and,
pushing the hair out of my face, I met him halfway.

"Hi," he
smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling warmly. "Have you had a
good-?"

"So," I cut
across him, my tone vicious enough to make him rock a step back
from me in surprise, "apparently it’s totally obvious that you’re
into Haley."

"What?" He
asked, his face a picture of complete confusion

"And, having seen how keen you were to rush to her rescue on
Sunday night, well hell,
any
night of the week actually, I guess I see why
everyone thinks that." I tilted my chin up so I could meet his
troubled gaze defiantly.

"Wait. Someone
told you I’m into Haley?" He asked slowly and then, when I nodded
curtly, he added, "OK, and? People say crap all the time, why are
you so upset?"

"I'm upset
because it seems that, no matter how much I try to not think about
her, every time I bloody turn around Haley's there,” I almost
howled. “And I don't even mean physically, someone's talking about
her or I hear her voice through a sodding door for example." And,
to put the feather in my 'I'm being an obnoxious child' cap, I gave
my foot a little stamp.

Jack looked down at my foot then back up at me, his eyebrows
raised as if to say 'what was that?' But what he actually said was,
"So this is about Sunday then. Look, I told you before, she needed
help with her car,
that's
all
."

"But that's
not
all!" I objected. "There's always something else, something
she needs to borrow or shelf she needs putting up, and, on top of
that, you and Matt invite her out with us all the time even though
you know that I-“

"Now we're
getting to it," Jack interrupted. "This isn't about Haley at all,
it's about you. So, please, just for one moment, stop ranting about
Haley and tell me what’s up with you. And don't tell me nothing
because, as oblivious as you claim both Matt and I are, even we’ve
noticed you've been a total nutter the last couple of days." His
expression softened as I stared at him, my hard expression slipping
as he dealt out some reality. "Come on now, the truth."

The wind had
picked up, pulling at my loosely tied pony tail until the hair tie
slid out and my thick hair danced gleefully around my face,
seemingly revelling in its freedom. I didn't care, though, I was
too busy trying to think how I could explain what was going on with
me in a way that would make even a tiny bit of sense.

"Sunday night,"
I muttered, eventually.

"What?"

"Sunday night," I repeated, this time a bit louder. "You're
right, this is about Sunday night. When we were on the couch
together I felt…" No that was going a bit too far, I revised my
sentence. "…well, anyway, I
thought
that something was going to happen. I was flying
pretty high on that something and it turns out that you weren’t
feeling anything." I was blushing so hard by this point that I
could feel my cheeks throbbing.

"Hey, what
makes you think I didn't feel anything?" Jack said gently and the
fact that he was trying to be nice and not hurt my feelings made my
face burn even more.

"Oh, I don't
know," I said scathingly, resorting to my tried and true method of
going on the attack when what I really wanted to do was flee,
"maybe the fact that the second there was the slightest
interruption you dumped me off you and practically bolted out the
door?"