Max
“Excuse me,” I said, my voice tight. Everything felt tight – my throat, my muscles – like I was a bow pulled to maximum capacity. “I’ll be back in a minute.” Mia and Heath both gave me curious looks as I turned to stride down the corridor. I didn’t stop until I got to the Gents, threw open the door walked straight up the built-in metal condom machine and punched it … hard. It groaned and the metal collapsed in, leaving a massive dent. A string of condoms fell out of the bottom.
“Whoa!” a guy said as he emerged from one of the cubicles. “Jesus dude, I applaud you for the safe sex and all but that’s a little aggressive for The Pig and Whistle on a Thursday night. Just saying.”
“Sorry, mate,” I mumbled, leaning over the sink to splash water over my face. For a moment I actually thought I might throw up.
It hadn’t been a fucking fall.
I didn’t need Heath’s subtle emphasis on the word to know that. Bloody hell, how could anyone think of hurting Mia? She was a scrap of a human, totally defenceless. I closed my eyes for a moment, willed the nausea back down and took a deep breath. The last thing she needed was for me to go all Hulk on her at this stage. I also didn’t want to talk about it front of Heath.
Oh yes, I’d be talking to fucking Heath, no doubt about that. But now wasn’t the time to get into the old best-friend-withholding-important-information-about-the-woman-I’m-becoming-obsessed-with thing. When I was sure that I was back in control of myself I pushed away from the sink and back out of the door. Mia and Heath were still talking by the bar. Heath said something to Mia and she laughed. She laughed. After learning what I’d just learned, Mia laughing with Heath just didn’t compute. The last thing I wanted to do in that moment was crack a smile.
“Message me the physio details,” I said to Heath as I barrelled up next to them both.
Heath, who was still smiling, looked at me then at Mia before frowning in confusion. “Er … what?’
“Max,” Mia said, her hand going to my overly tense forearm. “Are you okay?”
Was I okay? This woman had sustained a fracture dislocation of her shoulder plus God knows what else, and she asks me if I’m okay?
“What? I’m fine.”
“It’s just you … er, you look a little intense right now.”
“Yeah, mate,” Heath says. “You’ve got your serial killer eyes going on and that freaky muscle in your cheek’s ticking from clenching your jaw too hard.”
“I’m fine, mate,” I say to him through gritted teeth. “I just need the details of the physiotherapist, so I can set something up for Mia tomorrow.”
Mia gave my arm a light squeeze and I looked down at her upturned face. She gave me a small smile. “Max, I don’t think that the NHS works that way, you know. You can’t just demand an appointment the next day. It’s not an emergency. I’m fi-”
“Mia,” I snapped, hating myself at her small start, but I really felt that if I didn’t get my point across somehow that my head might explode. “You won’t be seeing the physio on the NHS. You’ll be seeing a private physio and you’ll be seeing them tomorrow.”
“Max, I can’t–” Her words cut off as I took her hand gently and pulled her away from Heath. We wound our way through the pub and out of the front door where I came to a stop under the Pub sign (a large plaque with a painting of a pig standing up, wearing a tweed suit and holding a whistle in its mouth – below the painting were three rows of text: no food, warm beer, poor hospitality).
“Okay,” she said slowly, looking up and down the street. “What are we doing out here?” I took a deep breath in before lifting both my hands slowly, so as not to startle her, and settling them under her jaw to tilt her face to me. I closed my eyes and rested my forehead on hers for a moment then. Her hands came up to my forearms but she didn’t pull me away.
“We’re out here so that you don’t feel trapped or boxed in when I talk to you.”
Her breath left her in a soft whoosh, fanning my face.
“Right. Well, I’m going to ask you again – are you okay?”
“No,” I told her truthfully. “No, Mia. I’m not okay. Not after hearing how badly you were hurt just weeks before I met you.” I pulled back a little to look into her wide brown eyes. “Not after I remember how I treated you when you started working for us.” I laughed briefly but without humour. “I like to think of myself as this principled man, as a voice for the underdog. When I met you, you were hurt, and I treated you like dirt.”
Those beautiful eyes looked up at me and she swallowed. “You couldn’t have known. I went out of my way to make sure nobody knew. It wasn’t your fault.”
“Please don’t make excuses for me, Mia,” I told her, my voice strained again. “Please, please don’t do that. Not tonight. Not after what Heath just told me.”
“Okay,” she whispered.
“You didn’t fall, did you?” I whispered back.
There was a long pause and a swift intake of breath from her before she answered. “No.” The whisper was so quiet I had to strain to hear it. “No, I didn’t fall.”
I cleared my throat, trying to dissipate some of the urgency I knew would leak into my voice. “Could you tell me what happened?”
“Max, I–”
“Mia, I really need to know what happened and who was responsible.”
Hmm.
I was trying not to sound too intense but may not have achieved that aim. Maybe demanding names at this stage was a step too far. Her eyes darted away from mine; she took a step back and bit her lip.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Mia, please.” The strain in my voice was still making it gravelly and I couldn’t seem to unclench the fists that had formed at my sides. “I need to know how you’ve been hurt. I’m sorry I’ve been such a massive dick in the past but please, please believe me – I care about you. I can’t bear to think of anyone-” I broke off and took a steadying breath. The thought of somebody hurting her was making me want to punch the window I was standing next to and, although the Pig and Whistle’s landlord, Fergus, did not give one shit about the décor, I’m not sure he’d overly happy with a fist shaped hole in his murky glass.
Mia’s eyes darted back to mine and she took a tentative step forward before laying her hand on my chest. She must have been able to feel how rapidly my heart was beating. Something flashed in her eyes as she stared up at me, something almost like wonder, like hope.
“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you more, Max. Really I am.” I let out a long breath but then gave a short nod.
“Okay. I’ll leave it for now.” She visibly relaxed, relief flooding her expression. As I searched her face I realised how tired and pale she looked. I was pushing her too hard. “Look, Mia. You don’t have to stay at the bloody Pig and Whistle. I’m sorry I made you come out. I’ve got to stay with Teddy, but Yaz can take you home and-”
“I love the Pig and Whistle.”
“What? Nobody loves the Pig and Whistle.”
“Well, I do.” Her voice was steady and her eyes still looking up at me, shining with something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. “So I don’t want to go home now. Now I just want to be with you and your friends for a little while. I know I’m an outsider and …” she shrugged, “… well I just haven’t been around people like this for so long. The warmth between you all … I just would like a little more time on the outskirts of that.”
I swallowed past my now tight throat. “You’re not an outsider,” I told her once I could speak without sounding choked.
“Max-”
“You’re not and I’ll prove it to you.”
I took her hand again and led her back into the pub. As we made our way back to the others the bell rang for last orders. Yaz gave me a curious look then beamed at Mia, dragging her into the group saying, “Welcome back from the longest wee in history! Now tell us about this Bitcoin malarky again. I’ve decided I’m gonna get me some.”
I knew for a fact that Yaz was not interested in crypto currency. Yaz wasn’t really interested in any currency of any kind. But my sister was kind and she wanted to include Mia. And if that meant asking about blockchain and Bitcoin then that was what she was going to do.
“I’ll be back,” I whispered into Mia’s ear before striding to the bar.
“Fergus?”
“What?” Fergus, the landlord, snapped, looking supremely pissed off that a paying customer would dare speak to him.
“How long is it since we did a lock-in?”
Fergus lost his grumpy expression at that, and his craggy face slowly broke into a broad smile.
Mia
“I’m gonna be a miner!” Yaz shouted, arms straight up in the air. I was laughing so hard that I nearly choked on my drink.
Heath snorted. “I hardly think that your career progression so far, including pissing about on the water and pissing your brother off in his office, is really preparation for mining bitcoin, Yaz,” Heath said, and as always when Heath teased Yaz, there was just a little undercurrent of meanness about it – it was like he was talking to his little sister and not Max’s. Yaz scowled at him.
“You’ll be laughing through your arse when I’ve mined all your Bitcoin, posh boy.”
“Laughing through your arse is not a saying, Midge.”
“I know what I said, arsehole.” Yaz paused to take another huge swig of her beer. “We can’t all do terribly serious jobs saving lives left, right and centre. Some of us mere mortals just want to chug along doing what we enjoy. Anyway, I help peeps too.”
Heath rolled his eyes. “Sure you do. I’ll call you next time somebody’s bleeding out in A&E and you can come and give them an emergency bit of rose quartz to hold, or teach them to windsurf. Sure that’ll do the trick rather than all the pesky emergency surgery.”
Yaz’s face flashed with hurt for a moment before she masked it with a laugh.
“She’s helped me,” I put in, wanting to wipe that hurt expression off Yaz’s face. Unfortunately, given how uncharacteristically loud my voice had been, my outburst drew the attention of the majority of the table.
We were currently at a lock-in.
I’d never been to a lock-in before, but two hours ago grumpy Fergus had shut all the doors with us inside the pub and the alcohol started flowing freely. The posh restaurants and bars I was used to didn’t do lock-ins and they certainly didn’t have grumpy, slightly smelly landlords who sat at your table drinking dodgy cider.
I was five rhubarb gins in. By that stage I bloody loved Fergus.
“She gave me some aromatherapy oils and they help with …” Oh bugger. Drunk me hadn’t thought this through. Yaz’s oils helped with my anxiety. I didn’t want to be banging on about that at a lock-in though. “I-I can … sometimes I get worried about stuff – they help with that.” I was receiving a lot of curious glances now. Yaz reached under the table and squeezed my hand.
“That’s great Mia,” Heath said, his kind eyes making my chest constrict.
“So you’ll block my chain, Number Five?” Yaz asked, giving me a lopsided smile. “For realz?”
I laughed. “Yaz it’s called the blockchain and you can’t just–”
“How do you know all the stuff?” Yaz asked and I shrugged.
“I don’t know all the stuff. I’m good with numbers and computers so I-”
“Do you own Bitcoin?” Heath asked.
“No, I … er.” I wasn’t the one that owned the Bitcoin. I was just the mug that mined it and converted it for my complete prick of a husband – making him millions in the process. “I don’t own any.”
“When are you going to start taking Bitcoin, Fergus?” Max asked.
“You can take yer’ fuckin’ Bitcoin and shove it where the sun don’t shine,” Fergus replied. “Gimme a tenner and be done with it.”
“You could maybe start by thinking about getting contactless,” Heath said, smiling into his beer, well aware of the fuse he’d just lit. Fergus exploded into a long, mostly incomprehensible, rant about ‘city wankers’ and their ‘fancy fucking ideas’ buggering up his pub.
It was brilliant. I loved Fergus. In fact I loved everybody. I had a warm fuzzy feeling about all the humans around the table. I’d already told Heath that he was Bournemouth emergency department’s answer to George Clooney, Yaz that she was a beautiful healing water goddess with superpowers and Verity that she was a power-dressing awesome powerhouse boss lady with a heart of gold.
I sat back in my chair and listened to Fergus’ rant, letting the warm feeling of being with these people wash over me. Maybe they weren’t my friends, maybe this wasn’t really my life – but I was here now.
