Precise (6 page)

B
rent grasps Katie’s fingers. He wouldn’t usually be so bold, but he’s had a beer to loosen him up, so it doesn’t feel weird to touch her. He pats his pocket with his free hand, saying a silent thank you to the old friend who’d called a moment ago. The guy hadn’t spoken to Brent in years, and what luck to ring . . . and lead him to Katie.

This is a sign. It’s his time to make amends for not being there for her since Paul’s tragic death.

Walking through the front room, Brent hears the cheers and music from the backyard where the party is. He turns to say something to Katie, but shuts his mouth. He can’t say a typical “You’re looking good”, or “What have you been up to?” because both seem inappropriate. Instead, Brent says, “Coincidence I met you out front, hey?”

“I know.”

He nods, pleased to have Katie here. The little sister he hasn’t seen in too long. “And Rochelle is having . . . fun?”

Katie stares at ornaments as they walk through the house, but seems worlds farther away as she takes in the tall ceilings and odd shapes. She looks at a set of portraits on the wall and she scoffs.

She says, “Yes,” and it takes Brent a moment to realize she is answering him.

He heads toward the kitchen, where the backdoor to the party opens just behind. Maybe this wasn’t the best idea. She looks like she’s been stranded on a foodless island for weeks, and slept on a bed of rocks. After what she would have had to deal with, he couldn’t blame her. Brent gulps and the saliva feels thick and lumpy.

The lumpy feeling reminds him of his first mistake for the night. His birthday was three weeks ago. This party isn’t a joint one with his mate—Tim Johnston is the actual party man. A pang of guilt fills him when he thinks of the lie he told her. He focuses on that back door again, which suddenly feels impossibly far.

The Birthday Lie was the only way to invite her in. The only way.
She’s so . . . cut off. Odd
.

Her old radiance is a figment of his imagination. Gray skin cases her body, and he wonders if the girl he grew up with is still behind her lost, wandering eyes.

Originally, bringing her in to Tim’s party had sounded like a way to distract her from whatever plagued her. Now, Brent feels stupid.

To try and make the best of the situation, he runs through his friends. Marco? She’ll get along well with him. He’s a weird bloke, but reserved, and perhaps that’d make her feel like she has company. Cooper? Brent would keep her away from him. God, Brent couldn’t stand him for too long. Had he thought his idea through, sleazy Cooper in mind, he
definitely
would have taken her for a walk outside instead.

He runs through anything else he can offer her. Drinks. Show her where the facilities are. He thinks again, running ideas past of how to make her happy.

Katie says, “Who’s the other guy?” She releases her hand from Brent’s and twists her hair. “The birthday guy, I mean. Who is this joint party with?”

“Tim.”

That’s when Brent realizes why he feels odd. It’s the look in Katie’s eyes. The look of a stranger staring at him through the eyes of his lifelong friend. As if it’s the shape of the person he’s known all his life, but the soul of a stranger.

I’m not sure I want to know what she’s thinking.

Brent stops at the sliding door and holds his hand out.

“Thanks, sir,” she says, and grasps the wall so her fingers go white. She steps down to the pavement slowly.

He laughs in a meek way that could be appropriate if she was serious or not. He should have noticed she was tipsy before, but he’s been drinking himself.

How does Liam do this? What does he say? Should Brent be nice? Standoffish? Is Katie like this with him too?

Brent has to give it to Liam: he has patience.

Brent steps behind her and says, “Drinks are in the blue cooler. Feel free to grab something.” He shakes his head. It’s a little gesture that he doesn’t think anyone notices, he’s just shaking away the stupidness of telling Katie where the alcohol is. “There’s food over there behind my mates, Tim, Marco and Cooper, and the toilet is off the hallway opposite to the kitchen.”

“Yep. Cool.”

“Oh, and—” But Brent shuts his mouth and waves to his friends because Katie’s striding toward the closest drink cooler. He mouths a few silent words, hoping no one noticed her disappearing from him mid-speech.

“ . . . and there’s only four kinds of sex,” Cooper finishes saying as Brent arrives near the tables and Marco and Tim.

Brent gives Katie a look, but she’s scooping through icy bottles, carefree and clueless.

“Yeah, hey, Brenny!” Coop says. He thumps Brent on the back and grins wildly. “Anyway, so the first kind of sex is House Sex—when you’re just hitched. Have sex in every room.”

“Coop—” Tim says.

“Serious. Just hear me out.”

“Coop,” Tim says again. “It’s my birthday and your jokes still suck. That means you owe me double the presents.”

“Triple if you hate this one.”

Tim says something else but Brent hasn’t heard. He shuffles closer to Marco so he’s not standing on the edge of their group. Perhaps this will conceal the fact that his mind isn’t here? That it’s over there. With her.

Usually he can laugh at how direct Coop can be. But Katie guzzles down another gulp of her bottle and Brent’s pulse races again.

“ . . . Bedroom Sex—after you’ve been married for ages and you only have sex in the bedroom.”

“Coop, I’m with Tim,” Marco says. “I would have been beaten in high school if I tried to get away with something this lame.”

Coop keels over in laughter. “That’s ‘cause you’re still—whoa!” Coop says, stopping. Then, “Who’s that?” He points a direct line to Katie’s ass.

Brent grits his teeth, and hisses, “Kates.”

“Sounds hot.”

Brent clears his throat and tries again. “Katherine Anselin. Lifelong family friend.”

“Right.” Coop stares again as Katie bends down to put back her drink and pick another. His body leans at the same angle as hers, only his eyes are wide, trance-like.

Brent whacks Cooper’s shoulder hard enough for him to recoil.

“So next is Hall Sex—after you’ve been married so long you can’t remember the year she locked you down. You just pass each other in the hall and say, ‘Fuck you.’”

Tim and Marco make little noises, sucked in to the joke, waiting for the punch line. Both guys grab a handful of chips from a nearby bowl still transfixed on Cooper. It’s a surprise they aren’t spitting it out between laughs.

As Brent reaches for some chips—just to do something with his hands—he sees Katie walking back, bottle in one hand. Her pace is rhythmic, confident.

Why couldn’t I have been like Liam?
Brent thinks. “She’s not coping,” Liam had said to Brent, weeks after Paul’s death. But, a week or two later, he’d said she was a bit better, but weird. Confused, Brent decided to wait. Give her time. Then it’s now and months have passed.

“You’re bursting my eardrums with that crap joke. You’re shit,” Brent says. He smirks, so they get he’s joking, but even to him it feels stiff. He stands straight, and says, “Kates is coming. Be nice.”

“Last is,” Coop continues as if Brent never spoke, just as Katie wobbles up next to Brent, her eyes seeming to sparkle, “Courtroom Sex—when your wife and her lawyer fuck you in the divorce court for everything you’ve got.”

Tim howls with laughter. Cooper keels over again, roaring, slapping his thighs between fits of laughter. Marco chuckles too.

The lumpy feeling returns, so Brent looks between Katie and the cooler. A drink feels like the right thing for him, too.

“Cool,” Katie murmurs, as Brent leaves.

When he returns, Coop is hanging his arm over Katie’s shoulder. She isn’t standing there like a lump. She’s . . . giggling. Her hands clap together and Coop slips closer to her side. Marco pretends to focus on something distant in the backyard—Dina, Tim’s fiancé, maybe—but his hands are tumbling together in a loose clasp.

Brent’s silent, trying to figure out what he missed, how the Katie he thought he saw earlier turned into this other person, when Coop rustles his dirty blonde hair and says, “The man himself is back!” Cooper throws one triumphant arm in the air. He gazes at Katie, their noses almost touching. “See, Brenny can’t even run his own café, but me? I’m your capable man, baby girl.”

So much for chatting about Liam.

K
atie sits with Brent and Marco, chatting on concrete steps in the backyard. There are lights set up sporadically around the backyard, so most of the area has partial lighting. The nearest one protrudes from the fascia several meters away, which creates hanging shadows under Marco’s eyebrows and lips.

Katie shivers out of her trance. Somehow, she ended up here chatting to Marco, Brent’s friend, and Brent. She gulps down more of her drink, the fizzy bubbles making her eyes start to water, pushing away the image of Marco with curly hair—blonde, to be exact—and a longer nose. It’s the shadows playing tricks, pretending to be Paul’s ghost.

She notices Marco is sometimes quiet, sometimes chatty in bursts. He sits with his knees raised and his hands linked around them. Katie actually spends time laughing for once, covering her mouth and giggling in to her hands at trivial jokes about drinking, who’s an alcoholic, who’s not, and the like.

“Even ask Brent; I ain’t an alcoholic,” Marco replies, an attempt to defend himself.

Katie takes a gulp from her bottle. “Don’t believe you.”

“Mm, well, no. He wasn’t a huge fan of the grog,” Brent knocks Marco’s knee as he says this, “if you know what I mean.” He’s looking at Katie now, winking, then back at Marco. “More adventurous, right?”

“He’s babbling again, Katie.”

“Kates, please,” she says. “It doesn’t sound right otherwise. I’ve never been called anything else.” She giggles to herself and adds, “Except by my bitch mom. I’m usually Katie. My favorite is ‘Katherine’, when she’s really mad at me.”

“Hey,” Brent says, tapping Katie on the shoulder. “What about you? You ever try some stuff?”

“No.”

It sounds so simple, but Liam’s playing in her mind. She remembers him slumped against the tiles in her bathroom after she’d dropped Ella at school and had an alcohol-induced memory blackout. He was the first thing she saw and she can’t get that image out of her mind. Which reminds her …

Ella. Ella. Ella.

What have I done?
Katie thinks. Is Ella still with her granddad? She is. She’d be with him. Her granddad wouldn’t leave her.

She finds herself staring at a mark on the concrete steps.
The party
, she thinks. Lucky there are drinks here because drinks are fun. Brent never told her he had cool friends, and they’re cool, and everything’s cool.

Drinking may not have been the responsible way to show off being capable, but it is the only way to pretend. Pretend enough, and she might be able to seem fine. Fine enough to pretend Rochelle wasn’t already telling Ella she’d be staying at hers forever.

What am I going to do?
Katie is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Katie bounces like an ecstatic child, and slaps her palm against the step. She suddenly needs to hear Marco’s stories to distract her. “Tell me, Marco, what’s it like? Which is your . . . ” she sways off balance and flails her arms to avert disaster, but Brent pulls her back upright. “ . . . favorite drug?”

Marco lowers his eyes and darts his gaze across the surroundings, over by the fence, ahead under the clothesline where a group of people are chatting. He turns back, takes a final swig of his bottle and shoots a glance at her.

“Kates,” he says, leaning in. She doesn’t retract in fear from his stiff glare—his black, black eyes only centimeters from her—though she senses she should feel intimidated. “Be careful what you say.”

“Why?”

“Don’t worry.”

“No, tell me!”

“Marco,” Brent says. His voice is soft, so close to a whisper that Katie almost missed it above the music. She catches the end of a confused headshake from Brent to Marco. As if saying, “what’s up?”

Marco’s phone beeps and he shifts away from Katie so he can dig his hand in his pocket.

“I have a question.”

“Ask away.”

“About Liam . . . ”

“Oh.” Brent flicks invisible bits of something from his pants. Still looking down, he says, “He’s been weird when I mention you. Like when I say I haven’t spoken to you in ages, and I think we should catch up. Or that I wish we could have a quick phone call instead if we’re too busy to see each other in person. I dunno. He gets weird at the mention of your name.”

“I haven’t noticed anything strange,” Katie lies.

“I’m really glad that you made it tonight,” Brent adds.

Katie swings around to Brent in a long and exaggerated way. She puts a hand on his leg to steady herself once she faces him. She smiles, glad to have some other conversation to distract her from Liam. Ella. “Hope I’m not in the way.”

“It wasn’t that you were in the way. It was my fault because I didn’t warn Tim. I mean, this is his house.”

“Sorry,” she says.

“Stop apologizing. I should be the one doing that.”

Marco stands and shuffles a few steps away. His face is glued to his phone.

“Why?”

“Well,” Brent says, “I’ve gone MIA these last months.”

Divert.
“How long have you known Marco for? I haven’t heard of him from you before . . . ”

“I’m embarrassed, really,” Brent says, rattling off thoughts without realizing Katie is trying to change the subject. “I’m trying to find a way to cope. Adjust.” He’s off on a tangent, his shame pouring out.

“What about Coop?”

“Oh.” Brent pulls away, confused. “Well, Tim, Marco and I have been friends for a decade, I guess. Coop, I’ve been closer to these days.” He scrunches his face and scans the party. In a tone too quiet for Marco to hear, Brent says, “I know Coop can be a bit much but if he’s causing any . . . trouble, then just yell out. Text me if you need to be more discreet. I don’t want you feeling weird. Coop works close to me, so we see each other a lot.” Brent’s eyes are blank, telling her to make up her own mind. “I can’t really . . . well, just ignore him, because I’m with him so often.”

“Don’t worry. He’s fine.”

More than fine. He’s awesome!

Marco comes back, plonking himself down in his original spot. The phone beeps again and Marco taps away at the buttons. Brent shoots an obvious warning glance to him. Marco raises his index and middle fingers vertically, bringing them to his mouth and back.

“You smoke?” Katie asks.

Marco seems bewildered. “I’m sorry?”

“Do you smoke? Weren’t you just telling Brent that you were off for a ciggie?”

He looks from her to his index and middle fingers, nods. “Yeah,” Marco says, eyeing Brent. “Going for a smoke.” He stands and starts to head off, but halts. “You don’t, you know, smoke, do you?”

Katie beams. She, too, pushes herself up and onto her feet. Not expecting this, Marco’s expression stills, a red blush filling the color of his cheeks.

“No way am I missing out on a smoke. So yeah, guess I sort of do.”

“What? You’ve never smoked before!” Brent cuts in.

“I do now, and I’m currently off my face so I can’t resist an opportunity like this. I’ll be back after.” She spins around, away from Brent, but a tug pulls her back.

“What the hell, Brent?” she yells. “Let go!”

He releases before she’s even asked him to. It’s as if he doesn’t want to tell her to stay but he half-heartedly tugs on her anyway, hoping. “She doesn’t smoke, Marco. It’s okay. We’ll catch up with you later.”

Marco nods as Katie stares, stupefied, at Brent.

“Katie, I’m sorry,” Marco says. “I shouldn’t have asked. Coop is trying to give up so he never carries more than a couple of ciggies on him, for emergencies. I didn’t want to be too obvious about it.”

She rolls her eyes at him, crosses her arms.
What a lame brush off.

Marco sees her stiff expression and tries again. “I’ve been informed that now is one of those times.”

Katie scoffs and rearranges her arms as she fixates on the brick wall in front of her.

“Sorry, Kates. I really am.” He looks desperate. His eyes shine like a glass window, housing a sad dog behind them. “I do feel bad, but, um,” he pauses and peers around the corner where Cooper is visible, “he wants to have a man-to-man chat.”

She nods him off and walks away from both of them. She came here to escape Liam, too, but he’s been following her around in her mind, anyway. In the voice telling her to stop drinking, but mostly inside his brother, who’s transformed into him.

If Katie doesn’t find something else to distract her, the fun will wear off. And Molten Man will join Liam and squash Johnny.

Why be reminded of her stuff ups if she doesn’t know how to fix them?