From Despair Grows Order: The Broken Billionaire Series Book 3 Read online

  JOSH

  I left dinner with Sarah’s family in a joyous, as well as relieved, mood. Her father, Roy, had turned out to be a much less stick-up-the-old-ass kind of guy than I’d expected. Saying that, though, before today, all I had to go on was his scowling face glaring at me from the window when I’d drop Sarah off at the house. I was glad that in person, he appeared much more relaxed. His apology when I’d walked through the door, though a little embarrassing, was big of him, and I’d appreciated it. Her sisters had been welcoming too, and the youngest, Kay, I’d found very amusing indeed, a certain sassy quality about her that I admired. Overall, I’d enjoyed myself among the Dillinger family.

  As we approached our haggard little apartment block, Sarah remarked in a sardonic tone, “Home sweet home.”

  “You know, it really is sweet,” I said, turning to her with the glint of a smile. “And beautiful too. Truly beautiful.”

  “How!?” Sarah let out incredulously, her eyes scanning the cracked, graffitied facade of the block, searching out this so-called beauty.

  “Not in any aesthetic sense, but in that it’s ours. In that the two of us have a space upon this earth that belongs to us and no one else.”

  “So long as we pay the rent,” she remarked.

  “Yeah, it’s not quite ours in the lawful sense. But at least we can make a nest there. So what if the neighbors are loud, or the plumbing’s faulty, or the place is cramped. It’s still our place. Josh’s and Sarah’s. Sarah and Josh’s. Our own hideaway from the rest of the world. All we have to do is just shut the door and it’s you and I.”

  Her face dissolved into a beaming smile and she thrust herself across the car with outstretched lips, taking hold of my face in her hands and blocking my view of the road. Having dissolved into smiles, she now dissolved into me and our lips melted into an ardent kiss. But we had to separate quickly when the car hit the curb, forcing me to slam on the brakes.

  “Whoops!” I said as the car settled to a stop on the barren sidewalk. “Thank God no one was there.”

  “You gotta be more careful,” she stated.

  “Hey! It was you who kissed me!”

  “But I’m not the one driving.”

  I rolled us off the sidewalk and back onto the road. Not long after that, we were walking through the door of our little cupboard of a place. We were still decorating, and much of the floor was a field of newspaper, paint pots, trays, brushes and other equipment. With the help of Charlie and Mrs. Hodge, I’d finished decorating the bathroom, painting the walls and ceiling, replacing all the missing tiles and resealing the toilet so it didn’t leak, as well as Mrs. Hodge giving it one hell of a clean so that it sparkled. The kitchen had also received similar treatment; the walls and ceiling painted sky blue and white respectively, leaking faucet fixed, tiles replaced, cupboards cleaned and repaired. It was now only the lounge, which made up the majority of the cell-sized apartment, that needed finishing.

  Once we’d kicked our shoes off, we pulled out the sofa-bed and curled up watching TV, drifting off upon the dreamy tide of some crappy movie, guzzling down gummy bears, our bodies interlocked. In these little moments at our place, I was happier than I can ever recall. On that bed, in that crummy apartment, the stench of damp emanating through the air, I was caught in joyful repose, floating off across the universe, laid upon a cosmic slipstream of stardust. All I needed in the world was cuddled into my flank, everything else billions of light years away, nothing to reproach us, nothing to anger or insult us. Nothing but us floating along in one another’s arms.

  “Another gummy bear?” Sarah asked as we drifted along on our galactic bed.

  “Of course,” I said, opening my mouth like an expectant seal.

  She dropped several in my trap and I closed it shut, my teeth immediately grinding the candies up.

  “You know I could lie like this forever with you,” I remarked. “Just you and me in this bed forever. Like John Lennon and Yoko Ono.”

  “John and Yoko were multi-millionaires. They could afford to lie in bed. I’m afraid if we do that, I don’t know which will come first: starvation or eviction!”

  “I was just dreaming,” I pointed out. “You don’t gotta ruin it.”

  “‘Don’t gotta’!?” she mocked. “What’s happened to you? One week in here and you’ve lost the use of English!”

  “It’s the family next door,” I pleaded. “I spend all day overhearing them arguing and now I’m all ‘Don’t gotta’ and ‘Ya gotta be kiddin' me.’ It’s their fault.”

  “Ha! I think at heart you’ve always been a trash-talker!”

  “Huh! I’ll have you know I attended one of the best schools in the country. We went on school vacations skiing in the Alps and were given etiquette classes.”

  “Etiquette classes?” she scoffed. “Like how to use the right cutlery at dinner parties and stuff like that?”

  “The very same.”

  “And did it help?”

  “At dinner parties?”

  “At all!”

  “Not really. I guess I know my boning knife from my bread knife. So not all of the thirty-thousand dollars a term was a waste of money.”

  “Thirty-thousand dollars a term!?”

  “Yeah. Good money when you consider that it kept me away from my father for nearly ten months of the year. It meant that I didn’t have to be ignored while he spent his time working or with some chick half his age.”

  “Didn’t you miss Holman?”

  A rock struck the cage of my heart at his name.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I replied slowly. “No. I did for sure. It was him that usually came to pick me up from school during the holidays, and I looked forward to that car ride more than I did anything else.”

  I was hit with the sudden flash of childhood memories; me in the passenger seat gabbling on as Holman sat driving, grinning at my incessant speech and inquiring about my education, which seemed to take a backseat to my more pressing concerns involving sports and girls. Then, with each passing school holiday, I talked less and less as I went through my teens, the enthusiastic boy slowly ebbing away and being replaced with a sullen man. Holman’s ugly mug never changed though. Always somehow sad, benevolent, and blank all at the same time. But that stern look hid his better side. A side that only I got to see when he’d look at me with his gentle grin. That grin felt as good as any compliment I ever got.

  Sensing my sentimentalism, Sarah cuddled into me and I pulled her closer, my right thigh trapped between her own two, my right arm wrapped around her dainty little frame of white ivory, one porcelain arm at the back of my thick neck, the other upon my chest, feeling as delicate as a piece of cloud rested upon my flesh.

  “You should write him a letter,” she stated, “like you did your father.”

  A week ago, I’d written my father several thousand words, the gist of which was that I loved him, while at the same time explaining that I chose Sarah not because I didn't want to be his son, but because he gave me that stupid ultimatum. I told him that I loved Sarah like no other and that I was stronger with that love. Surely he could see that for himself, couldn’t he? Anyway, I was firm in stating that I couldn’t live without her and that the past between himself and Roy was between them and no one else. In short: I loved Sarah, and wanted to remain his son, but wouldn’t compromise.

  “I could write to Holman,” I began after my few seconds of nostalgic musing had ended, “but what would I say? ‘Hey, Holman. Cheers for the punch to the ribs! Maybe next time you might break one.’”

  “You shouldn’t joke. You told me yourself that he’s the closest thing to a father you ever had.”

  “You did see what he did to me?” I put to her with an incredulous frown. “The whole tossing me across the floor thing.”

  “He’s your father’s bodyguard. He was guarding his body.”

  “But he should’ve been more on my side.”

  “But he couldn’t.”

  “Huh! You always gotta stick up
for everyone. You don't judge a soul, do you?”

  “I try not to. I think it’s best to try and understand people rather than make any real judgment. We’re all born sinners—”

  “Whoa!” I had to put the brakes on this. “None of your Christianity here tonight, my love. I promised to go to church with you, surely that was enough. I’ll listen to two hours of it a week, but not here, not in our sanctuary. No religion in the sanctuary, just like John sang. That’s Lennon, not the Baptist!”

  She smiled at me and repeated the word ‘sanctuary,’ before making me wince with a powerful squeeze that belied her small frame. For the rest of the night, we simply finished the movie, gobbled more gummy bears, and drifted into sleep at the very same time, her head resting upon my snoozing chest, our bodies still interlinked like the fingers of two hands.

  It really was just she and I versus the whole goddamned lot of them.

  SARAH

  I was shaken awake when my head was unceremoniously tossed from off of Josh’s chest as he bolted upright in bed, a pitiful cry escaping his frightened lips and splitting the silence of the night. When I switched the bedside lamp on, I found him breathing rapidly in terror, his chest heaving in and out, his face filled with a mixture of panic, sweat and tears. With utmost tenderness, I took hold of him in my arms. His first reaction was to look at me with bulging eyes, but gradually his face softened, and he grabbed onto me, burying himself into my chest, my arms reaching around his wide body and cradling his sobbing figure.

  “Shh,” I cooed, rubbing his taut back. “It was only a dream. Only a dream.”

  Over the past week since we’d been living together, this had happened every night bar one, him waking from the pit of some terrible nightmare. The first time, the nightmare had involved Heather. For all his conscious resolution on the matter, his ex still haunted him mercilessly within his subconscious. Another time, he’d dreamt that it was me dying instead of her. This resulted in him switching the light on and desperately inspecting me as I lay sleeping beside him in bed. All other times had been about his mother’s death, and it was this specific dream that had the worst effect on him. During these occasions, when he was horrified out of sleep, I would feel so terribly sorry for him. I never thought it possible that a fully grown man could suffer so many awful dreams; dreams that twisted his face up into the most pitiful sights of dread and sadness.

  He’d told me intricately about the ones involving his mother. In them, he would be sitting watching the murky images of her struggling with a blacked-out figure. He described the figure as looking as though it had been scratched from a photograph, a pale, indefinite form dancing before him, while Josh, himself, was unable to move a muscle. The dream was always the same—the same helpless paralysis, the same scratched-out figure, the same sudden stop as his mother became no more, her screams echoing off into eternity. It hurt me dreadfully to see the pain that he was so obviously in.

  Having calmed his sobs, Josh went off to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water, before returning to bed where we once again got to sleep, cuddling up and holding each other tightly. He was always so in need of love afterwards that I sensed I was some kind of emotional anchor for him, tying him to happier thoughts, away from the opaque shadows of his past.

  Eventually, we drifted back along a river of soundless sleep, until the sudden waterfall of my alarm clock woke us up at seven. While I hit the snooze button and attempted to do just that, snooze, Josh roused himself. Once he was sentient, he delicately unwrapped himself from me, before shuffling off to the little garret of a kitchen, where he began making us coffee. Like his nightmares, this had been a ritual of this past week. Since all he did most of the day was study on his own in the apartment, he had deemed it—these being his own words—his ‘supreme duty’ to make me breakfast every day.

  While he went about this supreme duty, I slowly lumbered out of my snooze and gradually sat up. Grabbing the remote, I switched the TV on. Morning news. Politics, celebrities and anything else needed for the daily injection of fear and loathing. Apparently the world was going to hell in a handcart, but everyone was more interested in arguing over the fact and blaming someone else, rather than actually talking about how it could be prevented. The news could be upsetting, but I allowed it to drift past. You see, I had my own little piece of heaven here with Josh, and I know that sounds selfish, but it at least allowed me to hold at arm’s length the world’s constant merry-go-round of disasters.

  “Here’s your coffee, baby,” Josh said, standing at the side of the bed holding two steaming mugs.

  I smiled and took one. As I did, he leaned down and kissed me good morning. He then placed his own coffee down on the side and jumped boisterously back into bed, grabbing ahold of my shoulders and kissing my neck.

  “Hey!” I let out as I tried to steady my coffee. “You’ll make me spill it.”

  “Then place it on the side,” he recommended.

  “If you’ll give me a chance.”

  I managed to get the coffee on the bedside table without spilling it, and, after that, we cuddled up in bed, him sitting up and me pressed into his side, head laid delicately on his chest.

  “You know the news makes you suicidal,” he remarked after a moment. “And mad. Wouldn't you prefer cartoons?”

  I grinned at him and switched the channel. Happy happy cartoons filled the screen, and soon we were giggling away at the anarchic antics of the characters, returned to the bliss of childhood. Several shows went by and seven o’clock quickly became eight.

  “I gotta get ready,” I admitted with a dispirited groan.

  “Really?” came his disappointed response. “Can’t you stay at home with me today? After all, your father is your boss, so you could easily pull a sick day.”

  “Huh! I don't think you fully understand that particular dynamic. It’s because he’s my father that he is programmed to detect a lie the moment it escapes my lips. And because he’s my father, he would expect me to turn up at the office even if I was.”

  “I could give you some tips on the whole lying thing,” he suggested. “If you need it, that is.”

  “I think I’m good without the Josh Kelly ‘Guide to Lying.’ And, anyway, unlike you, Mr. Kelly, I feel responsibilities toward other people.”

  “Hey, no fair! I feel responsibilities to other people too.”

  “Like who?”

  “To you.”

  “But I’m your girlfriend.”

  “Well, only half,” he said screwing his face up a little.

  A dull thud struck me, based on a suspicion of where this was heading.

  “What do you mean only half?” I inquired, narrowing my eyes at him.

  “Because you know,” he mumbled trepidatiously.

  “Because we haven’t slept together yet?” I snapped in.

  “Yeah,” he agreed in a sheepish tone.

  My earlier rapture dissolved into annoyance.

  “Can we not spoil the morning?” I asked indignantly.

  His face took on a rather wounded aspect and he slid himself from under me, lifting himself out of bed.

  “Where are you going?” I inquired softly as I sat myself up.

  “I gotta get breakfast ready,” he replied, disconsolate.

  Placing my hand on his arm, I said, “It will happen soon. I promise. I just want it to be right.”

  “We’re living together, Sarah,” he stated blankly, sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me. “What more assurances do you need? This is right—you and I. We’re right. I love you. You love me. We’ve made the ultimate decision to live together, to share each other’s lives fully. I’ve sacrificed everything to be by your side.”

  “I know and I’m sorry,” I softly exclaimed, coming up behind him and resting my head upon that familiar shoulder. “I know it’s upsetting for you, but it’s been something that I’ve guarded for so long, it’s very hard to let go of.”

  He slowly swiveled his head to me.
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br />   “I love you,” he uttered, “but I feel like we’re only half a couple without making ourselves whole.”

  “We are whole—with or without that.”

  “It’s called sex, Sarah. You are allowed to say it without having to actually do it.”

  “Okay,” I let out in a slightly sardonic tone. “We’re whole with or without sex.”

  We remained there for a minute or so, Josh slumped on the edge of the mattress, my chin rested upon the crook of his neck. In truth, a major part of me wanted him, wanted to make love to him there and then, to give in to my sultry desires, to let him have his way with me and feel the power of his magnificent body. I’d come very close this past month, and we’d strayed several bases from first. But there was always something holding me back, something unwilling to give up my virginity. Even to him, whom I loved with every drop of blood racing through me, urged on by a heart that he fully owned. Nevertheless, whenever we would get close to the actual act, something would recoil in me and drag me back, fill me with such hollow blackness, telling me that it wasn’t right, that we were committing something immoral. I wondered at those times whether I’d spent so long repressing my sensuality that I hadn’t ended up caging it somewhere in my subconscious, if these feelings of immorality were no more than a self-constructed warder keeping the fires of my lust imprisoned.

  With his countenance much gentler now, Josh turned to me and kissed the side of my head.

  “It’s okay.” His words emerged delicately like feathers on the wind. “I’ll wait for however long it takes. It’s just that you’re so fucking beautiful.”

  “Maybe that would have been better put without the cuss,” I commented.

  “Okay then; you’re so incredibly beautiful.”

  “Better.”

  “I know that I shouldn’t get frustrated. I should wait for you, like I promised, and not be a beast.”

  “I don't mind it when you’re a beast,” I grinned. “And it’s not all your fault. You are right; in this day and age, two people living together, in love, should be taking their relationship the whole way. It’s just, something keeps holding me back and I don't want my first time to be clouded with that feeling. It’s not you, it’s me.”