Pathetic
‘Where am I?’
Pav opened his eyes to see Millie standing by the bed. He’d wrestled her unconscious body out of the car and carried her up to his flat earlier, having to grapple with his keys whilst still supporting her next to the door. After a few attempts at waking her up on the sofa in the living room in order to get some fluids down her, he’d carried her to his bed, taken her shoes off, put her in the recovery position, and pulled the duvet over her small curled-up body. Now she was up and out of the bed, looking confused and swaying slightly on her feet.
‘I don’t feel very well,’ she whispered, and Pav sat up to turn the beside light on. He felt bad that he’d slept in the bed with her now, but he’d been too worried that she would vomit in her sleep to leave her.
‘Right,’ he said, sliding out of the covers and walking around to her side slowly. Her face was a little green and her wide eyes were fixed on his chest.
‘Woah,’ she breathed, her pupils dilating as she swayed on the spot again. Pav glanced at his bedside clock; it was two in the morning and he was willing to bet Millie was still as drunk as a skunk.
After a moment she slapped a hand over her mouth and her eyes went even wider. Pav covered the distance between them in two long strides, picked her up by her hips and lifted her quickly into the bathroom to bend her over the toilet. She heaved and then was violently ill. Pav remembered every detail of his first encounter with alcohol and he felt her pain. She continued retching a few more times as he held her hair at the back of her neck with one hand and then wetted a cloth with the other, which he passed to her when she was finished. She sat back onto the cold tiles, blinking rapidly and looking in danger of passing out again. Pav sat down next to her and pulled her onto his lap, handing her the cloth. She allowed this, a testament to her less than sober state, as she wiped her face and neck.
‘Pathetic,’ Millie mumbled as she let the cloth fall to the floor, seeming to lose even the strength in her arm to hold it.
‘What, love?’
‘I’m pathetic,’ she said. ‘Can’t even drink like a normal person.’
‘You’re not pathetic. All of us have gone through this.’
‘Pathetic, weak, over-emotional,’ she continued, as if she hadn’t heard him.
‘Er …’ Pav frowned down at her face. Over-emotional? She was way off base with that one. Her head was resting on his chest and she was staring off into the distance with unfocused eyes. ‘Millie, that is a load of bollocks. What makes you –’
‘Weakness, that the trouble with me. Weak, weak, weak, all the time. No backbone.’ Her words were trailing off as she relaxed against his body. All this was stated with absolute conviction; she believed every word and she had done for a long, long time. It was all so far from the truth that Pav struggled to think how she could have come up with it, unless …
‘Millie, baby, who told you that? You know that none of what you’re saying makes any sense.’
Millie let out a small humourless laugh, so hollow that it sent a weird shiver up Pav’s spine.
‘If you knew me better, you’d agree with them, I promise,’ she told him, again with absolute conviction.
‘But who are “they”, honey?’
‘You’re so beautiful,’ she told him, ignoring his question and her voice fading as her body became heavier with sleep. ‘Everything about you is so bright, so … magnetic.’ She gave another of those little humourless laughs. ‘Your charisma and mine are off the scale, just in different directions.’
‘Baby –’
‘I like it when you call me that,’ she whispered.
‘I know,’ he said pulling her closer.
‘I could go my whole life with just that. Just that word. One word from a man like you …’ She trailed off and he watched her eyelids flutter closed. He sat there for a moment, oblivious to the cold tiles, with her small, warm body curled up in his lap. His chest tightened as he replayed her words. One thing he knew for sure as he sat there was that he would be the one who found out who had made Millie believe those things as absolutes. And he would be the one who made her see them for the lies they were. Her guard would be up again tomorrow. Those shields would be firmly back in place. But Pav had experienced that small window of insight now and there was no going back as far as he was concerned.
*****
Millie was lying on something warm and firm. Her head was banging and her mouth was so dry her tongue felt like sandpaper. With great effort she opened one eye and then the other. What she saw wrenched her straight out of her drowsy state and into immediate panic mode. She was lying on a chest and staring at a tanned column of throat. To her horror her arm was slung over the six-pack of a man’s abdomen in an almost territorial way and her leg was hitched over his muscled thigh. She jerked back, making a noise halfway between a grunt and a squeak from her dry throat and sat up. Looking down, she was horrified to see that she still had on the dress from last night and that it was a crumpled mess. Her eyes felt scratchy and when she rubbed them her hands came away with telltale black smudges on them. She reached up to her head, and the bird’s nest of hair she could feel sitting there caused another involuntary squeak.
‘Hey there,’ a low, rumbly voice said from her side, and she jumped in reaction. When she turned and looked down she saw his beautiful dark brown eyes staring up at her; his stubble was thicker than she’d ever seen it before and the sleepy smile on his face made him even sexier than normal.
Millie’s face paled and she flew off the bed, running for the bathroom, and slamming the door in her wake. Once there she stared at her reflection in horror. Her eyes were ringed with black and her hair was matted on one side of her head. She sat down heavily on the edge of the bath and screwed her face up; embarrassment, acute and painful, washed over her. The feel of her nails digging into her fingers helped keep a check on the anxiety, and she tried to slow her breathing down. A knock sounded at the door and her eyes flew wide, one hand going to her chest and the other going up to ward off any intrusion.
‘Millie?’ Pav’s voice sounded from behind the door, no longer edged with sleep. ‘Babe? You okay in there?’
Millie’s throat worked as she tried to get some form of word out, but the anxiety was too much.
‘Okay, I’m gonna come in now. I just –’
‘No!’ she screamed, then covered her mouth with her hand. She closed her eyes again. If he didn’t already, after this Pav would know that she was truly nuts. He had pushed the handle down but released it at her scream. Millie dug her nails into her forearm, pinching as hard as she could this time, and forced herself to speak. ‘I mean. No, sorry. I’m … I’m going to have a shower.’
‘Okay,’ said Pav, sounding uncharacteristically unsure. ‘I’ll be right outside though, yeah?’
Millie managed to shower. She scrubbed away all the make-up and she washed her hair with Pav’s shampoo. That in itself was not easy. She’d used the same shampoo and conditioner for years. She never varied her routine. It took her an hour and a half to get ready in the morning and she always had all of her products around her to achieve it. She needed her things. Pav didn’t even have conditioner. When she was done she found a huge dressing gown and put it on, rolling up the sleeves so that her hands could grab toothpaste and search for a spare toothbrush. She stood in front of the door for a full minute after she had finished, working up the courage to push the handle down.
‘Hey,’ Pav said softly when she finally emerged. He was sitting on the bed, facing the door, and she had the feeling he’d been there for a while. Thankfully he was wearing jeans and his chest was now covered in a worn T-shirt – but he still looked unfairly perfect. His lips twitched as Millie tried to walk in the dressing gown and nearly tripped over the long towelling material, but his smile died as he focused on her face. ‘How are you feeling?’
Flashes of last night had been flicking through Millie’s mind since she’d woken up. She remembered feeling so comfortable on the car journey from the club. God, some of the snippets of what she’d said whilst curled up on a bed of Pav were making her cringe. She had vomited! She, Camilla Morrison, had actually experienced an ethanol-induced emesis.
‘Hey.’ She flinched when she realised Pav was now standing right in front of her. He reached up and enclosed both her hands in his warm ones, then slowly prised them apart. ‘What the hell?’ he said, concern adding an edge to his voice. ‘What’s this?’ Millie blinked, then looked down at her inner forearm. Some of the bruises had come out from last night and there were fresh marks that she’d given herself just now.
‘It’s fine,’ she muttered, trying to pull them away, but he kept hold gently but firmly.
‘It’s not fine,’ he told her. He moved her back to sit on the bed and forced her arms to stretch out in front of her for him to inspect. ‘What on earth – ?’
Millie felt her face flush and she jerked her hands away again before getting up in a sudden movement and backing away from him.
‘You … you don’t understand,’ she said, her voice annoyingly shaky. ‘I get s-stressed and then …’ She trailed off, acutely embarrassed. It was weakness. She knew that. She had been told that since she was a child. But the bruises always faded, they never left any scars so her parents had tried to ignore it.
‘Okay, okay. I’m sorry,’ Pav said, his voice back to soft as he walked towards her slowly with his hands held up in front of him like he was approaching a wild animal. ‘But … what’s got you so stressed now?’
‘What do you mean?’ Millie asked, her voice rising with disbelief. ‘Of course I’m stressed. I don’t have my clothes. I washed my hair with your shampoo. I don’t have any make-up with me. I’m wearing your dressing gown. I … I … of course I’m stressed.’
Pav looked confused and honestly Millie understood his pain. To a man like him, who actually looked more attractive tousled after sleep, her concerns over her appearance must seem bonkers.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s really important to me to look … to look …’
‘Perfect?’
Millie shook her head. ‘No, not perfect but … just not … me. I need my make-up. I need the stuff El picked out for me to … to …’
‘To hide,’ Pav told her, and she blinked. ‘You need it to hide. You need a mask.’
Millie had never really thought about it that way, but it made a lot of sense. She nodded slowly. ‘And … to be in control,’ she added in. ‘I … when I was a child I didn’t … I didn’t prioritise the way I looked. In school I was a few years ahead of myself. The children in my classes largely ignored me as I was so much younger. The kids my age … well, they didn’t always ignore me. Which was …’ She looked away for a moment, imagining Pav at school: good-looking, outgoing, intelligent in an approachable way. ‘I wish they had ignored me,’ she whispered after a long moment, and his hands gave hers a squeeze.
‘You were bullied.’
Millie shrugged. ‘By the time I left school I knew appearance mattered. I tried during my first degree but the results were disastrous. I met Eleanor when I was eighteen.’
‘You had enough money for a personal shopper when you were eighteen?’
Millie nodded. ‘I had enough money to buy my house when I was eighteen. I have … a lot of money.’
Pav smiled. ‘Clearly.’
‘It’s not my money. I mean, it’s Gammy’s money. My Grandpa owned a lot of property, most of it in London. When he died most went to my father but Gammy was left a hotel. A very nice hotel in central London. She sold it and put it in trust for me, one I could access from eighteen. She wanted me to be able to … she wanted me to be financially independent … from my parents.’
‘From your parents? But why –’
‘Look,’ Millie cut him off. She was in no fit state for a discussion about her parents. Her head was still banging and she had to find her clothes. How was she going to get home? ‘I really need to get going and …’
‘Right,’ Pav said briskly. ‘Breakfast for you I think. And painkillers. But first.’ He reached for her and before she knew what was happening she was being held in his strong arms against his warm body. He was hugging her. It was one of the few spontaneous hugs Millie had ever had and she could feel her nose stinging in response.
‘It’s only me here, okay?’ he muttered into her hair. ‘You don’t have to worry about looking a certain way.’
Millie breathed in his scent mixed with the washing-powder smell of his T-shirt, and sighed. Usually physical contact like this made her anxiety worse. But with Pav it was like his warmth was seeping though her skin and into her bones. The sound of his strong, steady heartbeat sent a wave of calm over her and she began to feel the stress lift away.
‘And I think you look beautiful in my dressing gown,’ he said.
‘Liar,’ Millie whispered, but she was smiling despite herself. She even found her arms coming up to hug him back.