Hi, welcome to the first of my February love stories. I’m writing these quickly, as a little challenge to myself and a way to build a writing habit, so I’m not promising great literature: expect clichés, tropes and plots lifted entirely from songs.
Every story I write this month will be inspired by one of these prompts (thanks as ever to the lovely people at Jericho Writers). The prompt for tonight’s story, Screaming Crying Throwing Up, is:
‘They realise they’ve been stalking each other for a long time and both know a lot more about the other than they bargained for.’
I’d recommend pairing this story with a negroni-sbagliato-with-prosecco-in-it and a lot of Taylor Swift. I really hope you enjoy it!
Dave just wanted a coffee.
"I just couldn't believe it when I heard. I screamed. Didn't I? I honestly screamed."
Unfortunately for Dave, the two women behind the counter at the Big Magic café were making it pretty clear that they had better things to discuss than his order.
"Screamed. I know. I did too. I cried. I threw up a little bit."
Even more unfortunately for Dave, he had little choice but to put up with this level of shoddy service, for three reasons.
"I'm, like, I'm pleased for us, because like, oh my God. But I'm also like really pleased for her, d'you know what I mean?"
The first was that Big Magic sold excellent coffee.
"Why? She's not that lucky to be moving here."
The second was that it was more or less the only game in town. During the summer there were dozens of places in Courtenay Bay where the tourists could wander down from their AirBnBs to get a decent coffee first thing in the morning, or to end their day looking out at the waves with a glass of wine at night. One of them was Little Magic, Dave's own pop-up coffee shop right on the beach. But now it was February, and cold grey rain was lashing the windows. Little Magic was locked up for the season. Big Magic was one of the few places you could get a coffee or a cocktail at this time of year.
Dave just wanted a coffee. But the longer the two women went on, the more appealing a cocktail was beginning to sound.
"No, not here specifically. But I'm just glad she's out of that situation, you know what I mean? After everything she's been through."
The third reason he had to stand here waiting like this every time he came to Big Magic was that one of these women was his sister-in-law, and the other was his wife.
"Aren't you excited, Dave?" said Carrie.
Dave was about to reply that yes, he was excited, because she'd finally started making his coffee. But he was interrupted by a snort of laughter from his wife.
"Dave's not exactly a Willow Gilbert fan," said Sarah.
"I'm not," Dave admitted, watching as Carrie tamped down the coffee grounds into the thing. "In that I'm not a fourteen-year-old girl who likes songs about rainbows."
"Oh, that was one song," grumbled Sarah.
"Honestly, Dave, you should listen to some of her more recent stuff," Carrie persisted. "I can really see you being into it. She doesn't do fluffy teen stuff anymore. She's a whole different person. Even more so since that nasty scare with the stalker in LA last month."
"She could have died," shuddered Sarah.
"They reckon her whole next album is gonna be about it. She was in a really dark place. I just hope she finds some peace here."
"And it's got to be good for the area, hasn't it?" said Sarah. "Local celebrity? Might bring some people in out of season.
"That doesn't sound very peaceful," said Dave. As he handed his wife the money for his coffee he leaned across the counter to kiss her on the cheek. "I'll see you later."
"You got much on today?"
"Couple of jobs. Nothing til the afternoon, but I shouldn't be home late." He was never home late in the off season. The handyman jobs he was able to find kept their heads above water, but they didn't keep him busy. Not busy enough.
Outside the rain lashed him like a cold shower. He pulled his coat around him and jogged down the beach, his feet crunching wetly on the pebbles, until he reached the sanctuary of Little Magic and hurriedly unlocked the door.
As he turned to close the door behind him he caught a warming glimpse of Big Magic, glowing like a nightlight from the fairy lights that hung around its glass walls and from the candles that Sarah insisted on lighting from the moment she arrived there in the morning. He paused to try and spot which of the watery blurs moving within it was his wife, before closing the door and turning to face the inside of the little cabin.
He hit the switch and the light slowly blinked on. It was cold in here. Even the light was cold, and harsh as it illuminated the things Dave had stuck up on the walls since he'd locked up Little Magic for the winter. Pictures of the girl who sang about rainbows. The ones he'd downloaded and printed, and the ones he'd taken through her window, and the ones he’d taken inside her house. Souvenirs of his trip to the States, last month.
His favourite pictures were the ones where she was asleep. And the close-up that showed the fear on her face, as she woke up to see him standing there.
***
Darcy watched the movers as they hauled the latest scenery of Willow Gilbert's life into the big house by the beach.
"You could help, you know," Willow muttered, hefting a designer gym bag with one hand. The bag was full of the clothes Willow wore during the daily hours she spent lifting the weights that built the muscles that were lifting the gym bag. Darcy could tell you a lot about Willlow’s strength.
"I am helping," said Darcy, serenely, moving past. "I'm staying out of the way."
And it was partly that. But Darcy was also trying to memorise the house.
It was the first time either of them had seen it, physically at least: Willow had fallen in love, online, with the town and the house and the idea of living here, not necessarily in that order. Darcy needed to understand the house the way Darcy understood Willow: the surprising strengths, the secret weakness. There weren't going to be any close calls here, like there had been in LA.
Willow did a lot of things that didn't make a lot of sense to Darcy. But the decision to move here: Darcy understood that.
This was the precise inverse of the house where it had happened. The little cottage which had seemed such a private oasis in the middle of the LA zoo. No big windows for people to pry at. Walls all the way around the garden. But the walls hadn't kept him out. And neither had Darcy.
All Darcy had managed to do, when woken by Willow’s screams, was wrest the knife away. The man who was holding it had got away. They didn't see which way he went, which made sense, since they hadn't seen him coming either.
This house was all windows. They could see miles in each direction: the town, the beach, the beach and the sea.
Darcy passed the bathroom, flicked the light on, peered inside, flicked the light off, moved on. Paced through the kitchen, looked briefly out through the floor-to-ceiling window at the sea. Walked along the corridor and found another door, turned the handle, found it locked, nodded. Willow was allowed secrets, even from her bodyguard. Or at least, she was allowed to believe that she had them.
***
That night Willow sat in the big house on the beach, looking out through the window at the dark sea, and through the internet at the town.
She was watching a clip from the local news. A local café called Big Magic was full of people, mostly school children, and reporters were there asking them how far they'd come, hoping to catch a glimpse of the enormously famous pop star who had moved to their town.
Willow sighed, got up and walked to the window, scanned the seafront until she found the café. The news clip had been recorded hours earlier, but it still looked busy. Too busy.
A shame, Willow thought. She could really use a drink.
Before she'd quite decided what to do next, she found that she was doing it: pulling out her phone, googling the number and making the call.
"Hello, Big Magic?"
"Hi, good evening. I was wondering - do you by any chance deliver?"
"Er..." Willow could hear the woman thinking about Willow's accent, and about the reporters who had been in her café. Now, Willow thought, she'll ask me a question that she doesn't really need to ask, so she can hear my voice again. "Er, possibly...could I take your address?"
Willow gave the address.
"Are you having me on?" said the woman on the phone. She said it a little crossly, but Willow could tell she wanted to believe her.
"Not at all. What's your name?"
"Sarah. Sarah Taylor Boyd. What's yours?"
"It's Willow Gilbert, but you know that."
"Do I, though?"
"Sure. Come outside."
"What?"
"Just step outside the café for a second."
The line went quiet, and Willow wondered if she'd gone too far. But as she squinted through the darkness towards the café - there! - a darker shape had detached itself from that distant warm glow.
"Now what?" said the voice in her ear.
"You must know I can see you," said Willow.
"Maybe you can. What am I doing?"
Willow pressed her forehead against the cold glass. "You're spinning in a circle."
"Maybe I am."
"You are. You look a little silly, to be honest. Maybe you should stop."
"That's not very nice, is it?"
"Are you out of breath?"
"I am! Out of shape as well, obviously. Although in my defence I am pregnant."
"You are?"
"Five months."
"I'd say congratulations, except that now I obviously can't ask you to bring me my order, which is a fairly major disappointment."
"Not saying I was going to bring you anything in any case, but what difference does it make if I'm pregnant?"
"I was going to order a bottle of wine and ask you to have a drink with me."
A pause. Willow could hear Sarah breathing, at a slight distance, as though she was holding the phone away from her. She peered out into the darkness again and saw that she'd gone back into the café.
"We have some of the 0% stuff," Sarah's voice returned. "Non-alcoholic."
"I don't want that."
"I know. I meant for me. For you I have cocktail ingredients."
"I love cocktails."
"I know. We’ve been practising some new ones in case you came in."
"I don't think I can come in today. It seems a little...lively, in there."
"We close at 10," said Sarah, "in the off season. If you wanted to drop along after then, for some privacy. And a cocktail."
"You're not going to bring it to me?"
"You're not going to make a pregnant woman come all that way in the cold, are you?"
Willow hung up. She had half an hour until the café closed and she spent it wandering the house, unconsciously tracing the route Darcy had taken before.
Mindlessly she opened the bathroom door, flicked the light switch on, flicked it off again.
In the kitchen she paused, leaning on the enormous island, spotlit from above, looking out to sea. The perfect space to sit and enjoy a bottle of wine. It seemed a shame not to share it with a new friend.
But perhaps, Willow thought, as she paused in the corridor to unlock the one room Darcy hadn’t entered, and flicked on the light inside to look around at her collection - the pictures she’d found and printed and stuck to the wall, of the man who’d broken into her home and woken her with a knife in his hand, the man with the eyes that she still saw every time she closed her own; and the notes from the private detective she’d hired, who had found about everything there was to know about this man, including where he lived and who his wife was and where they worked - perhaps it would be better if Sarah didn’t come here, just yet.
***
It was about a month later when Sarah decided it was high time she went to Willow's house.
After all, she told herself as she trudged along the beach, weighed down more by her tote bag of cocktail ingredients than by the bump under her dress - and trying to justify her curiosity about the huge house - it was hardly fair to make Willow traipse all the way down to Big Magic every night.
And it had been just about every night. Willow sitting at the bleached wooden table nearest the cash register, the fairy lights and mirrors around the room making her eyes sparkle as Sarah, and sometimes Carrie too, mixed her a drink and cleaned up around her.
They tried not to pry too much into her life, wildly curious as they were: it was obvious that Willow didn't want to talk about showbiz, or fellow celebrities, or the incident at her house in LA. She'd politely deflected each time the conversation went that way, asking them questions instead, about the baby, or Dave, or their lives in Courtenay Bay.
Although she wasn't drinking, something about the intimacy of these strange late nights had led Sarah to share more than she usually would - to share things she hadn't even told Carrie. Her fear that Dave was seeing someone else, that had come up once or twice. And last night, at around 1am, Sarah had told the world-famous Willow Gilbert that sometimes she was a little scared of her husband.
Willow hadn't said anything, but something in her face had shifted as she'd taken Sarah's hand, resting on the tabletop. The two of them had sat there like that for what seemed a very long time, and Sarah had found herself thinking about it a lot since then. The briefest, gentlest movement of Willow's thumb against her finger.
Now Sarah climbed the steps to the house and paused to look out over the crashing blackness of the sea before turning to press the doorbell.
The door was answered almost immediately, by the bodyguard who occasionally accompanied Willow down to the bar, in spite of her protestations.
"Darcy," said Sarah, "Hi." She held up the tote bag. "Sorry for the surprise visit. I can just leave these here if it's a bad time? Little at-home cocktail service?"
"Uh no, Willow's gonna be stoked to see you. She's just working on something, actually, but it's no problem. Come on up."
More stairs, and then they were in a huge kitchen, all concrete walls and hanging lights and that enormous window facing the sea. The floor was bare tiles but the room was warm, and music was playing softly from somewhere.
"She has a studio, just back there," said Darcy, crossing the kitchen and heading down a dark corridor. "I haven't seen her for a couple hours so I guess that's where she is. C'mon."
Sarah set the tote bag down on the continent-sized kitchen island and followed Darcy, until the bodyguard suddenly stopped short by an open door.
"Oh. Shit," said Darcy, just as a voice that sounded a lot like Willow's screamed "Get out!"
"What's - " Sarah reached Darcy's elbow, and before the bodyguard could block her view she saw that Willow was wearing an expression Sarah had never seen before and that she was standing at the centre of a small, windowless room that was papered with pictures of Sarah's husband.
"What?" she stuttered.
Darcy hauled Sarah back down the corridor and Willow followed. "Sarah, I know this must seem so weird but you need to let me explain - "
"What the hell is that?" Sarah broke free from Darcy's grip and made to run back towards the creepy little room; but Darcy grabbed her arm again, and Darcy's other hand was going to an inside jacket pocket, and Willow screamed "No!", and this time when Sarah broke free she ran in the other direction, across the kitchen, not daring to look back because she could hear the thump of Darcy's feet coming after her, and she scrabbled down the stairs and out the front door and down again to the beach, and now she did look back just long enough to confirm that Darcy was still coming, and this time she screamed.
She broke into a staggering run across the pebbles she ran straight into another person with such force that she almost fell backwards, but the other person caught her and held her tightly. Although it was dark she recognised him at once from the smell of his aftershave and the feel of his jumper against her face, and she cried with relief, but as she looked up at him she saw that he was looking past her, at the huge house, and there was something in his eyes that she didn’t recognise at all.
"Dave," she whispered into the darkness. "What are you doing here?"
***
"What are you doing to find my sister?"
A queue had formed at the Big Magic counter, where Carrie was trying to serve the morning rush and shout at the police down the phone at the same time.
"Oat milk latte with vanilla syrup! It's been three days. I’m going out of my mind. Just tap the card reader when you're ready. I know about the search, I took part in the search. Yes, love? Sugar's just by the door. But why haven't you arrested someone? Skimmed milk cappuccino? Why haven't you arrested - " Carrie lowered her voice - "Dave bloody Boyd?"
"There's no need to whisper, love," said the next customer in line. "We all think Dave did it."
Carrie looked up to see everyone in the café looking at her.
"Do you?" she said.
There was a chorus of yeses, and one faintly muttered “Creepy bastard, he is.”
"Did you hear that?" Carrie said, into the phone. "No, I know it's not evidence, but - " She looked up again, feeling the looming presence of someone standing at the counter, and turned around to see Willow Gilbert's bodyguard.
"We need to talk," said Darcy.
***
The police also very much thought that Dave Boyd had killed his wife. If they hadn’t thought so all along, they certainly thought so once they’d smashed down the door of the Little Magic cabin and seen what was inside. It wasn’t evidence, of course, but since by now Dave had also disappeared, there wouldn’t have been much they could do if it was.
They’d interviewed Carrie, of course, as a possible suspect in Dave’s disappearance, but her whereabouts were accounted for - by the customers of the Big Magic café, during its opening hours, and “Get this: her alibi for the rest of the time is Willow Gilbert’s bodyguard…”
The two of them had been spending more and more time together just lately. In fact, while the police were cataloguing Dave Boyd’s shrine to Willow, Carrie and Darcy were dismantling Willow’s shrine to Dave.
“There are just so many of these,” said Carrie, pulling down the pictures taken by Willow’s PI. “What’s this one?”
“This is when he followed us to the airfield. The PI caught him taking pictures of Willow getting on her plane.”
“Willow has a private plane?”
“She sure does,” said Darcy, who had last seen the plane just a few days before, taking off on its way to somewhere even quieter.
On the plane, Willow had jotted song lyrics into her notebook, until Sarah came back from being sick in the bathroom. When Sarah had got back to her seat, Willow had taken her hand, fussed over her, gave her water and kissed her and stroked her hair until Sarah’s eyes closed. And Sarah thought of the night in the café when she’d said that her husband scared her.
“Thank-you for looking after me,” she said, quietly, with her eyes still closed. And then she added, even more quietly, “I knew you would.”