(no subject)
SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY!
I tried to post this but it wasn't working. Anyway, here it is now, and I'm afraid it's not as good as I might like, but you'll have to make do because my brain is being weird at the moment and refusing to cooperate with me:
~Bam~
On and on it went. I don’t think I ever thought that our time together was limited. I didn’t want to think like that. I wanted to believe that we’d travel the world together forever, that we’d thrown our old lives away and now it was just us, the three of us, and no one else. Why should anything change, when it was so perfect? What more did we need? I thought things were fine.
From London we moved north, travelling England, then Scotland, to a little village called Portpatrick, where we sat on the cliffs together, freezing, but happy as we watched the sun set on the sea and listened to the oystercatchers and other birds. Ville loved the oystercatchers. He told me that we should come back here again, and perhaps someday he’d buy a cottage here so we could listen to the oystercatchers all day. From there we went on to Ireland, which Alice loved, and then back to Scotland, because we’d decided that after a short trip to Wales we wouldn’t come back to Britain for a while, and Ville wanted to hear the oystercatchers again.
It was while Alice and I watched Ville gleefully climb the rocks on the beach to crouch, silently, watching the oystercatchers from an impressively close distance that Alice told me what I’d been dreading.
“We can’t go on like this.”
“What?” I said, a little distracted by the way the setting sun outline Ville’s figure against the orange glow of the sky as he watched the oystercatchers with an innocent fascination.
“We can’t keep travelling together.”
“Wh- Why? What are you talking about?” I asked, turning to her and my heart stopping, “I don’t understand.”
“Ville switched his phone off, but for a while they kept calling him.”
“Who?”
“The record companies, Seppo, other members of the band. They need him back. There are tours and gigs to be done. He’s been away too long.”
And that was it. Reality had struck. A sudden gust of wind whipped Ville’s hair about his face as he laughed at the almost cartoonish little black and white birds flying about him and calling in their shrill little “peep” voices. They were like little flying clowns, I thought, only not as scary, and cuter.
“He… he needs to go back?” I whispered.
Alice nodded.
“But… he can’t… He doesn’t want to, they can’t make him, right?”
She lowered her eyes sadly.
“Right?” I repeated.
“Bam, they don’t need to make him. He wants to go back.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t need to, I knew it from the beginning.”
“How could you know?”
“I told you, you’re not like him. You fly with me. Ville is caged. He can’t just drop everything, he’s not… crazy, like us.”
I watched the sea breeze move her hair gently. It had grown a little since we’d been travelling, and I liked it longer, it brought out her eyes more, and the red of her lips seemed stronger in the dying light of the evening.
Love is insane, baby, and we are too. His words. Ville’s words. Did he really want to go back? What if Alice was wrong?
What if she’s right?
Both of them looked so vulnerable, Ville out there on the rocks and Alice with her arms wrapped around herself against the cold breeze, watching him with a sadness I hadn’t noticed properly until now. She was just as afraid of losing him as I was. Ville turned and noticed us both watching him. He raised an eyebrow and started carefully picking his way back to us, occasionally slipping so that I had to fight the urge to run over there and help him. Did he feel the cold? Probably not.
“Well, if he goes back, what about us?”
“What about us?”
“Will we go with him?”
I saw fear in her eyes suddenly, even though she tried to hide it. Her hand shot to her chest and clutched at the large coat Ville had wrapped around her before going off on his little adventure. Her lips pursed and her jaw became firmer, as though she was facing some deep inner torment.
“Will you?” she asked.
I nodded, “If you’ll come.”
She turned away. I panicked.
“You’ll come, right? You can’t just let him go back on his own!”
“We’ll have to stay with him there, won’t we? It won’t be part of our travels. We’ll have a home.”
“I guess, but it can be part of the adventure.”
“Work can never be part of the adventure, Bam. I can’t go into his cage.”
I reached out and took hold of her shaking hand. What was it that she was so afraid of?
“It’s only a cage if you make it one. Why are you so afraid of having a home?”
She turned to look deep into my eyes, “Aren’t you afraid, Bam?”
“Afraid of having a home? Why should I be?”
“Having a home means becoming the stereotype. It means responsibilities that chain you to the one place. You’ll never be able to leave, to be free. We’ve been free together, don’t you see that?”
I shook my head, “I think you can have a home and still be free.”
She looked afraid again. I had never seen Alice afraid before. It scared me a little. She was even tougher than Ville in many ways, but now she looked… fragile… lost, scared.
“What happened, Alice? There’s something you’re not telling me.”
She opened her mouth to speak when Ville appeared in all his windswept glory.
“They’re so cute.” He said deeply, gesturing to the little birds, “They’re so loud and so little!”
I rolled my eyes at him, “Yeah, okay Ville. Next you’ll be reading those little bird books and buying a set of binoculars.”
He frowned at me for a moment before plonking himself next to Alice and wrapping an arm around her. She smiled and leant into him, closing her eyes slightly.
“Cold?” he asked her.
“Mmm no, thanks to your lovely coat.”
“And you, sweetheart?”
It took me a moment to realise Ville was talking to me.
“Not really.” I replied.
“Yes you are, I can hear your teeth chattering from here. C’mere…” he said, beckoning me over to sit on his other side, which I did.
He wrapped the other arm around me and instantly I was enveloped in his warmth. How he manages to stay so warm in the cold, I’ll never know, but I tried not to think too much as I snuggled into him and closed my eyes just has Alice had done. As well as the distant noises of the sea and the peeping of the birds I could hear Ville’s heartbeat, a slow steady thud that told me he was relaxed, and that relaxed me.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
I wanted this moment - with the gentle sea breeze, Ville’s slow breathing and heartbeat, the warmth of his body next to mine and the beautiful sunset - to last forever. I felt him lean down and kiss my forehead, his hair tickling my face and closed eyelids, and the slight stubble on his chin and above his lip scratching my face a little, but I didn’t care. I loved the smell of him, mixed with the salty smell of the breeze and the trace of Alice’s sent, carried on the wind to me. I loved hearing him tell us that he loved us both more than life itself. I loved it when he told us again, each separately this time, and how much we meant to him, how we had made him happier than he’d been in a long time.
We sat on that cliff together as the stars began to appear in the sky, more and more, until finally the twinkling night sky spread over us like a beautiful, glittering deep blue blanket, and the cries of the birds died down until the only noises were the waves lapping the beach and Ville’s breathing and heartbeat, steady, strong, soothing. The three of us under the night sky - Alice, beautiful, strong, mysterious, sarcastic, spontaneous, intelligent Alice. And Ville. What more can I say about Ville? I realised that I loved him for the same reasons I loved Alice. They were both strong for me, my two anchors, but while Ville kept my feet on the ground, Alice seemed to be pulling me in a slightly different direction. We were so alike, Alice and I, and so in love, all of us, so in love. How could things be any different? No, it was too scary to think that way.
The feeling of Ville’s thumb stroking my cheek lovingly brought me out of my thoughts and I realised that he was in fact brushing my tears away. I felt a little guilty for letting my feelings ruin such a beautiful moment, but Ville said nothing, he just pulled me closer and placed more kisses on my face before whispering once again that he loved me.
“I love you too,” I whispered, “I love you so much it hurts.”
Alice was sleeping, I realised.
“Shh,” Ville whispered, wiping my tears away gently, “it’s alright. I love you so much it scares me sometimes. Love is a scary thing.”
“It is,” I replied, “and I don’t know whether to love it or hate it. Everything’s so scary.”
“No more tears, Bam. I’m here for you.”
“I know. I just… it’s confusing and at the same time… I don’t know why I’m so confused.”
He chuckled softly and kissed my forehead again, “You’re always the awkward one, aren’t you?”
I nodded against his chest, “That’s me.”
“And you’re perfect and I love you.”
“So you keep telling me.”
“Well, I do.”
“And you love Alice.”
“I do indeed, and so do you.”
“Yeah, she’s incredible.”
“You’re both incredible, but in your own ways. I love you because you’re my Bam, and nothing will ever change that.”
“And you’re my Walla Walo.”
“Mmm, and I love it.”
We watched the stars again in silence for a while, but there was a question inside me just waiting to burst out, it had been fighting around inside me for a while. Well, there were two questions, but I knew that I had to ask one, and the second one would probably be best.
“You’re not thinking of going back, are you?” I blurted.
I felt his heartbeat quicken and my own began to race with it. He said nothing.
“Ville?”
He sighed, “They’ve been calling me.”
“I know.”
“There are things to be done.”
“I know.”
“I need to be there for those things to be done.”
“And will you?”
“I don’t know. I… I need to, I suppose.”
“Alice won’t come with you, you know.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“Neither do I. Well, I guess I do, but in other ways I don’t. There’s something she hasn’t told us. She’s scared of being in one place too long, she keeps saying she’ll be trapped.”
“You don’t think… maybe this has something to do with that ex of hers? David, was it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe…”
I looked over at her. She looked so peaceful.
“David was a bad person. I think if I ever met him, I’d hurt him…” Ville muttered, almost absent-mindedly.
I was shocked. I’d never heard Ville speak like that and besides, I knew very little about what had went on between Alice and David. I knew it must have been something bad, Ville was a pacifist, usually.
“W-would you really do that?” I asked timidly.
“Beg your pardon?”
“Would you really hurt him? Hurt David?”
“Did I say that?”
I nodded and he looked back out over the glittering sea.
“I think… I think I would, yes. No man has the right to hurt a woman.”
“He hurt her?”
“I think he did much more to her than that, Bam. There are things Alice isn’t telling us, she’s a strong woman, proud, too.”
I began to feel a little sick. Our perfect moment suddenly wasn’t feeling so perfect.
“Maybe she’s afraid of having a home because she thinks we’ll be like… that. Maybe… maybe she’s scared that what happened with David will happen again.”
“I think you might be right,” he agreed, “I think David tried to keep her with him, to be honest. Oh, God, you’ve no idea how angry that makes me.”
He glared out into the night and I watched him for a few moments, before sitting up and kissing his cheek gently.
“We should go back to the hotel,” I suggested, “it’s getting cold.”
I don’t know how he managed it, but somehow Ville managed to carry Alice back to the hotel. She wasn’t the lightest of people, that’s for sure. I’m not saying she was fat, but she wasn’t thin like Ville was, either. She was something in between, and quite tall, which didn’t help.
Finally as she slept on the double bed at one end and Ville and I cuddled together beside her, I kept thinking about what both Alice and Ville had said. Ville wanted to go back, or he needed to, whatever, it meant the same thing in the end, but what would Alice do? What would I do? We had to go with him, we had to! I began to realise that perhaps there would come a time when I would have to choose - go with Ville, or go with Alice. What kind of decision was that? That was a cruel one, and there was no way I could do that. No, we’d all go together, right?
That’s when I began to feel afraid, too. Alice had asked me if I was afraid earlier, and I hadn’t been, but now… It did seem like a bit of a big deal. Going back with Ville, he’d be caught up in work again, our adventure would be over, sacrifices would have to be made, there would be tension, stress, worries, press, fans, managers, record labels, contracts... There would be large periods of time when Ville would be working and we wouldn’t see him. No more spontaneously packing up and flying to another country… Come to think of it, that was scary!
“Are you asleep?” I whispered.
“No” Ville replied.
“I can’t sleep.”
“Me neither.”
“I’m scared.”
“Me too.”
“Don’t leave, don’t go back.”
“I have to, you know I do.”
“But… you’ll have to work. We won’t see each other… it’ll be hard.”
He sighed and pulled me close.
“All relationships are hard, Bam, you know that.”
“But… What about Alice?”
“I love her with all my heart, but you must understand that I have no choice - I must go. Music is my life, I can’t just abandon it.”
“She was right.”
“Alice?”
“Mhmm. She said you were trapped and you’d end up going back. Your job controls you, doesn’t it?”
“No,” he sounded angry, suddenly, “no, it’s not like that, not at all. I love my work, Bam, you know I do. I told you, music is my life. This… this was fun, it really was and you know that I love you both so much, like you said, I love you so much it hurts, but we have to move on. Relationships require sacrifice. My record label stopped paying for our little trips a long time ago. This is my own money we’re spending, and I don’t have unlimited supplies of the stuff, either.”
“…I didn’t know.” I mumbled.
“I didn’t want you to know. I wanted you to have fun. Don’t you see, Bam? This isn’t some fairytale where we can fly from place to place and live happily ever after! Alice may be able to live like this but I… I can’t. There, I’ve said it, I can’t live like this.”
Then he turned away from me. It took me a few moments to register that actually, we might have had an argument… maybe. Was it an argument? Had I offended Ville? I hadn’t meant to. Shit, I had, hadn’t I! He’d been spending his own money just to keep us happy… Well, maybe we should have shown him a bit more gratitude. He was right, this couldn’t last forever. I had been deluding myself, hadn’t I?
God, I hated that he was right.
~Ville~
I hadn’t meant to go off at him like that, my little Bam, I really hadn’t, but the truth is, he’d touched a nerve. Not only had he found the exact little problem that had been eating away at me for the past few weeks, but I had accidentally brought up the fact that I was paying for this. I’m not a tight person, not at all. I’ll happily spend money if it means comfort and happiness for the ones I love, but there comes a point where you have to slow down, you know? We had reached that point. I had abandoned my responsibilities. I had been a fool, believing our “big adventure” could last forever, but now I had new problems.
Namely, where did we go from here?
Alice wouldn’t come back with me, well, not at the moment. She was hiding something and it was the Key to her fears, I knew it. God, I hated seeing her afraid, someone so strong and yet I felt a guilty irritation. If it wasn’t for her fears we wouldn’t be in this mess. No, I couldn’t blame her for that, it wasn’t her fault she had reason to be afraid. If anyone was to blame, that was David, but I had the feeling that if we could somehow find out this secret, this deep and terrible secret Alice held within her about David, we could perhaps move on, and perhaps her fears would be cured. Yes, that was it! I would help my Alice, my beautiful, wonderful, brave Alice. I would help her through her one weakness, though I didn’t know what it was.
She slept like an angel, oblivious to the inner torment of the two men who lay with her. She just wanted to be free, was it so much to ask?
I’ll let you be free, Alice. I’ll help you beat David, and I’ll let you truly be free. No more running, no more pretending. We’ll be free together, all three of us. Just let me in so that I can help you.
“Ville…” a little voice whispered in the dark. It was Bam.
“Hmm?”
“I… I’m sorry.”
I turned back to him and without another word took hold of him and kissed him deeply on the lips. It wasn’t necessarily passionate, but it was so full of love that the kiss took on a strange new kind of intensity. It was a kiss that said I love you, forget about it all, I love you, and that’s all that matters.
“Does that mean I’m forgiven?”
“Go to sleep, Bam.”
~Alice~
“Relationships require sacrifice.”
Yes, they do, but why is it that in every relationship up until now, I’ve been the one to make the sacrifices?
I was drifting in and out of dreams, but I could hear the low buzz of Ville’s voice speaking to Bam in the distant land of consciousness. Then the dreams came back, stark, vivid, brutal.
“If you love me you’ll do this.”
“No, it doesn’t work like that, you know it doesn’t! You had my hand in marriage, what more do you want?”
“I want this.”
“You’re drunk. You’re insane! I don’t want this right now, why can’t you see that? We need to talk this over, you can’t just ignore it. He’s your son and I’m your wife! You can’t do this to us!”
“I’ll do whatever I fucking want, I followed you all over the world for an entire year, I think you owe me this.”
“Don’t do this, David, it won’t help anything. This is cheap, pointless!”
But there were no more words. No, once David had made up his mind, there weren’t words. Only actions, and pain. I would never escape here, David had decided that. He knew my weaknesses, he knew that I cared about this son. Did I care enough to stay? Of course I did, and I did love him. Oh, I hated him but I loved him, too! He wanted too much from me, I felt so weak, drained, I could no longer provide what he needed, yet still he would take from me.
~Ville~
Alice whimpered in her sleep. I hated when she did that, it made me feel uneasy. I wanted to wake her up, but I didn’t. Bam was sleeping in my arms. She moaned and cried out a little, and it broke my heart.
Let us help you.
I tried to post this but it wasn't working. Anyway, here it is now, and I'm afraid it's not as good as I might like, but you'll have to make do because my brain is being weird at the moment and refusing to cooperate with me:
~Bam~
On and on it went. I don’t think I ever thought that our time together was limited. I didn’t want to think like that. I wanted to believe that we’d travel the world together forever, that we’d thrown our old lives away and now it was just us, the three of us, and no one else. Why should anything change, when it was so perfect? What more did we need? I thought things were fine.
From London we moved north, travelling England, then Scotland, to a little village called Portpatrick, where we sat on the cliffs together, freezing, but happy as we watched the sun set on the sea and listened to the oystercatchers and other birds. Ville loved the oystercatchers. He told me that we should come back here again, and perhaps someday he’d buy a cottage here so we could listen to the oystercatchers all day. From there we went on to Ireland, which Alice loved, and then back to Scotland, because we’d decided that after a short trip to Wales we wouldn’t come back to Britain for a while, and Ville wanted to hear the oystercatchers again.
It was while Alice and I watched Ville gleefully climb the rocks on the beach to crouch, silently, watching the oystercatchers from an impressively close distance that Alice told me what I’d been dreading.
“We can’t go on like this.”
“What?” I said, a little distracted by the way the setting sun outline Ville’s figure against the orange glow of the sky as he watched the oystercatchers with an innocent fascination.
“We can’t keep travelling together.”
“Wh- Why? What are you talking about?” I asked, turning to her and my heart stopping, “I don’t understand.”
“Ville switched his phone off, but for a while they kept calling him.”
“Who?”
“The record companies, Seppo, other members of the band. They need him back. There are tours and gigs to be done. He’s been away too long.”
And that was it. Reality had struck. A sudden gust of wind whipped Ville’s hair about his face as he laughed at the almost cartoonish little black and white birds flying about him and calling in their shrill little “peep” voices. They were like little flying clowns, I thought, only not as scary, and cuter.
“He… he needs to go back?” I whispered.
Alice nodded.
“But… he can’t… He doesn’t want to, they can’t make him, right?”
She lowered her eyes sadly.
“Right?” I repeated.
“Bam, they don’t need to make him. He wants to go back.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t need to, I knew it from the beginning.”
“How could you know?”
“I told you, you’re not like him. You fly with me. Ville is caged. He can’t just drop everything, he’s not… crazy, like us.”
I watched the sea breeze move her hair gently. It had grown a little since we’d been travelling, and I liked it longer, it brought out her eyes more, and the red of her lips seemed stronger in the dying light of the evening.
Love is insane, baby, and we are too. His words. Ville’s words. Did he really want to go back? What if Alice was wrong?
What if she’s right?
Both of them looked so vulnerable, Ville out there on the rocks and Alice with her arms wrapped around herself against the cold breeze, watching him with a sadness I hadn’t noticed properly until now. She was just as afraid of losing him as I was. Ville turned and noticed us both watching him. He raised an eyebrow and started carefully picking his way back to us, occasionally slipping so that I had to fight the urge to run over there and help him. Did he feel the cold? Probably not.
“Well, if he goes back, what about us?”
“What about us?”
“Will we go with him?”
I saw fear in her eyes suddenly, even though she tried to hide it. Her hand shot to her chest and clutched at the large coat Ville had wrapped around her before going off on his little adventure. Her lips pursed and her jaw became firmer, as though she was facing some deep inner torment.
“Will you?” she asked.
I nodded, “If you’ll come.”
She turned away. I panicked.
“You’ll come, right? You can’t just let him go back on his own!”
“We’ll have to stay with him there, won’t we? It won’t be part of our travels. We’ll have a home.”
“I guess, but it can be part of the adventure.”
“Work can never be part of the adventure, Bam. I can’t go into his cage.”
I reached out and took hold of her shaking hand. What was it that she was so afraid of?
“It’s only a cage if you make it one. Why are you so afraid of having a home?”
She turned to look deep into my eyes, “Aren’t you afraid, Bam?”
“Afraid of having a home? Why should I be?”
“Having a home means becoming the stereotype. It means responsibilities that chain you to the one place. You’ll never be able to leave, to be free. We’ve been free together, don’t you see that?”
I shook my head, “I think you can have a home and still be free.”
She looked afraid again. I had never seen Alice afraid before. It scared me a little. She was even tougher than Ville in many ways, but now she looked… fragile… lost, scared.
“What happened, Alice? There’s something you’re not telling me.”
She opened her mouth to speak when Ville appeared in all his windswept glory.
“They’re so cute.” He said deeply, gesturing to the little birds, “They’re so loud and so little!”
I rolled my eyes at him, “Yeah, okay Ville. Next you’ll be reading those little bird books and buying a set of binoculars.”
He frowned at me for a moment before plonking himself next to Alice and wrapping an arm around her. She smiled and leant into him, closing her eyes slightly.
“Cold?” he asked her.
“Mmm no, thanks to your lovely coat.”
“And you, sweetheart?”
It took me a moment to realise Ville was talking to me.
“Not really.” I replied.
“Yes you are, I can hear your teeth chattering from here. C’mere…” he said, beckoning me over to sit on his other side, which I did.
He wrapped the other arm around me and instantly I was enveloped in his warmth. How he manages to stay so warm in the cold, I’ll never know, but I tried not to think too much as I snuggled into him and closed my eyes just has Alice had done. As well as the distant noises of the sea and the peeping of the birds I could hear Ville’s heartbeat, a slow steady thud that told me he was relaxed, and that relaxed me.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
I wanted this moment - with the gentle sea breeze, Ville’s slow breathing and heartbeat, the warmth of his body next to mine and the beautiful sunset - to last forever. I felt him lean down and kiss my forehead, his hair tickling my face and closed eyelids, and the slight stubble on his chin and above his lip scratching my face a little, but I didn’t care. I loved the smell of him, mixed with the salty smell of the breeze and the trace of Alice’s sent, carried on the wind to me. I loved hearing him tell us that he loved us both more than life itself. I loved it when he told us again, each separately this time, and how much we meant to him, how we had made him happier than he’d been in a long time.
We sat on that cliff together as the stars began to appear in the sky, more and more, until finally the twinkling night sky spread over us like a beautiful, glittering deep blue blanket, and the cries of the birds died down until the only noises were the waves lapping the beach and Ville’s breathing and heartbeat, steady, strong, soothing. The three of us under the night sky - Alice, beautiful, strong, mysterious, sarcastic, spontaneous, intelligent Alice. And Ville. What more can I say about Ville? I realised that I loved him for the same reasons I loved Alice. They were both strong for me, my two anchors, but while Ville kept my feet on the ground, Alice seemed to be pulling me in a slightly different direction. We were so alike, Alice and I, and so in love, all of us, so in love. How could things be any different? No, it was too scary to think that way.
The feeling of Ville’s thumb stroking my cheek lovingly brought me out of my thoughts and I realised that he was in fact brushing my tears away. I felt a little guilty for letting my feelings ruin such a beautiful moment, but Ville said nothing, he just pulled me closer and placed more kisses on my face before whispering once again that he loved me.
“I love you too,” I whispered, “I love you so much it hurts.”
Alice was sleeping, I realised.
“Shh,” Ville whispered, wiping my tears away gently, “it’s alright. I love you so much it scares me sometimes. Love is a scary thing.”
“It is,” I replied, “and I don’t know whether to love it or hate it. Everything’s so scary.”
“No more tears, Bam. I’m here for you.”
“I know. I just… it’s confusing and at the same time… I don’t know why I’m so confused.”
He chuckled softly and kissed my forehead again, “You’re always the awkward one, aren’t you?”
I nodded against his chest, “That’s me.”
“And you’re perfect and I love you.”
“So you keep telling me.”
“Well, I do.”
“And you love Alice.”
“I do indeed, and so do you.”
“Yeah, she’s incredible.”
“You’re both incredible, but in your own ways. I love you because you’re my Bam, and nothing will ever change that.”
“And you’re my Walla Walo.”
“Mmm, and I love it.”
We watched the stars again in silence for a while, but there was a question inside me just waiting to burst out, it had been fighting around inside me for a while. Well, there were two questions, but I knew that I had to ask one, and the second one would probably be best.
“You’re not thinking of going back, are you?” I blurted.
I felt his heartbeat quicken and my own began to race with it. He said nothing.
“Ville?”
He sighed, “They’ve been calling me.”
“I know.”
“There are things to be done.”
“I know.”
“I need to be there for those things to be done.”
“And will you?”
“I don’t know. I… I need to, I suppose.”
“Alice won’t come with you, you know.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“Neither do I. Well, I guess I do, but in other ways I don’t. There’s something she hasn’t told us. She’s scared of being in one place too long, she keeps saying she’ll be trapped.”
“You don’t think… maybe this has something to do with that ex of hers? David, was it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe…”
I looked over at her. She looked so peaceful.
“David was a bad person. I think if I ever met him, I’d hurt him…” Ville muttered, almost absent-mindedly.
I was shocked. I’d never heard Ville speak like that and besides, I knew very little about what had went on between Alice and David. I knew it must have been something bad, Ville was a pacifist, usually.
“W-would you really do that?” I asked timidly.
“Beg your pardon?”
“Would you really hurt him? Hurt David?”
“Did I say that?”
I nodded and he looked back out over the glittering sea.
“I think… I think I would, yes. No man has the right to hurt a woman.”
“He hurt her?”
“I think he did much more to her than that, Bam. There are things Alice isn’t telling us, she’s a strong woman, proud, too.”
I began to feel a little sick. Our perfect moment suddenly wasn’t feeling so perfect.
“Maybe she’s afraid of having a home because she thinks we’ll be like… that. Maybe… maybe she’s scared that what happened with David will happen again.”
“I think you might be right,” he agreed, “I think David tried to keep her with him, to be honest. Oh, God, you’ve no idea how angry that makes me.”
He glared out into the night and I watched him for a few moments, before sitting up and kissing his cheek gently.
“We should go back to the hotel,” I suggested, “it’s getting cold.”
I don’t know how he managed it, but somehow Ville managed to carry Alice back to the hotel. She wasn’t the lightest of people, that’s for sure. I’m not saying she was fat, but she wasn’t thin like Ville was, either. She was something in between, and quite tall, which didn’t help.
Finally as she slept on the double bed at one end and Ville and I cuddled together beside her, I kept thinking about what both Alice and Ville had said. Ville wanted to go back, or he needed to, whatever, it meant the same thing in the end, but what would Alice do? What would I do? We had to go with him, we had to! I began to realise that perhaps there would come a time when I would have to choose - go with Ville, or go with Alice. What kind of decision was that? That was a cruel one, and there was no way I could do that. No, we’d all go together, right?
That’s when I began to feel afraid, too. Alice had asked me if I was afraid earlier, and I hadn’t been, but now… It did seem like a bit of a big deal. Going back with Ville, he’d be caught up in work again, our adventure would be over, sacrifices would have to be made, there would be tension, stress, worries, press, fans, managers, record labels, contracts... There would be large periods of time when Ville would be working and we wouldn’t see him. No more spontaneously packing up and flying to another country… Come to think of it, that was scary!
“Are you asleep?” I whispered.
“No” Ville replied.
“I can’t sleep.”
“Me neither.”
“I’m scared.”
“Me too.”
“Don’t leave, don’t go back.”
“I have to, you know I do.”
“But… you’ll have to work. We won’t see each other… it’ll be hard.”
He sighed and pulled me close.
“All relationships are hard, Bam, you know that.”
“But… What about Alice?”
“I love her with all my heart, but you must understand that I have no choice - I must go. Music is my life, I can’t just abandon it.”
“She was right.”
“Alice?”
“Mhmm. She said you were trapped and you’d end up going back. Your job controls you, doesn’t it?”
“No,” he sounded angry, suddenly, “no, it’s not like that, not at all. I love my work, Bam, you know I do. I told you, music is my life. This… this was fun, it really was and you know that I love you both so much, like you said, I love you so much it hurts, but we have to move on. Relationships require sacrifice. My record label stopped paying for our little trips a long time ago. This is my own money we’re spending, and I don’t have unlimited supplies of the stuff, either.”
“…I didn’t know.” I mumbled.
“I didn’t want you to know. I wanted you to have fun. Don’t you see, Bam? This isn’t some fairytale where we can fly from place to place and live happily ever after! Alice may be able to live like this but I… I can’t. There, I’ve said it, I can’t live like this.”
Then he turned away from me. It took me a few moments to register that actually, we might have had an argument… maybe. Was it an argument? Had I offended Ville? I hadn’t meant to. Shit, I had, hadn’t I! He’d been spending his own money just to keep us happy… Well, maybe we should have shown him a bit more gratitude. He was right, this couldn’t last forever. I had been deluding myself, hadn’t I?
God, I hated that he was right.
~Ville~
I hadn’t meant to go off at him like that, my little Bam, I really hadn’t, but the truth is, he’d touched a nerve. Not only had he found the exact little problem that had been eating away at me for the past few weeks, but I had accidentally brought up the fact that I was paying for this. I’m not a tight person, not at all. I’ll happily spend money if it means comfort and happiness for the ones I love, but there comes a point where you have to slow down, you know? We had reached that point. I had abandoned my responsibilities. I had been a fool, believing our “big adventure” could last forever, but now I had new problems.
Namely, where did we go from here?
Alice wouldn’t come back with me, well, not at the moment. She was hiding something and it was the Key to her fears, I knew it. God, I hated seeing her afraid, someone so strong and yet I felt a guilty irritation. If it wasn’t for her fears we wouldn’t be in this mess. No, I couldn’t blame her for that, it wasn’t her fault she had reason to be afraid. If anyone was to blame, that was David, but I had the feeling that if we could somehow find out this secret, this deep and terrible secret Alice held within her about David, we could perhaps move on, and perhaps her fears would be cured. Yes, that was it! I would help my Alice, my beautiful, wonderful, brave Alice. I would help her through her one weakness, though I didn’t know what it was.
She slept like an angel, oblivious to the inner torment of the two men who lay with her. She just wanted to be free, was it so much to ask?
I’ll let you be free, Alice. I’ll help you beat David, and I’ll let you truly be free. No more running, no more pretending. We’ll be free together, all three of us. Just let me in so that I can help you.
“Ville…” a little voice whispered in the dark. It was Bam.
“Hmm?”
“I… I’m sorry.”
I turned back to him and without another word took hold of him and kissed him deeply on the lips. It wasn’t necessarily passionate, but it was so full of love that the kiss took on a strange new kind of intensity. It was a kiss that said I love you, forget about it all, I love you, and that’s all that matters.
“Does that mean I’m forgiven?”
“Go to sleep, Bam.”
~Alice~
“Relationships require sacrifice.”
Yes, they do, but why is it that in every relationship up until now, I’ve been the one to make the sacrifices?
I was drifting in and out of dreams, but I could hear the low buzz of Ville’s voice speaking to Bam in the distant land of consciousness. Then the dreams came back, stark, vivid, brutal.
“If you love me you’ll do this.”
“No, it doesn’t work like that, you know it doesn’t! You had my hand in marriage, what more do you want?”
“I want this.”
“You’re drunk. You’re insane! I don’t want this right now, why can’t you see that? We need to talk this over, you can’t just ignore it. He’s your son and I’m your wife! You can’t do this to us!”
“I’ll do whatever I fucking want, I followed you all over the world for an entire year, I think you owe me this.”
“Don’t do this, David, it won’t help anything. This is cheap, pointless!”
But there were no more words. No, once David had made up his mind, there weren’t words. Only actions, and pain. I would never escape here, David had decided that. He knew my weaknesses, he knew that I cared about this son. Did I care enough to stay? Of course I did, and I did love him. Oh, I hated him but I loved him, too! He wanted too much from me, I felt so weak, drained, I could no longer provide what he needed, yet still he would take from me.
~Ville~
Alice whimpered in her sleep. I hated when she did that, it made me feel uneasy. I wanted to wake her up, but I didn’t. Bam was sleeping in my arms. She moaned and cried out a little, and it broke my heart.
Let us help you.