“Risk.” Frankie’s eyes glazed over with tears. “One smack is enough for it to be worse.”
“Please,” I pleaded. “Don’t tell. I don’t want to leave Southwold. Please.”
Frankie didn’t reply.
“I’ll be eighteen in a few years, then I’ll be an adult and out of the system,” I rambled on. “I just have to stick it out for a few more years, then I’ll walk away and never look back.”
“D’you promise?”
“Yes, Frankie. I promise.”
“And promise you’ll do everything not to make your foster dad mad.”
“I promise.”
“Okay.” She rubbed her eyes. “I won’t tell. I hate that you’re asking me this. I shouldn’t listen, but I don’t want to hurt you so I won’t tell.”
I was so relieved, tears fell from my eyes. Frankie surprised me when she got up on her tiptoes and wrapped her short arms around my body. She squeezed me so tight it almost stole my breath. A wave of emotions I had never experienced before crashed into my heart. I had been a burden, an outcast, a misfit and unloved for as long as I could remember and this tiny, red-headed girl made me feel wanted with one conversation and one little hug.
“We’re friends now and that means I’ll take care of you, okay?” she mumbled against my chest. “You can come to my house any time you want to get away from them. I promise.”
“O-Okay.”
“Promise we’ll do everything together, that we’ll take care of each other.”
“I promise, Frankie.”
When I hugged her back, it felt right. Like I had found someone who liked me for me and accepted all that came with me. I knew we were going to be good friends because finding someone like Frankie, someone who saw through the façade I portrayed and still wanted to have my back was rare. She was rare. I think I started to love her that day because she made me feel like I wasn’t the broken one, the stray kid who couldn’t find a family.
When I was with her, I was wanted and I knew that she wouldn’t ever send me away like everyone else did.
I just knew it.
CHAPTER THREE
RISK
Present day . . .
Home.
I had been back to the UK and travelled up and down it multiple times since I left to pursue my dreams in the States nine years ago, but this was the first time since I had left that I was returning to my home town. Southwold was a small town on the coast in the East Suffolk district of Suffolk, England. The town had a population of a thousand or so people and what kept the place afloat was the tourist economy. Tourists came for the pretty views and the beaches which Southwold offered, but the hotels, B&Bs, the golf course, cafés, restaurants and the market town atmosphere were the only reason people stuck around for their weekend getaways. Half of the homes in Southwold were second homes or let to holiday-makers so you rarely saw the same faces twice unless they were locals.
Growing up, I saw the appeal in Southwold that many of its residents were blind to.
I loved how calm, how quiet and picturesque it was. It was a place where someone could find themselves, or in my case, lose myself. When I left Southwold I was only eighteen years old, but I was a broken person. I spent a long time forcing myself to never think of my past, to think of her, but being back home made that impossible. Everywhere I looked, I saw her. Frankie Fulton, my ex-girlfriend, was Southwold to me and I always figured that was why I loved the town, but never came back to it.
They say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone or that sometimes you have to lose someone to realise that you really love them. I never understood any of that because I always knew that I had the love of my life in Frankie and I knew I loved her long before I lost her. The shitty thing was, I knew all of those things and I still lost her. I had nine long years to think about why we ended and though I didn’t think it was the right thing to have had happened, I accepted it. That didn’t make it hurt any less. I knew I was a rock for Frankie, but what she didn’t know was that she was an entire boulder for me.
She knew everything about my past. All of it.
May and Hayes had been my best friends for years, but even they didn’t know the extent of the things that I had been through. Frankie was different. We started out as regular classmates at school, then when I was twelve I noticed that she was pretty and that was the beginning of how she became my entire world. She took care of me before I was hers to take care of. She gave me my first hug that I could ever remember. She had my back from the jump and didn’t take no for an answer. A deep bond developed between us. She had always been there for me when I felt trapped and all alone in a home, and world, where I wasn’t wanted. She kissed every bruise, allowed me to unload my troubles onto her and she kept my secret when I asked her to.
She gave me hell for it, but she still did it.
Once Frankie entered my life in a big capacity, I shared my coping mechanism with her. Music. I explained to her how I felt when I listened to music, how I could go into a new world and escape mine whenever I listened to a song. Whenever I listened to the riffs of a guitar, the ping of a piano, the beat of drums and the emotion in a vocalist’s voice, I became part of a moment with them that took me away from all my anger, hurt and misery.
It was thanks to Frankie that I found out that I could sing.
She had severe asthma, I had known that for as long as I had known her, but I found out just how bad it was during the time that we became close friends because it was around the same time that her dad died. The day she ran towards me, screaming and crying. I knew I’d never forget how scared I was when she dropped to her knees before me and gasped for breath. Her lips had turned blue by the time I got her inhaler from her pocket and forced it into her mouth.
Hearing her inhale her medicine and listening as her wheezing faded to nothing gave me a relief I had never felt before in my life, but it also added a great worry to my mind too. Frankie was a girl who I quickly realised I needed in every way and the very thought of her dying because of her asthma terrified me whenever I allowed myself to think about it. It was the reason why I stole one of my foster mother’s blue inhalers every few months. I made sure I had one of them with me at all times just in case Frankie was ever without one of hers.
Owen had caught me stealing one once and he sliced a line into my back as punishment. Out of all of the times that the man had beat me, that was the only time he had ever left a forever-lasting physical mark on me. Across my shoulders and down to the right of my back was a thick, jagged scar. Its pink colour was fading with time. It was always there to touch though, to feel, to remember.
That awful day, when Frankie’s attack subsided, I sat on the side of the street with her and hugged her but it didn’t seem like it was enough. I asked what I could do to help; she told me patting her lower back was what her parents did so I did that and then I began to sing to her to distract her from the pain she was feeling. I didn’t know what it was like to have a real father. I never knew who mine was, and my foster father was never in the running for Dad of the Year, but just because I didn’t have a father didn’t mean I didn’t understand the pain of losing one. I had never seen Frankie so broken before and I wanted to do something, anything, to take away some of that pain.