Bedful of Moonlight by Raven Held (audio ebook reader .txt) 📕

“and Caleb you’ll take this. Now get to work. They must all get it by seven p.m., every household, every shop. Got it?”
Caleb rolled his eyes, and then took my arm and turned to leave.
“I think we should split up,” I said to Hyde. “It’ll be faster that way.”
I could feel Caleb’s gaze on me, but I looked resolutely at Hyde.
Hyde raised his brows. “Okay. Whatever. But you have to go out that door together, right?” He shot Caleb a look.
Once out the door, I turned left and tried to disappear round the corner into a street with red-roofed houses, but he managed to catch up with me.
“Can you please tell me why you’re so mad at me?”
“I’m not.” I stuffed a flyer into a blue tin mailbox painted with bright yellow flowers.
“Yes, you are. And if it’s about last night, I can totally explain –”
“You don’t need to offer me an explanation, Caleb.”
He ignored that. “I didn’t mean to leave you at the porch alone the entire night. I know you think I went to my dad’s, and I did, but it’s not –”
“Can we please not talk about this?”
He stopped me, holding onto my shoulder.
“Really,” I said, glancing down at it. He dropped his hand. “I’d rather not talk about it. Please.”
It felt like the right thing to do, not moping about whatever it was that I did not even understand myself. So why did it hurt so much when I saw the look in his eyes?
Yes, if I had to admit it, it hurt.
Like I said, it was easier not to get to close to anyone. It gave them all the power to hurt you. Being alone, removed, was just a form of protection, to survive in this uncertain world, when any minute someone might just pull the carpet out from under you. It’s just easier not to get on board in the first place.
“Alright,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”
Then he turned and disappeared round the corner.


Twenty-one


“Being in love shows a person who he should be.”
~ Anton Chekhov (Russian writer and playwright, 1860 – 1904)


I had never been to craft fairs before, much less been personally involved in one.
Hyde had certainly wasted no time. “If we’re going to save the Old Belle, we’re going to do it now,” he had said. So the day after the flyers were handed out, he rounded up a few tents and tables, and took charge of running the craft fair.
Belle had her misgivings, but there was – as was usually the case with her – no time for that, because she was too preoccupied with Oliver and Sawyer.
It was up to me and Caleb, therefore, to baby-sit them while Belle and her friends manned the stalls. Because they had made such an incredible amount of stuff, we had to find a space large enough to display everything.
Eventually, we settled on the marquee. It was, after all, big enough for the whole of Wroughton.
We were there at seven in the morning.
“This is the day, everyone,” Hyde was saying, flailing his arms about passionately. I stared riveted at his sun tattoo. “It’s the dawn of the old glory of the Old Belle bookstore. Look alive, people,” he added to a couple of his friends he had ordered to help out.
There was still a hesitant distance between me and Caleb. Neither of us was willing to close that gap, so we waited.
“Caleb, we should start moving the tables in,” Hyde said.
“Okay,” Caleb said, a tad too quickly, and left.
“Is everything okay between you and Caleb?” Belle asked, watching the two guys make their way towards the van. She seemed visibly calmer without Oliver and Sawyer around. She had figured there was no point waking them so early, so she planned on bringing them over a little later.
I offered my default answer. “Yeah, everything’s fine.”
But, as always, no-one believed me. “It’s just, I was watching you two just now and something just felt wrong. And Hyde told me what happened yesterday.”
I didn’t know he had such a big mouth. I guess that was how secrets and rumours fly in Wroughton.
In an attempt to direct some attention away from myself, I asked, “Belle, why don’t you give Hyde a chance? I mean, we can all see that he’s mad about you. He goes to the Old Belle everyday even though he doesn’t even work there; he even helped you with this whole Save the Old Belle plan. Et cetera,” I added.
Belle sighed wistfully. “I know. I can see how much he’s done for me, and I really can’t thank him enough for it.”
“That’s it? You’re only grateful to him? Nothing else?” Hyde would be heartbroken if he knew.
“No.” Belle blushed. “I have considered the possibility before. He loves the boys, gets along with my father – which is more than I can say for my other boyfriends.”
“So what’s holding you back?”
Suddenly I was, for some reason, interested to know why anyone decided someone wasn’t worth it, worth all the trouble and heartache, perhaps.
“Oh, Kristen,” Belle sighed. Her sad eyes were heavy. “I’m just so tired of trying to make things work, getting used by men, being abandoned, winding up alone. It’s just easier not to get into it at all.”
It was all I could do to not agree with her right then. I knew if I did, she would ask me what happened that would make me feel this way, and I was not ready to share that yet. I was not ready for her sympathetic looks and encouraging pats on the arm.
“Do you want to know why?” she offered, and I felt bad for holding back when she was taking me into confidence.
I nodded.
“I’m an idiot, plain and simple. My first … I don’t think I can even call him my boyfriend … left me with a son even though he was married, and then he went to jail. I stupidly thought he loved me but of course he didn’t. You’d think I’d have learnt my lesson the first time round, but I didn’t. And now I’m the mother of two boys whose fathers have left us, and my sister hates me for what I did.”
The morning was hushed, and a cool mist drifted by.
“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking what a slut I am, to be sleeping around like that, unprotected.”
This was getting uncomfortable.
“I’d thought they loved me, though,” she said in a small voice. “I can’t tell the difference, probably still can’t.” She stared off wistfully for a while before continuing, “So, in answer to your question, it’s not that I don’t appreciate Hyde’s feelings for me. I just don’t know if I have the strength for the ride anymore. Or the brains.”
“Hyde isn’t a bad person. He won’t use you that way, I’m sure.”
“I know he isn’t,” she said, nodding. “Still.”
We stood there watching as the guys looked for a good spot to set down the tables.
“But don’t listen to a cynic like me, Kristen,” Belle went on. “Corny as it may sound, the only way to be truly happy is to listen to what your heart is trying to say. Block out the noise and just listen closely.”
She was getting too close for comfort again.
“When you said your first … partner left you with your son, do you mean Gareth?”
She glanced sideways at me. “Yes. I know you know about him. And he’s Oliver’s father. Why do you think my sister never talks to me anymore?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I know, it’s really messed up. And I’m really sorry for what I did.” She did look entirely miserable. “Gareth does whatever he pleases, and I wish I’d never gotten involved with him. But I’m not sorry for having Oliver. Or Sawyer. I’m just sorry I had to get involved with those guys to have them.”
“But Hyde isn’t like them,” I said, looking at him, him with his sun tattoo and hulking biceps.
“I know. We’ll see, though.” She smiled. “We’ll see.” Then she tilted her head thoughtfully. “You know, you aren’t so different from Caleb.”
I turned to her. “How so?”
As far as I was concerned, I was nothing like Caleb. I did not try to keep my family a secret, and I did not have to come up with twisted reasons for committing a crime for them.
“Both of you … you’re just so distant; you don’t give anyone a chance into your head.”
“We just don’t like to air our problems and bitch about it to everyone we meet,” I said, shrugging.
“And you are both stubbornly unreceptive to anyone who tries to help.”
“We like our personal problems to stay the way it should.”
Where did all this we business come from? I thought we were completely different in every aspect.
“And there’s also the fact that you have both lost someone you love, more than once.” She scrutinised me for a while. “I don’t mean to be rude, but that was just an observation.”
“Caleb’s lost someone more than once?”
“His grandmother,” she said, nodding. “My mother. Caleb’s really close to his grandparents, since Annabel and Gareth didn’t really have much time for him. They were too preoccupied with their issues to think about anything else. I try to be there for him too, asking him to work at the Old Belle whenever he can. Reilly works all the time and Jade is quite the social butterfly, but Caleb doesn’t like parties and crowds and a whole bunch of boys bringing beer and inviting girls over. It’s just not his style.”
I nodded. Very much like Blake.
“So when my mom died and my dad got a little sick, Caleb was just holding out … for what, I don’t know. Deep down, I think he’s trying to get back to the way it was before his scumbag father left them, back to when both his grandparents were around.”
“But that’s not possible,” I said. “Nothing can ever go back to the way it was, when his grandmother’s…”
It was then that I realised another similarity between me and Caleb. Weren’t we two people who wanted what we could never get back, who could not see what lay ahead because there was no point in that?
Belle was staring at me with a knowing look in her eyes.
“Alright, I think we’re done,” Hyde called out to us.
“Marilyn and Jess need two stalls each,” Belle said to him. As she said that, a car rumbled up the lane and Marilyn and Jess got out, hauling more boxes.
Caleb came over to me. “Look, just let me explain, okay? Humour me.”
I waited.
“Last night, I was worried my dad would go looking for Aunt Belle. I told you that ever since she found out I was hiding him, she had only met him once. I didn’t know what he wanted with her – it probably isn’t something good – so I thought I’d stop him, make sure he didn’t go looking for her. She doesn’t have to be more involved than she already is.”
I opened a box and hung the bamboo bags and canvas handbags on a metal rack. “Why doesn’t she, you know, report him to the police? She can do so without implicating you.”
Caleb stared at me for a long while before saying, “I don’t know. She doesn’t want trouble, I guess.”
“She told me about Gareth and your grandparents.”
He sighed.
“Is that why you’re hiding him, so that you can