"I hope you like long stories."
After throwing Nick a bewildered and yet relieved look, Michelle sat down on the sofa as close to her best friend as she could comfortably get away with. Nick on the other hand sat practically across the room from them. He couldn't quite bare to sit so close to Carla and yet feel so very distant from her.
"So is one of ya gonna tell me what you were doing banging on my door at before 8 this mornin'?" She was delaying the inevitable. But she was okay with that. Maybe letting these two in wouldn't be as awful as she had so led herself to believe.
Michelle looked down, biting her lip, "Did we wake ya?"
Carla raised her eyebrows and half laughed, "Ha, chance would be a fine thing. I've forgotten what sleep feels like."
"We were worried about you, Carla. We couldn't get hold of ya, we thought-" Michelle swallowed the rest of the words, the unsaid saying it all. She'd barely been able to let herself think those dark thoughts, she couldn't quite say them out loud.
"You thought I'd tried to top meself again."
Nicks ears pricked at that. Again? He let his mind pick over the years he'd known Carla and he'd be willing to guess it was back when Frank was around she'd last tried to take her own life. He'd been so harsh to her back then. Cruel even. Everyone had. Maybe his own words had contributed to her hopelessness in some way and he thinks he'll never quite forgive himself for that.
"You were right." Carla speaks again and brings him back to earth with a crash. "I were dancing with death yesterday and that is exactly why Tracy Barlow will get away with murder twice over." The hand that has been fiddling almost nervously with her ear falls to her lap as she sighs at the mess she is once again in.
Carla looks up at the two horrified but even more confused faces and shakes her head, knowing she has to find the words to explain it all to them and yet not ever understanding it herself.
"I told her. I said to her when we were standing on the quarry edge she should have left me in that mini bus. Kal and Maddie would still be alive. My life for theirs. Thing is, there's still some truth in that. Because if she'd 'ad of just walked away, if I'd have died that night she wouldn't have broken into my flat to hurt me and she wouldn't have left that candle burning. I'd be dead and they'd still be alive. Two children would still have a father, Sophie would still have her girlfriend."
Nick spoke for the first time since they'd sat down and shuffled in his seat, trying to focus on anything except the image of Carla tumbling down a cliff, her body lifeless and out of his reach. "Carla you're not making any sense. What are you saying, Tracy started the fire?"
"Got it in one Nicholas. She says it were an accident but she stole your keys Michelle and let herself in when I were asleep. I'll let you work out what she were planning. Turns out Amy startled her and she ran, leaving the candle burning and the rest is history."
Michelle took a minute to let the words sink in, shuffling inches closer to Carla, "I don't get it. Why did she suddenly decide to confess? Because guilt is not in that woman's vocabulary."
Carla shrugged, pulling her dressing gown tighter around her in a vain attempt to hide herself away, "Because I were seconds away from walking off the edge of the quarry. Guess she didn't want any more blood on her hands." When she closes her eyes she's back on that quarry edge and she can feel the empty air beneath her foot as she urges herself to step forward. When she opens them again she sees her best friend in tears and her lover, if that's still what he is, with his face in his hands. It's as though they cannot bare the thought of losing her, as though her life has a meaning to them and for the first time in so long, that is comforting.
She lets Michelle cuddle her, she welcomes the warmth of a human being against her own exhausted body and breathes a sigh of relief as she rests her head on her shoulder with promises those thoughts are a horrible distant memory.
For once, she doesn't even think she's lying.
She thinks she might be able to start to put everything back together that she has spent so long knocking down. Until she looks across at Nick and their eyes meet. She feels she cannot even begin to read him in that moment and she wonders if in the pain she has caused through her own self destruction has pushed a good man too far.
After they talk some more and then some more and finally they settle on some food in the pub, Carla takes this as a chance to escape for a moment and hurries into her bedroom. She lets herself lean back against the wall and the stability of it is comforting. It is holding her and it will not let her fall. She is safe now, she can breathe and breathing is good. Breathing is the first step to normality.
It takes her bedroom door clicking shut for her to realise Nick is with her now and she opens her eyes to watch him sit on the bed.
"I won't be a minute Nick, I just need to-"
"You know, you can stop trying to push me away now. We've established I was right all along."
Carla frowns as she pulls herself away from the wall, her arms folded as she looks down at the ever bold business man, "Eh?"
"Well we know now you're not the monster you've been trying so incredibly hard to pretend you are. So can you stop acting the bitch for five minutes and give me a hug?"
She so badly wants to respond with something witty, to throw some sort of defence mechanism she has become too accustomed to using back at him but the thought of how she felt when she stood at deaths door only hours before makes a hug from him very tempting. So she says nothing, and when he stands Carla finds herself walking into his arms in the way she has already done so many times before and lets her head rest against chest. The sound of his heart is comforting and she realises it doesn't matter that he alone couldn't save her, because she couldn't even have saved herself. What matters is that he wanted to. And she thinks that is enough.
"Nick?"
"Uh huh?" He doesn't mean to hold so tight but her words still play on his mind.
"I love you an all."