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37.

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN.


               LONDON WAS FULL OF smoke and shit, Tommy had once told her, but what he had failed to mention was that every single city in this wretched country just so happened to be full of the same disgusting clouds of grey, dirty smog. Coventry had been, she realised, but she had hardly noticed that when they went there. . . call it love, call it blindness, call it plain old idiocy, but  Felicity hadn't seemed to catch sight of the dusty bricks and all that had surrounded them.

She saw the grime that covered Birmingham now, though. The towering steel buildings and the factories that had taken to demolishing old playgrounds. . . playgrounds where the innocents had ran and laughed and kicked rocks at one another, insistent on causing all the trouble in the world when they didn't have to pay for it, not really. Her eyes fell on the puddles of brown water and the rainbows of grease that littered them, with shadows of the houses around her being bounced about just as much as the airless football was being passed around by the group of ragtag boys on the corner of Watery Lane. She saw it all: from the metaphorical corruption to the more physical version of it, as wolf―whistles were followed by indignant cries, or shouts were followed by angry curses. 

Felicity remembered the year before, when she'd heard the horrors of the Peaky Blinders and had listened in on the old wives' tales of the stains splattering the pub walls, and how no one was ever sure if that was simply ochre beer droplets from a broken bottle, or simply blood that had darkened to a rusty shade over time. And, as a result of these stories and of the ones that her father had told her, all of those years before, Felicity could remember sticking to her side of Small Heath, of Watery Lane. The side where she lived in naivety; clouds of hope―filled ignorance.  


               Felicity came to the conclusion that she had to tell him, she had to make him hear the words that she had been rambling on about in her mind, in order to make him see everything in their true light. And sure, whilst she had already stated to herself that she would never, ever expect his forgiveness, she at least hoped that this would settle things even a little bit; that the clouded sea of guilt and tension between them might get washed away and the silt would fall to a standstill. Tension she could deal with, guilt and anger. . . she could not. 

So, as she finished her shift at the Garrison and went to lock up the place for the night, Felicity made sure to run over everything in her mind once more, trying to ensure that when the time came for her tumbling confession, she wouldn't forget anything. 

She couldn't go until she'd tidied everything away though, especially as the week's beginning had come with yet another bar brawl due to the rising annoyance of those workers that were still raging for a strike. Harry had already taken the shattered bar stool out to the tip at the back, so all that was left to do now was to sweep up the unsettled, flyaway dust and grime that had been upthrown, leaving the gallery looking even more unkempt than usual. Felicity, with one eye sweeping over to the clock and sighing at the sight of it only being a half hour past midnight, began the final chores of the night: stacking chipped glasses in one hand, sweeping the tables with the other and kicking the chairs underneath them with the toe of her boot at the same time. They were tedious jobs, but jobs nevertheless, and they kept her mind occupied for at least a short while before she had to trek the streets back to Watery Lane.

"Goodbye, Piccadilly," she soon found herself singing beneath her breath. 

"Farewell, Leicester Square. . ."

"It's a long, long way to Tipperary ― but my heart's right there."

Sweeter than a songbird, she had been told. The innocence of a child and the voice of one too, younger Felicity might have never guessed that she'd be spending her nights in the gallery of the Garrison pub, sweeping its floorboards whilst she awaited the dread and guilt to fill her later when she attempted to set everything right later on.

But my heart's right there.

Her heart was in the right place? Wasn't it? Or it had been ― she wasn't so sure what counted as the right place now, but she didn't care, not when that had no effect on just how she explained everything to the apparent grudge―holding Shelby.

Just ten minutes later did Felicity walk through the door to the house, greeted by the majority of its rooms being cloaked in darkness, bar the small parlour at the very front of the building. And there stood Tommy, facing away from her and instead toward the fireplace, his gaze landing on its dying embers. The girl stepped in silently, and only after a minute did she cough ever so quietly to get his attention.

"Can we talk?" She asked tentatively. 

Tommy faced her then, and regarded her silently, his gaze frozen on her features as she stood there, working up the nerve to speak before he did.

"I said I'd explain it all, so here I am," Felicity began after a moment. "To explain everything, everything I can, as best as I can."

Not a single fucking word.

"Two months. . . no, less than that. . . before the wedding, I had to speak with my dad," she continued, ignoring his frosty expression as best as she could. "That day I came back, the night Arthur said they'd talked with me. Then. He'd gotten me then, we spoke, made a deal."

"A deal?"

Two words were better than none, she supposed.

"A deal," Felicity confirmed, quiet, worried, guilty. "He had said he'd leave us alone if I helped him with one thing. He'd promised he'd leave us alone after that day, after I did everything he asked. I made him swear on it ― I never thought he'd go against his word."

He didn't say a word, and so she was back to square one.

"I tried to tell you. . . I wanted to tell you."

Tommy folded his arms over his chest, and all the while, his expression remained unchanging. "There was nothing stopping you." 

"There was!" Felicity stammered in an outraged, shaking response. "He said― he said he'd kill you. He'd kill you. Faster than you could stop it, faster than I could stop it, too fucking fast. I wasn't going to let that happen, Tommy, not for anything."

"So you just left it?" Was the man's response, still quivering with both beats of anger and doubt. "We got married, Felicity. Legally, you're my wife. I'm bound to throw myself in front of a bullet for you because that is what this. . . this. . . this fucking ring symbolises. Eternity together with no blood or betrayal splitting us apart."

"I didn't leave it. . ."

"Then what did you do?" Tommy roared, shocking both himself and the blonde in front of him with his abrupt shout. "You left it, you didn't say a single bloody word about it, and instead let me find it out when the week's stocks and counts came in!"

"I didn't, I didn't!" Desperate, ever so desperate, as Felicity tried to make him see once and for all. 

"Stop lying," he demanded in turn. "Stop lying to me, to yourself, to everyone."

She stared at him, unable to speak for a fraction of a second.

He merely sighed. "Please, for once, stop. With everything. The lies. Everything."

"For once?" Felicity then found herself uttering in a sudden, indignant shriek. "What's that supposed to mean?" He was being unfair ― she knew it, and she supposed that he did too, because she had only ever lied once to him. . . once that mattered. This time, with the one massive lie that she had only partaken in because she had thought it to be the better of the two options. 

The other lies had been the soft fibs that they once had against one another as they snuck about behind their backs, trying to steal the first kiss or convince the other to take the day off work. Fibs like oh, Harry had taken on another temporary help for the morning, or that Arthur had been adamant for the couple to take some time out of the betting shop. Fibs like that didn't matter, as they had been said with the purest, most adoration―filled intentions.

"I did what I thought best, Tommy!" The girl tried again, when he didn't reply. "One lie, one betrayal that I never wanted. . . yeah, I never wanted any of this. Nothing, I wanted no part of it, not when it came to my father but I couldn't stop― I couldn't st―"

Her voice broke and Felicity's fragile being filled with both horror and embarrassment, as she had never wanted him to see her like this. . . not when they were in such a hostile environment, anyway, when she couldn't simply run to him and he wouldn't envelop her in his arms and gently assure her that everything would be straightened, that everything would be alright. 

"You could've," Tommy countered, but even he could see the state she was in and somehow, through his haze of confusion, anger and everything in between, he managed to speak in a slightly more gentle tone as the girl gasped for air, gasped for life, gasped and choked as she tried her hardest to fix everything without shedding a single tear and letting her porcelain skin stain red with dried―up streams. "You could've told me."

"He said he'd kill you," Felicity said, a flash of the memory clicking in her mind like a cut―in on a film reel. "He swore on it."

Silence filled the air and shattered all of Tommy's words, preventing either of them from speaking as they both struggled to string together syllables that would somehow depict how they were each feeling. Whilst Felicity, despite the horror that was this conversation, was feeling a little bit relieved at the thought that she had at least begun to explain her guilt―filled actions, Tommy was torn. He hadn't a single dominant emotion, not one, and that infuriated him more than anything. 

"You could've said something to someone." Repetitive. The same six or so words that he kept uttering, and each time, the level of hurt, of anger, of confusion that filled them remained the same.

"He's got as many coppers on his payroll as you do on yours," she reminded him. "Had I said a word, I might as well have nailed both your coffin and mine shut. I couldn't― I couldn't―"

She couldn't cry. She wouldn't cry. . . not when she hadn't the right. It was Tommy's anger, Tommy's hurt, not hers. She'd been the cruel orchestrator of it all ― no, that wasn't right. She'd been a puppet, a pair of single―use ears that John Woods only took interest in when it came to taking over the city and claiming the streets as his own. 

She did cry, though: she couldn't help it. 

"Hey, hey. . ." Instinct kicked into the raven―haired man and he started towards her, getting just two paces away before remembering. His arms fell to his side and all he could do was stand there whilst she hurriedly brushed away her tears with a harsh sweep of the back of her hand across her cheeks. 

"I said I'm sorry," she mumbled eventually. "I never wanted this, I've said that, I've said I didn't want any of what has happened."

"But I never asked for forgiveness, Tom," Felicity continued. "There wasn't any point in asking ― I knew, from the moment I gave my father his answer, that I wouldn't get it even if I asked. But you alive, your family alive, was more important than an eternity of blissful forgetfulness, isn't it?"

No, was the thought that clouded Tommy's mind, but he didn't say it. He didn't say a word. 

"You, alive. That's all I wanted."

AUTHOR'S NOTE!

i am productive! i am productive! i am productive! although if this isn't out by sunday night then that is a lie ( yes i write my an's before the actual chapter to make me think i've written more than i have ) so uh yeah, i guess we'll have to wait and see.

also! i had folklore on shuffle and tlgad came on and it was the ending when she was like 'i had a marvellous time ruining everything' loads and i'm just sat here trying to write this book like. . . whoops this is me as a writer, sorry about ruining it all bffs

anyway ― hope you're enjoying it! i love you all so much <3

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