Close to You (27 page)

Thirty-One

S
HE HAD FORGOTTEN SOMETHING.
W
HAT
could it be? Allie scanned the groceries she'd placed on Susannah's kitchen counter one more time, trying to calm the nagging feeling she'd missed a vital ingredient somewhere along the way.

It had been an okay day. It was weird being back in Auckland—the city she'd avoided for so long. She and Susannah were cautiously navigating sisterly ground, and, with the family all out for dinner, Allie had offered to dust off her much neglected culinary skills for dinner with Derek.

She glanced at the clock: 6:16
P.M.
He'd said he should be over by around seven. Her sweaty running clothes stuck to her. Shower or start dinner first? She lifted up an arm for a whiff. Not too bad. Best to start dinner and then get ready. Besides, she was the world's messiest cook and would inevitably end up with pasta sauce in the most unlikely of places, no matter how careful she tried to be.

Her stomach gnawed itself. What was she even nervous
about? Derek was her husband. And he was the one trying to earn his way back into her heart and life, not the other way around.

Jackson's face flashed up in her mind and she forced down the foolish wish that it was him she was cooking dinner for, that he was the one walking through the door. In a couple of hours, he would be on a plane back to the U.S. Their paths would never cross again. Which was a good thing. For there to be any chance of making this marriage work, Jackson couldn't be anywhere near it.

She turned her attention back to the book that sat open in front of her. The chicken and pasta recipe looked okay. She'd never tried it before, and had chosen it solely because it was the first recipe she'd found that seemed to only contain ingredients she actually knew and didn't seem too threatening.

Step 1: Chop the onion into fine pieces and then sweat for approximately five minutes.

Sweat the onion? What on earth was sweating an onion? Allie scanned the page for more explicit instructions on what would make an onion sweat, but the book remained mute on the topic. She flipped to the back looking for a glossary. Nothing. How on earth could a book called
1-2-3 Cook
not have a glossary? What did they expect? That people were born with innate knowledge of how to sweat an onion?

Her concentration was broken by the front door opening. She glanced at the clock. Six twenty-one. Weird. She was sure Susannah had said they were going to go straight to dinner after she'd picked Katie up from ballet.

Footsteps sounded in the entryway, but not the raucous sounds that always accompanied her niece and nephew.
­Susannah must've popped back to pick up something. Oh well, it would be nice to have some distraction while she prepped, even if just for a few minutes. For all her initial misgivings, her sister had turned out to be far more human than she'd anticipated. All she required of her unexpected houseguest was that Allie never ever call her “Susie” ever again. Though for some reason “Suz” was deemed acceptable.

“I'm in the kitchen.” She turned around and pulled open the knife drawer. It was time to do battle with the onion. A few seconds later, she heard steps walking up the hallway. “What did you forget?”

Where was the chef's knife? She was sure she had seen it in there this morning. The footsteps entered the kitchen.
Aha, found it.

“Hey, Suz. Do you know what it means to sweat an onion?” Allie wrestled with assorted tableware to get to the knife.

“No clue, sorry.” It was not her sister.

The knife came loose and she spun around, wielding it not unlike some crazed psycho killer in a horror movie.

Derek quickly took a few steps back, cowering behind a large bunch of bright flowers he held in his hands, although they were separated by a wide kitchen counter. What did he think she'd done—become a skilled knife thrower in the last two years?

“Derek?” For the love of all things good, what was he doing here already?

He waved a hand weakly. “Hi.”

His face was pale and he looked like he was about to hurl. And she had mopped the floor only this morning.

Speaking of things to hurl. Allie put the knife down, slowly.
The guy still brought up such strong emotions in her, she ricocheted from hate to something-not-hate in a millisecond. She didn't trust herself not to throw the knife at his head if he made the wrong move or said the wrong thing.

She glanced down. Great. Why did she never get to be the one looking glamorous? “Nice of you to knock.” Her voice came out a lot harsher than she'd intended.

He winced. “Sorry. I did. You mustn't have heard me. And the door was unlocked, so I figured someone was home.” He slowly walked forward, pulled out a bar stool, and plonked himself down on it as if he belonged there.

Allie's finger's curled around the edge of the counter. What did he think he was doing? Sitting down like nothing had changed, when everything had.
Be nice, Allie.
The whole point of this was to try and see if this could work.

She had stood up in front of hundreds of people and promised for better or worse till death did them part, but if she'd had even an inkling of how bad the “worse” could be, she never would've walked down the aisle in the first place.

He held out the flowers to her. A huge bunch of lilies. They'd been one of her favorites her whole life. The flowers he'd brought her on their first date. That she'd carried in her bouquet. He had no way of knowing that the sight of them now only brought pain. She took them, the paper rustling in her arms, and placed them on the counter.

“I know I'm early. I just needed to see you.” His eyes didn't quite meet hers.

She swallowed back the urge to tell him he had long since lost the right to
need
anything from her.

The thought of the last couple of years had her fingers itch
ing to find the nearest blunt object. Out of a desire not to get a criminal record, more than a concern for his safety, she crossed her arms over her chest. “So talk.”

He formed a triangle with his fingers, resting his chin on the point. “I can understand how angry you still are with me.”

She highly doubted that. Not when she herself was still shocked by the waves of fury that occasionally overtook her. If he did, he would not have waltzed in here and voluntarily sat down. He would have been standing at the door ready to run at a moment's notice.

He would have shown up
on time
after she'd had a chance to give herself a pep talk before their evening began.

She stared at him, her heart doing strange things at the sight of the guy she had once loved sitting in her sister's kitchen like he belonged there.

“I missed you, Allie.” His eyes bore into hers.

I'd stopped missing you.

The truth in the thought took her breath away. She hadn't thought about it—hadn't let herself think about it—since the day she'd found out about Julia. She'd told herself she couldn't possibly miss someone who was the opposite of what she'd believed, all while ignoring her persistent longing for him. But it was the truth. At some point, she'd stopped missing him—so much so that seeing him sitting there just felt weird.

“I'm so sorry for what I did to you. I would do anything to change it, I hope you know that.” He held her eyes with his. “I know we can make this work.” He leaned forward, as if about to reach for her hand. She took a step back.

This time it didn't feel like a hole had been ripped out of her heart, but out of the floor. This wasn't happening. This was
the stuff of fantasy and cheesy movies. How many times in the early days had she dreamt of something like this? Of the whole stupid thing being a huge mistake and them finding their way back together? But now that it was happening, she didn't feel happy or even relieved. She felt nauseated.

The truth was, none of it had been a mistake. Just because the court had decided not to uphold his previous marriage on a technicality didn't change the fact that Derek had lied about more things than she could count and broken her heart in more pieces than there were numbers.

“Say something.” His voice was pleading.

“What do you want me to say?” Her voice was totally controlled. Unlike her hands, which were spasming. She was having some kind of fit. She clasped them in front of her, nails digging into her palms.

“I don't know. Just something. Anything.”

“You honestly think you can do what you did, waltz into the house, tell me you miss me, that you're sorry, and I'm going to throw myself at you?” The harshness of her words startled even her.
Simmer down, Allie.
She had agreed to try and give things a chance, after all.

“No, of course not.” He placed his hands flat on the countertop. “That's not what I thought at all. I know I have a long way to go to prove to you I've changed. I still can't believe you've given me a chance to try and show you. I promise I'm not going to take it for granted.”

She sighed. The guy was trying. She had to give him that.

“Are you at least going to sit down?” He pulled out the stool next to his.

She looked everywhere except into his eyes. She'd always
had a weakness for his slate-gray eyes. If she let herself gaze into them, she was going to be in big trouble. She gestured at her attire. “I have stuff to do, Derek. I need to get changed, cook dinner. We have plenty of time to talk later.”

“You look fine.” At least he didn't say
great
, which would've been a big, fat lie, and she was done with those.

He stood up, walked around the counter until he was standing right in front of her. Tipping her chin with his fingers, he forced her to look into his eyes. “I need you to know this before one more second passes. I don't want a divorce. I don't want us dancing around in some kind of ‘maybe we'll try to work it out, maybe we'll get divorced' thing. You're the only woman I've ever loved. Please.” He took a deep breath. “I love you, Allie. I am still in love with you. I'll do whatever it takes to prove it to you. Give you however long you need. To make this, us, work again.”

“Whatever it takes?” She repeated his words again. She didn't know this Derek. This contrite, humbled guy. He was saying all the right words, but her heart still held too many scars from the searing hurt he'd wrought to be able to let it go.

“I couldn't live with myself if I allowed what we had to be thrown away without fighting for it. For you.”

“I didn't throw us away, Derek. You did, remember? When you married me after you had already married
someone else
.” Whatever the court had ruled, that was a fact. When she'd walked down the aisle, he hadn't known whether he was still married or not. If Julia hadn't hunted him down because she'd learned there was no record of their annulment, he never would have been caught.

“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you
go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep . . . that have taken hold.”
Frodo's monologue from the end of the movie
The Return of the King
rolled across her.

“I know, Al.” She flinched. Why did he keep calling her that? The only man she wanted to hear that from was the one she was never going to see again.

“ . . . I can't ever give you an adequate explanation. I just . . . I knew if I told you, it would hurt so badly and probably destroy us and I couldn't do it.”

So instead he turned her into an accidental bigamist. Charming.

He stared at her, all troubled gray eyes and earnest expression. “I thought I was ready to let you go, if that was what you wanted. But seeing you again in Queenstown brought it all back. I forgot how good we were together. How much I love you.”

Against her better judgment, her heart started to hope. All she wanted to do was tell him it was okay and they could fix this. That it was going to be all right. The man was her husband, after all—for better or worse.

Her face obviously betrayed what she was feeling because his eyes lit up.

“Allie.”

All of the air had been sucked out of the room. She felt like she was suffocating. He said her name exactly the way he used to when he was kissing her—like all his hopes, dreams, and desires had all come true in her.

Except this time they didn't have the same effect they used
to. Instead, everything in her yearned for a different guy. The one with ocean-blue eyes she could happily drown in and a smile that made her knees buckle.

The one who never wanted to have anything to do with her ever again.

Placing a palm against Derek's chest, she stopped him before he could come any closer. “I'm going to get changed. There are plenty of drinks in the fridge.”

Ducking around him, she forced her legs to walk out of the kitchen and up the stairs to her room.

She closed the door behind her and sank down on her bed.
God, I can't do this. It's too hard.

She didn't love her husband anymore. Maybe she never even had. Maybe she'd just been blinded by his charm and attention. By the guy every girl wanted, wanting her.

She didn't want Derek, but she didn't want a divorce. It was like the beginning of a bad joke.

Taking a deep breath, she tried her prayer again:
God, all I want is to be free of Derek, so if making this work is Your will, then I need Your help. I can't do it on my own.

She was a different person from the one she had been two years ago. The only way they had a chance at making this work was if she believed he was too. He'd promised he would come to church with her. The old Derek wouldn't have gone near the place, so that was a start.

Sliding her bedside drawer open, she stared at her wedding ring that lay nestled in its box. She had meant those vows. Pledged them before God.