Authors: Dani Atkins
If he
was
worried, he hid it well.
However, as I settled back into my seat, I picked up on the threads of the one conversation that I had been dreading all night. I felt my heart plummet in my chest like a wrecking ball.
Phil was clearly in the middle of saying something to Dave about Jimmy.
“… such a tragic and stupid waste … such a great bloke …”
Dave murmured a noncommittal response, and I guessed that Sarah had already prewarned him to try to divert the conversation from this topic if it surfaced.
“Nothing was ever the same after that night … not for any of us,” said Phil.
The silence around the table that followed was its own acknowledgment. I felt rather than saw almost every eye turn to me. I guess they were right in thinking that I had been affected the most, for the scars on my face were nothing compared to the ones that scored me deep inside.
“Come on now, let’s not do this tonight,” implored Sarah.
“No, of course,” agreed Phil, and even though I’d kept my eyes averted to the tablecloth, I knew meaningful glances were being directed my way. It was all getting a little too intense and I was overcome by a sudden irresistible desire for the safe anonymity of my hotel bedroom.
“I hate to break up the party,” I began, and heard a small chorus of guilty noes from around the table, “and it’s not
just because of … Jimmy.” My voice hesitated before being able to form his name. “But I really do have a pretty bad headache, so if you don’t mind, I think I’ll call it a night for now.”
Sarah began to protest, but then thought better of it. “Sure, sweetie. It’s been a busy day for everyone.”
When I realized that she intended to wind the whole evening up, I felt instantly ashamed.
“No, Sarah. You all stay. You haven’t even had coffee yet. I’ll just grab a cab. Please don’t break up the party because of me.
Please
.” I got to my feet. Sarah still looked as though she was wavering, but then Dave interceded.
“Let me go outside with you to hail a cab,” he offered. “Trevor, why don’t you order some coffees and brandies.”
I gave him a grateful smile. No wonder Sarah loved him. He was worthy of her after all.
“No need for a cab,” a familiar dark voice interjected. “I’ve got my car outside, I’ll run Rachel back.”
I was taken aback by Matt’s unexpected offer, for apart from his initial greeting, this had been the first remark he had actually directed to me all evening. Before I even had a chance to react, he dropped a swift kiss on Cathy’s forehead.
“Won’t be long,” he assured her, then, turning to look across at me, said, “Shall we?”
I was about to protest, to insist that his offer really wasn’t necessary and that getting a cab was by far and away the easiest solution, and then I caught sight of Cathy’s face. Rage, disbelief, and total indignation all battled for pole position. It was wicked, I knew, but that was what decided me. I owed her this for the cloakroom incident. I reached down, collected my bag, and smiled at my old friends.
“Sorry to leave so soon, but I’ll see you all at the wedding on Saturday. Good night.”
As I walked away from the table, I felt Matt place a guiding hand at the small of my back to steer me past a waiter approaching the table with a tray of coffees. I heard the echoing chorus of goodbyes as we walked away. Strangely enough, Cathy’s voice wasn’t among them.
Outside in the bracing December air, I took a step away from him, deliberately breaking the lingering contact of his hand against me.
“This way,” he instructed, raising his arm to blip a key toward a low, dark, sleek-looking vehicle parked under a bright sodium arc light. He opened the passenger door and cupped my elbow briefly as I lowered myself onto cream-colored leather as soft as butter. I waited until he had joined me in the car before commenting:
“Well, this is certainly far more luxurious than a taxi. A new toy?”
He gave a little shrug. “It’s a company car.”
“But you own the company.”
He shrugged again. “And your point?” He shifted toward me, and although the engine had not been turned on, there was still plenty of light illuminating the car from the restaurant’s security lighting. Looking into his face, aware of the intimate proximity within the confines of the car’s sumptuous interior, I forgot the point I was trying to make. Hell, if he looked at me that way for a moment or two more, I was likely to forget my own name. I changed the topic.
“Cathy didn’t look too pleased that you’d offered me this lift.”
“Cathy’ll get over it.” Okay, that was clearly another conversational no-no. But he didn’t drop the theme entirely.
“Cathy and I … you knew about that, didn’t you … I mean before tonight?”
I gave a shrug that I hoped looked nonchalant.
“Sure, Sarah mentioned it … in passing … ages ago.”
His voice suddenly dropped in tone, sounding less self-assured than he had all evening. There was an echo of the boy I had known so well.
“And you were okay with that, were you?”
I may have hesitated for a second longer than I should have, before replying in a tone that was striving for breezy.
“Well, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
He straightened suddenly in his seat, flicked on the ignition and headlamps, and with a briefly instructed “Fasten your seatbelt,” reversed, at speed, out of the parking space. Clearly not the answer he had been hoping for.
As we left the car park, he pointed the car in the direction of my hotel.
“I’m staying at the—”
“I know where you’re staying,” he interrupted.
Oh, this was terrific. Now I had made him mad. At that moment I’d have given anything to have swapped this ride for the tattiest, smelliest cab that could be imagined. I sought for an innocuous topic, but came up empty. There were too many landmines in our history to make chitchat possible. In addition, the painkillers I’d taken for my headache had yet to kick in, so if we had to conduct the fifteen-minute journey in total silence, then so much the better.
I wasn’t going to be that lucky.
At the first set of traffic lights, Matt caught me rubbing my fingers against the bridge of my nose to try to ease the pain.
“You really
do
have a headache? It wasn’t just an excuse?” I heard the doubt behind the question. It made me snappier than I should have been.
“Yes,
I really do
.”
“There’s a twenty-four-hour place up ahead, would you like to stop there and pick up something for it?” The unexpected kindness took me by surprise.
“No, it’s fine. I’ve got some pills.”
Not that they appear to be working anymore
, I silently added.
Several more minutes passed and I was hoping we’d avoided the awkwardness, then he tossed a live conversational grenade.
“Cathy and I … it’s not that serious, you know. More of a convenience thing … I just wanted you to know that.”
I was too stunned for a moment to know how to respond. Eventually I replied: “I very much doubt that Cathy views it that way. Not from the look on her face as we left the table together. And why would you possibly imagine I needed this information?”
He sighed, and I could see he was struggling to find the right words.
“It’s been hard tonight, seeing you again. All of us together again.”
With one notable exception
, I thought, but I let that pass. He gave a laugh that had no humor in it.
“It’s just that all night I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I was sitting next to the wrong person.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Should I feel flattered by the compliment, or offended that he was declaring such feelings when he was still clearly in a long-term relationship with someone else?
“Matt, I think you’re just getting caught up in the nostalgia of the reunion, or something. You’re confusing the past and present here in a pretty drastic way. We were just kids
back then.” My voice lowered and trembled slightly. “Something terrible happened and things changed.
We
changed.”
“We’re not kids now,” he vowed, and without warning, his hand left the steering wheel and reached over to cover mine on my lap. I jerked it back as though I’d been burned.
“No. Don’t do that. You’re with someone else, you’re not free …” I carried on quickly when I saw he was about to offer something then: “And even if you
were
, it wouldn’t be any different. I still feel the same way as I did when we split up.”
That drew his attention from the road and he turned to stare at me in disbelief.
“Are you still blaming yourself about Jimmy? Dear God, tell me that isn’t true. Not after all these years.”
“How long it’s been is immaterial,” I began, wondering how many more people in my life I would have to keep justifying this to. “If he hadn’t been trying to rescue me, then he’d still be here now.”
“And you wouldn’t be.”
I shrugged.
“So this is how you intend to repay that debt? By shutting yourself away like some dried-up old spinster all your life? Christ, Rachel, you’re only twenty-three years old!”
The speed of our car increased exponentially with his anger.
“And do you think this is what Jimmy would have wanted, for you to commit yourself to living a life all alone?”
“I’m not alone,” I refuted, sounding a little too much like a sullen teenager.
“Well, have there been boyfriends?”
His attack stung, and I mindlessly sought to sting him right back.
“Hardly.” I swept back my hair to reveal the scar by the light of the streetlamps. “Not exactly a turn-on, now is it?”
He swore then, several times, my words seeming to have made him angrier than anything I had said before.
“Don’t you do that to yourself. Don’t bring it all down to that.”
The car jerked sharply into a narrow graveled forecourt, and I noticed with surprise that we had reached my hotel. He braked sharply in a little flurry of gravel chippings. His rage seemed to fade away with the thrum of the engine, and he swiveled toward me, reaching across the space between us to lift my chin and tilt my face toward him.
“This scar …” His finger traced down its raised white-lightning path, almost reverently. “It’s nothing. It’s not who you are.”
I pulled back from his touch, scared by the intimacy. I was tired, I told myself, and in pain, otherwise I would never have allowed him to have got that close. “Your girlfriend doesn’t think it’s nothing. She thinks I should get it fixed.”
“Cathy can be … a little thoughtless. She only said that because she’s afraid of you. And jealous.”
“She’s
what
? But why?”
“Because she knows I’ve never really got over you. That whatever she and I might have, it’ll never be enough. There’s no future in it for us.”
Things had gone much too far. I pushed him back so he was more squarely in his own seat.
“And there’s none for us either, Matt,” I answered firmly. “Please don’t say this stuff to me, not again. I don’t want to hurt you, and whatever she might think, I don’t want to hurt Cathy either. If you’re not happy with her … then leave. Don’t use me as the excuse. I’m not the solution to your problems.”
“It’s not that—”
But I wouldn’t let him finish.
“Look, Matt, I don’t know where this has all come from, but whatever you think was going to happen between us, well, it isn’t.” I tried to temper the rejection so the remains of the weekend would be at least bearable. “Part of me will always …” I hesitated, anxious not to use the word
love
, “have feelings for you. You were an important part of my past. But that’s it. An awful thing happened, not just to Jimmy, but to all of us. And this, this feeling that I can’t be with anyone … for now, at least … well, this is how I deal with it.”
“It’s hiding. Not dealing!”
I stayed silent. That one had been used on me before. But his next words could not be so easily ignored.
“And you really think this is what Jimmy would have wanted? To see you by yourself? For Christ’s sake, Rachel, he was so in love with you he sacrificed his own life to save yours!”
I gasped, struck by a pain inside my heart that dwarfed my headache to a mere irritation. He saw my reaction and was stunned by it.
“What? You didn’t know? You couldn’t see it written all over his face whenever he looked at you?”
This was too much. To hear this again, for the
second
time in one day, was more than I could bear. I shook my head in denial, my eyes blurring with tears.
“You’re wrong. So wrong. We were friends … just friends,” I whispered softly.
“For you, maybe. But not for him. Everyone else could see it. It was so obvious.”
I was so confused that my pained brain could hardly function.
“It’s not true. I would have known. And he never said anything … not once, not in all those years …”
Something stirred at the back of my mind. An elusive memory, just out of reach.
“Why do you think he hated me so much?”
“He didn’t
hate
you.” I jumped to my lost friend’s defense, but even as I uttered the denial, I had to acknowledge that there had always been a frisson of antagonism between the two of them.
Once more Matt reached out, securing my face between his strong hands. “I had you, and he didn’t. There must have been times when he found that unbearable.”
My heart twisted at the pain I had unknowingly caused. This didn’t make anything better at all. It made it a million times worse. I pulled back before he could kiss me, for I was certain that was his next move.
“I can’t do this, Matt. Don’t do this to me. It’s just not fair.”
By this time my scrabbling hand had finally found the door handle. I flung open the door, allowing cold December air into the car. I was unbuckled and out of my seat before he could join me on the passenger side.
Perhaps he could see the distress he’d caused, or perhaps the brighter illumination from the hotel allowed him to see I really did feel as sick as I’d been claiming, for he sounded conciliatory.
“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you, Rachel.”
I shook my head.
“Just go. Go back to the restaurant. Back to Cathy.”