Once a Rebel... (16 page)

And here it was … happening live, in 3D. And she was totally unprepared.

Pain tore at her. ‘So that’s it? Goodbye?’

He stood. Stepped closer. ‘I’ll miss you, Shirley.’

She wanted to be brave. She wanted to be as
strong and resilient as Boudicca. But she also wanted to curl up in a ball and die.

‘No, you won’t.’ She knew that down to her marrow. ‘You’ll close the door on our time together before the dust plume has even settled on the horizon. That’s what you do with things you don’t want to deal with. You bury them.’

He said nothing. As though he would stand and take any emotional flaying she cared to dish out. As though that was what he was used to doing. That should have made it less satisfying, but it didn’t. After everything they’d been through, all the excitement and clashes and intimacy,
this
was how they were going to part? So very civilised and … beige? In a tent?

No way.

‘Say it, Hayden,’ she gritted.

He stared at her.

‘Say that I mean absolutely nothing to you. Say you don’t love me and you never ever could. I want to hear it.’

His throat lurched. His eyes glittered. He didn’t make a sound.

‘Speak, Hayden!’ she shouted and shoved at his hard chest, but a choked sob totally undermined her. ‘I need to hear the words.’

His head tilted, his eyes creased. He gathered her hands into his and held them, hard, pressing his lips to them and speaking into her fingers.

‘I will never be able to love you, Shirley.’

The air sucked out of the tent. She stared up at
him, frozen. He held her eyes. He took her pain. He remained unmoved.

Outside, the truck horn honked.

Hayden gently released her hands and stepped back. She stumbled against his chair and glanced down to right herself. When she lifted her eyes he’d turned, robbing her of a final connection with those deep, expressive eyes. Gave her his back.

‘Goodbye, Hayden,’ she whispered.

She got out of the tent with much more aplomb than she felt. She didn’t stumble once on the way to the truck, or as she hauled herself up into its backseat, or as she defied her shaking hands and shoved her seat belt into its fastener.

And she didn’t look back.

Because she didn’t want to know if he’d turned around. If he’d followed the truck with his eyes.

She wanted to remember the exact girth and shape of his turned back.

It would help her to hate him. And as long as she hated him, she couldn’t love him.

The truck rumbled away and she sought refuge in the steady stream of conversation from the other passengers. But deep inside she was reliving her own conversation—the conversation from last night and early this morning. Their last.

Mother Theresa had it all wrong.

There was
always
more hurt to be had in love.

www.shiloh.com.au—An open letter to my mother,

19th September.

A
YEAR
ago she could never have conceived of standing here, swathed in thermal clothing and yak furs, gasping for breath, minutes from the base camp of Everest.

Yet here she was.

She’d outed herself publicly a month after getting back from the dinosaur trip and published her mother’s list, along with the letter to her. The outpouring of support—from readers and media and sponsors alike—had blown her away and, not long afterwards, a ticket had arrived courtesy of a local travel agent who wanted to help her finish the list.

I can’t help with both of the final things on your list,
the agent had written, referring to her mother’s desire to hold her grandchild,
but I can get you to Nepal.

Ten days of flights, buses, yaks and hiking later and here she was … Staring at the bright wind-tattered prayer flags so typical of Nepal and the scattered synthetic tents of the climbers. Being practically carried by her patient, serious-faced guide.

Five thousand metres above sea level, all uphill. And they called this ‘base’ camp?

She lifted her eyes to the peak of the mountain. ‘Holy Mother’ to the Tibetans. Despite being more than halfway up it already, Everest only got bigger. Less imaginable. Getting to base camp had nearly killed her, even with the compulsory acclimatisation days midway. No roads, no tracks, just vague, invisible trails lined with rocks. She couldn’t begin to understand what scaling to Everest’s summit would be like.

The tents in front of them looked like acne—bulbous and out of place on the spectacular natural landscape. She laughed out loud at the image and her guide threw her the latest in many concerned looks.

‘Rest,’ he ordered and then thrust a flask of hideousness at her. An iron-based drink. Good for blood cells, good for altitude sickness. Bad for taste buds.

She could have gone to North base camp. That was accessible by road. But no, she’d had to do it the old-fashioned way. Ready or not.

And, in her case, definitely not.

She looked around as her guide saw to their trusty yak. She’d become quite fond of the matted, stinky thing that tootled along under the very small burden of her backpack, tent and food supplies. It finally dawned on her, halfway up the trail to base camp, that the yak was actually for her, if she passed out, so that her Sherpa could get her back down again without having to carry her himself.

She might have been wobbly but she was still, at least, on her feet.

And she was here. The entrance to Everest base camp.

Tick.

Something about being halfway up this mountain made her feel very close to her mother. And to God, though she was not a religious person, generally. Here, it seemed, she was.

Her breath came as shallow and tightly as ever, thanks to the altitude, and she did her best to only half-fill her lungs the way her Sherpa had shown her. But she’d grown accustomed, now, to dizzy spells and dark patches at the edges of her vision and to slowing her pace to accommodate the lack of oxygen in her blood.

‘Shirley?’

She spun at the sound of her name. Pure instinct. Visions were something else she’d grown used to as her oxygen-starved brain played tricks on her but that was her first aural mirage.

Except that it wasn’t.

Hayden stood in front of her, bright orange trekking gear, tan even darker than normal.

Her breathing escalated. The dark patches swarmed.

She reached for her guide on instinct.

And then she passed out.

Gentle fingers stroked her back to consciousness.

She opened her eyes a crack and stared at Hayden.

The real one. Not the Hayden of her walking daydreams. Or her fevered night dreams. Her brain wasn’t so oxygen-starved that it had forgotten how to deduce.

She sagged. ‘You sent the ticket.’

Played again.

‘I saw your blog,’ he said. ‘I wanted to do something to reward your courage. It was the only thing I could do.’

‘Most people would send flowers.’

He smiled and quoted her. ‘I’m not most people. I had to find something far more dramatic and convoluted.’

Her wind-cracked lips turned up at the corners just a little. ‘Figures.’ She looked around. ‘Where am I?’

‘Medical tent.’

‘Did you carry me?’ Lord, please no. As if passing out in the first place wasn’t unseemly enough.

‘You had a yak.’ He laughed at the horrified expression she couldn’t mask. ‘The altitude hit me hard too; I wouldn’t have been able to carry you here.’

She struggled to sit up. ‘So you slung me over the yak, butt waving in the air?’

‘Pretty much,’ he conceded. ‘You’re going to be fine, by the way. You just hyperventilated.’

‘I don’t care why I got here. I care
how
I got here.’

‘Shirley …’ He smiled, reaching out and tracing a loose strand of hair. The soft expression on his face spoke volumes.

Her outrage dried up. Her smile died. How was
he
even here? She asked him.

‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

‘You knew I was coming?’

‘I knew you’d use the ticket. I hoped you hadn’t decided on a lengthy tour of Nepal first. I nearly died when I discovered there are two base camps. Who knew?’

Anyone who’d done the slightest bit of planning? ‘What if I’d gone to the other one?’

‘I had spies along both trails. I knew word would very quickly spread of a lone woman trekking towards base camp. Besides,’ he added, ‘I figured you wouldn’t do the easy one.’

So he did know her, just a little bit. She narrowed her eyes. ‘How did you get here ahead of me? Chopper?’ She knew him a little bit, too.

A dark flush crept above the pinched neck of his trek gear. ‘Yeah. From halfway up. Greatly jeered at as I landed by the climbers.’

‘So that’s “how” taken care of.’ She swallowed. ‘Now
why
are you here?’

‘I needed to see you.’

‘You have my address.’

‘I needed to see you far from home, somewhere magical.’

Her breath started to thin out. Was it the air again, or just her usual reaction to Hayden’s presence? She took what passed for a deep breath in the highlands of Nepal.

‘Why?’

He stared, glanced around to see if they were alone. ‘Because …’

She waited. The first month of being away from him had been pure misery. Knowing he didn’t love her. Knowing he didn’t even
want
her enough to just tell her what she wanted to hear. The second month, marginally better and by the third month she’d made some decent progress on getting her life back on track.

Hence the Everest trip.

‘Were you overdue to throw my life back into turmoil?’

His eyes softened. ‘Is it turmoil—seeing me?’

She swung her legs off the side of the stretcher and sat up. Her head spun. She breathed back the nausea. ‘Nothing I won’t survive again.’

His gaze changed. ‘I don’t know whether to be proud of your courage or ashamed of myself that you need to call on it.’

She held her tongue. ‘Why are you here, Hayden?’

‘I missed you.’

Was he serious? ‘Couldn’t find a blonde?’

‘Not sex, Shirley. I missed
you
. The moment you left the dinosaur campsite, the moment you climbed out of bed that day.’

‘You turned your back on me that morning in the tent, Hayden. The message was pretty clear.’

‘I didn’t want you to see my face. And I couldn’t look at yours again. At the pain.’

The first part stopped her cold. But the last part rankled. ‘Don’t pity me.’

He took her hands where they’d bunched into fists. ‘I don’t pity you, Shirley. I pity me.’

What?

‘I’d convinced myself that the pain I felt that day was yours. That I was simply responding to hurting someone I cared about.’ He resettled himself on his haunches. ‘But it went on. And on. And it finally dawned on me that it was
my
pain. I’d never been in pain before.’

‘Everyone feels pain.’

‘Not if you’ve numbed yourself to survive. I’d never let myself care enough, be engaged enough, be emotionally invested enough to care if something was taken away from me. Not since I was a boy. I’d shoved it right down deep inside out of sheer survival. I’d forgotten what loss felt like.’

Every humane cell in her body responded to that, totally overruling her anger.

‘I don’t want to be like him, Shirley. Controlling others to make up for something in myself.’

‘You’re not like him.’

‘Two years ago it finally dawned on me what I was becoming. The socially acceptable version of him. So I dropped out and tried to get myself sorted. I thought I had it beat. And then you looked at me that day in the tent the way my mother used to look at him. That awful mix of pain and love and resignation. And I knew I was kidding myself thinking I could manage it alone.’

Alone.
Was he looking to her to be some kind of salvation?

‘I’m getting professional assistance now.’

Nothing he could have said—nothing—could have surprised her more. Not if he stood on the top of Everest and declared undying passion for her yak. ‘You’re in therapy?’

‘He’s an idiot—’ he brushed it off, shifting the angle of his crouch by her stretcher ‘—but he seems to know some things. We’re making progress.’

Given his budget, he probably had the best the country had to offer.

‘But I didn’t need Sigmund Freud to tell me why I was hurting. I missed you, Shirley. In my life. In my arms. In my business.’

He smiled, but she couldn’t match it. This was all too monumental.

Seriously, if she woke up on the side of some pebbly track with her Sherpa and the yak staring down at her she was going to just … walk off the edge of the nearest crevasse. And have a very unfriendly discussion with the God she was starting to get a sense of up here.

She got to her feet and he pushed himself up to stand in front of her. She stared up at him. Made herself say it. The bitterest pill.

‘You told me you could never love me.’

He dropped his eyes. ‘I told you I’d never be
able
to love you. Not the way you deserve. Not the way it is supposed to be.’

It was impossible to know whether it was just
her
air that got tighter or the altitude. ‘You let me believe it was me.’

‘I thought that was what you wanted to hear. Needed to hear.’

He was right. She had. She’d needed to hate him. She lifted her eyes and took a breath. ‘It’s too late, Hayden. I’ve moved on.’

His dark brows dropped. ‘On? To what?’

That was the problem with lying; ideally, you needed to have put thought into it. ‘On to … getting over you.’
Ugh. Lame.
‘I’m going to hold out for someone who can love me the way I need, the way I deserve.’

His colour dropped slightly. But then his eyes narrowed. ‘No. You fainted when you saw me.’

Confident words, but they weren’t matched by his tone.

‘It was the—’

‘No, it wasn’t.’ Stronger. Surer. He shuffled closer. ‘It was me. You still care.’

She clamped her lips together.

‘Shirley, you’re not that inconstant. And you’re too moral. You might have been
trying
to get over me, but you’re not.’

Pfff …
‘You’re so arrogant.’

He smiled. ‘Yet you still love me.’

She dropped her head and when she lifted it she left behind all her masks, all her pretensions. ‘Is this fun for you, Hayden, tormenting me? Is the ego stroke worth flying across the world for?’

His smile evaporated, his eyes darkened. ‘No, Shirley. This is not about my ego. This is about my … feelings. My heart.’

The discomfort was what gave him away. It
showed in every crease and fold in his handsome face. Talking about this was excruciating for him.

He was serious …

‘Just say it, Hayden.’ Whatever he’d come here to say.

He looked around them again. ‘Not here. This is not how I imagined it.’

‘No. Here, or not at all. You don’t get to orchestrate every moment to your personal satisfaction.’ Not when it hurt this much.

Indecision flitted across his features. ‘Please, Shirley. Just step outside. Only a few feet.’

The plea was so honest and so earnest, it was hard to ignore.
Fine.
‘Just outside. No further.’

He led her out into the bright daylight. After the darkness of the tent, the electric-blue sky half blinded her. She raised her hands to let her eyes adjust more slowly. It didn’t help when he turned her so that she was looking at him against the backdrop glare of the main peak of ‘Holy Mother’.

‘I need sunglasses—’ she started.

‘God, woman, you’re making this very hard.’

His tone clamped her mouth shut. He’d never,
ever
snapped at her like that, hissing with frustration. Even when they were fighting. But, for once, she didn’t immediately assume responsibility. Not everything was her fault. And that was a massive mental shift for her.

‘Just let me do this,’ he gritted. He paused, composed himself and then lifted his eyes back to hers. ‘Shirley … You were never going to be just casual
for me. I was a fool not to see it coming. I was way too fascinated and intrigued by you.’

Everest disappeared. Her entire vision right now—her entire world—was Hayden Tennant.

‘I pushed you away and threw the gift of your love back in your face rather than face my own demons.’ He blew out a long breath. ‘I was terrified that I would hurt you even more if I stayed in your life. I even justified it that way to myself and felt quite the hero for doing the hard thing. I couldn’t have been more patronising if I’d tried. The truth is …’

He frowned and struggled with what came next but she couldn’t move for all the oxygen bound up in the snow-caps.

‘The truth is, I was scared to let myself feel. To care. Love and I don’t have a particularly good track record; my father’s obsession with my mother destroyed her, my love for her imprisoned me with him. I have no idea what loving someone safely entails. I was frightened that I would stuff it up if I tried. That I’d fail and you’d end up hating me. But you ended up hating me anyway—’