So Now You're Back (25 page)

She'd always known it. And the reality of that still tortured her.

‘You dragged me all the way out here, to the middle of bloody nowhere to talk about her, and put us both in this pressure-cooker situation, and yet you still can't face the truth, can you?'

She wanted to hear him say it. To own up to it.

He'd bonded with Lizzie, had been unable to resist his baby daughter once she was born, but there had always been that unspoken truth between them. That she hadn't given him a choice.

‘It's not as simple as that,' he said. ‘It's complicated. I told you, it wasn't to do with you or Lizzie. It was me. It was something I had to deal with that you couldn't be a part of.'

‘Bullshit, Luke.'
Not that again.
‘Don't talk in bloody platitudes and don't patronise me. I'm thirty-six years old. I've been a single mother for sixteen years. I've weathered destitution, your desertion, that prick Claudio deciding he didn't fancy being a dad, Lizzie's epic sulks, Aldo's anger management issues, God knows how many hours of family therapy feeling like a total failure. I've iced about a billion cupcakes, finger-mixed pastry until my hands cramped and built a career while juggling two menial jobs. And I've even managed to survive horse riding, hiking, near death in a kayak and eight never-ending days stuck in a cabin with the only man to give me a multiple orgasm sleeping upstairs after a year-long dry spell and forgetting to pack my bloody vibrator.'

His head shot up, the muscles in his jaw twitching as the flash of lust leaped towards her. ‘You're not putting that on me. I'm not the one who initiated that bloody kiss
at the waterfall. And I'm also not the one who put a stop to what could have been a perfectly good way to let off steam a minute ago.'

‘Oh, grow up, Luke. We're not becoming bonk buddies when we still have enough baggage to fill the Millennium Dome.'

‘Why not? It's just sex, for Chrissake.'

‘Spoken like a man who still thinks with his penis.'

‘You kissed me back, Hal.' He shot an accusatory finger at her. ‘And I'm not the one who just mentioned her vibrator.'

‘Fabulous. How clever of you. You're absolutely right. I still desire you. I always have.' She snapped her fingers in front of his face, the loud click ricocheting off the surrounding trees. ‘We could screw like rabbits right now and I'd enjoy it. But I'm not sixteen years old any more. So I can't just screw you and forget about it. Because letting off steam, as you so charmingly put it, is not going to make all the baggage magically disappear.'

‘Who cares? Why would you even want to unpack baggage that's over sixteen years past its sell-by date?'

Is he actually that clueless, or has he had a lobotomy?

‘I'll tell you what the bloody point is. The point is, I've been lugging that baggage around with me for sixteen years and I want to dump it now. It's always been there, dragging me down, making me think less of myself as a woman and question my abilities as a mother. It's the reason why I can top the
Sunday Times
bestseller list six weeks in a row, and why A-list stars will pay fifteen thousand pounds for a birthday cake from my studio, but why I can't have an honest conversation with my daughter about why she's lost two stone in six months without getting a two-hundred-pound-an-hour therapist involved.'

‘What if I don't want to talk about it?' He cut her off,
desperation edging out the temper. He grasped her arms, his fingers digging into her biceps. ‘Can't you see? Lizzie's the only thing that's still relevant between us. We don't have to rake through all that shit any more. We're both past it.'

‘You may be, but I'm not.' It took every ounce of her courage to admit it. But she was past caring now. And past pussyfooting around and letting her pride and her fear of humiliation get in the way of getting the closure she needed. ‘We made love that morning, you know. The morning you left.'

The knowledge flashed in his eyes. ‘Yeah, I remember. We woke Lizzie up.'

‘Then I made you a sandwich to take on the train,' she continued. ‘Your favourite, ham and cheese on my home-made poppy seed bread. You kissed Lizzie on the forehead and called her your Best girl the way you always did. And you told me how excited you were, that this was it. That you were going to ace the interview. And I was so excited, too. And then you walked out the door and I never saw you again.' She gulped air. She mustn't cry. How could the memories of that day still be so vivid? When she thought she'd buried them so deep? ‘You didn't even contact me to talk about seeing Lizzie for two whole months.'

‘Jesus, Hal. I know. And I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. But I wasn't thinking straight. I wasn't really thinking at all. Not for a long time.'

‘You made me feel like nothing. For a very long time. Can't you see an apology isn't enough to take that away? I need an explanation. About what happened to you that day.'

The question hung between them.

He turned his head towards the river, the wet hair sticking to his forehead. ‘OK, I guess I owe you that.'

Finally!

She held her breath, not entirely convinced he was really going to give up the information.

He didn't look at her, but after a pause of several never-ending seconds, he finally started to speak in a rough monotone.

‘Amelie and I went to some seedy club that night in the Pigalle, after the assignment.' He focused on her at last. ‘The interview had gone OK. I'd got some good quotes. We drank too much and I got into a fight with one of the bouncers. I woke up the next morning in her spare room, with a black eye and an unexplained bite mark on my shoulder and the worst hangover of my entire life. I'd missed my train.' He dug the toe of his boot into the pebbles, concentrated on it as he continued. ‘I got dressed, got to the Gare du Nord to buy another ticket. To come home to you and Lizzie.' He cleared his throat. ‘And I just …' The hesitation turned into a weighty silence.

A million questions slammed into her brain, but she refused to voice them. Imagining herself back at their flat, already worried because he hadn't called, but having no way of knowing the horror that was about to unfold, when the communication never came.

‘And I just couldn't buy the ticket,' he said. ‘My head felt like a wrecking ball had smacked into it and my shoulder stung like a son of a bitch and my hands were shaking as if I had the DTs. And that's when I started to cry.'

His voice cracked on the word. And she wondered if she'd heard him correctly.

Luke crying? But Luke never cried. That couldn't be right.

‘It was a really weird feeling at first, probably because I'm pretty sure I'd never cried before in my life.' He planted his fists into the pockets of his wet shorts. ‘Afterwards, during
therapy, I figured out those tears were ones I'd been storing up for years. But at the time, it felt like it wasn't me doing it. That I was looking at myself, shouting, “Snap out of it, Best.” But even so, once I'd started, I couldn't stop.'

He braced his shoulders, digging his fists further into his pockets as a shiver ran through him.

‘Eventually, though, I ran out of tears. So I sat there until a gendarme came and told me to leave the station because it was closing. It was after midnight. I'd lost my bag, with my mobile and my wallet. I suppose it had been pinched. I wandered around in a daze and eventually found my way back to Amelie's around dawn. She let me get back into the spare bed.' Finally, his eyes met hers and she saw the hollow look she'd seen so often in the weeks, the months before he'd left. ‘And I didn't get out of it again for two weeks.'

A million questions hung in the air.

Hadn't he thought about her, about Lizzie? Not once? Why didn't he ask for her help? She could have saved him. Because she had loved him.

But all those questions were in the past now. Futile and pointless.

A shudder ran through her, her damp clothes chilly against her skin. The sunlight unable to penetrate the icy haze of shock.

He'd had a breakdown. A catastrophic one by the sounds of it. And she'd had no idea.

Whatever she'd expected him to tell her, this wasn't it. She thought she'd been prepared, but she hadn't been prepared for this. Because it felt like losing him all over again.

She gripped her elbows, pulled her arms into her chest to stop the chill branching out through her whole body, and bringing with it the miserable feelings of inadequacy and futility that had haunted her at the time.

‘Let's set up camp and I'll get a fire going,' he said, running his fingers through his hair and sending it into damp furrows. ‘I don't know about you, but my balls feel like they've frozen to the size of walnuts.' The light tone was in direct contrast to the strained expression on his face.

‘Mine, too.' She sent him a weak smile, grateful not to have to talk about his revelation. There were so many things she wanted to say, so much more she could ask but wasn't sure she wanted to know.

Like a typical guy he'd given her an entirely literal answer. The exact details of why he hadn't made it home that day, why he hadn't contacted her for two weeks. But he hadn't told her why he'd felt so trapped. What he had been so terrified of.

But could she bear to hear the truth? Her chest already hurt at the thought of him, as he had been then, so smart and witty and full of himself, curled up in a ball of misery on the platform at the Gare du Nord, unable to function.

He dragged their gear out of the kayak hatch and they took turns to change into dry clothing. She gathered firewood, placing the broken branches into the firepit. He set about putting up the first of their two-man tents.

She glanced over at his muffled cursing as he wrestled with the guidelines and hammered the tent's pins into the hard-packed earth.

How could he seem so tough, so invulnerable, so confident now? And yet have been so broken then? Surely it must have been her, and Lizzie—what else could it have been? But how could she not have understood how unhappy he was? And if she had, would she have been able to make it better?

He came over, crouching to light the fire, and she forced the confusing, treacherous thoughts to the back of her mind,
keen to encourage the silence. She'd stopped blaming herself years ago and she refused to drop back into that sinkhole of recriminations all over again.

He stood and stretched out his spine. She heard his vertebrae popping, noticed the pebbled skin on muscular forearms, the wisps of sun-bleached hair standing on end. And had the strangest yearning to be close to him tonight. If only to reassure herself he was OK now.

‘You want to eat?' he asked as the dry kindling crackled and caught. ‘Before I put up the other tent?'

‘Sure,' she said, although she'd never felt less hungry in her life.

Had she totally mucked this up? Trying to rewrite the past? Perhaps Luke was right, and all they needed to put all their old demons to rest was a good hard shag.

‘Why don't we just share the one tent?' she suggested, her jaw stretching in a huge yawn. ‘Save you having to put up the other one and break any more of your fingers.'

He glanced at her. ‘You sure? It's going to be pretty snug.'

‘Don't take that as an invitation,' she qualified quickly, just in case he'd read her mind. ‘Nothing's going to happen.'

While her spirit might be insane enough to risk doing the wild thing with Luke again, and her mind might be exhausted enough to be able to argue her into it, her body certainly wasn't.

Weeping thigh muscles never lie.

‘Don't worry, I know that,' he said, his expression as weary as hers.

‘So, the much more burning question is …' She rummaged around in the box of supplies and pulled out two sachets of freeze-dried entrées. ‘Do you fancy rehydrogenated chilli mac or rehydrogenated chicken gumbo to go with your sides of beef jerky and trail mix?'

Prepare to be tortured tonight.

Luke glanced in Halle's direction, stuffing their leftovers and the remaining food into a heavy-duty disposal sack. Her bottom stuck out of the tent, jiggling enticingly in fleecy pyjamas as she struggled to get the sleeping bags into the confined space.

He tied the disposal sack to the cable suspended between a couple of trees at the back of the campsite and hiked it up to the required fifteen feet above ground level that Chad had stipulated.

Chad had given him a long lecture about ‘responsible camping behaviour' and ‘the black bear safety rules'. Although Chad insisted that incidences had been rare in the past couple of years due to ‘bear programming', Luke had listened carefully to the instructions, not wanting to get bitten on the arse by a six-foot black bear in his sleep because he'd failed to wash out their cooking gear properly or store the leftover foodstuffs in a secure location.

However, a clandestine visit from Yogi the Man-eating Bear was not his primary concern at present. Bedding down in a confined space with Halle was. And yet he'd elected not to put up the other tent after her suggestion. Even though he should have, because the odd smashed knuckle would be a lot less painful than a night spent with blue balls.

She'd made him tell her about his breakdown. And then looked at him with that combination of disbelief and shock and pity. Shooting his tidy game plan—of repairing their relationship as Lizzie's parents without raking up all the shit from their past—right out of the water.

She hadn't commented on his revelations, hadn't probed further. But rehashing that time in his life, when everything
had basically collapsed into a pit of self-loathing and despair, had left him feeling tense. And exposed.

Unfortunately, that hadn't made him feel any less horny, which surely meant he needed to be sectioned. Everything was way too raw at the moment to even contemplate sex with Halle. She might as well have a neon sign on her forehead saying ‘Danger: Drama Ahead'.