So Now You're Back (30 page)

It took a moment for understanding to register on his face.

‘I'm clean, I swear. I aced all the tests a year ago for my insurance. And I've never done it without.' His lips stretched into a thin smile. ‘Except with you.'

‘I'm clean, too, but I'm not using any form of birth control. I haven't had a sexual partner for over a year.' She began to tremble. ‘Do you have some condoms?'

He cursed and dropped back on the bed, his erection thrusting up, thick and hard. He covered his face with his arm, his breathing ragged. ‘What if I told you, you won't get pregnant?'

‘Oh, shit. You don't have any?' He'd started this without even thinking about protection? With their history? Was he nuts?

So much for Mr Confident-and-Experienced.

He dropped his arm. ‘No, I don't. I wasn't prepared to be consumed with lust on this trip. Sorry.'

‘But surely you get into these situations a lot?' she accused. After sixteen years, she felt like a horny teenager again. And, while she might have had a misguided, misty-eyed moment over that lost boy, she so was not up for a return trip to the sexual frustrations of her youth.

‘Apparently not,' he snapped.

She looked at his erection, desperate to feel him inside her. But at least she'd had an orgasm. ‘I guess we'll have
to settle for doing it without penetration.' She wrapped her fingers round his shaft, felt it leap in her palm.

But, to her astonishment, he dragged her hand away. ‘No, we don't. Listen to what I'm saying. If we're both sure we're clean, we don't have a problem. I can't get you pregnant.'

Her eyes nearly crossed with frustration. ‘Yes, you could. I'm only thirty-six. I have not gone through menopause yet. Granted, it's less likely than it was when I was eighteen, but there is no way on earth I'm taking that risk. Especially with you.'

He straddled her, grasping both her wrists to push her into the mattress until they were nose to nose. ‘There is no risk with me. I'm sterile. Firing blanks. Get it? I had a vasectomy nearly nineteen years ago.'

She stopped struggling, her whole body going slack with shock as understanding dawned.
‘How
many years ago?'

‘Shit.' He let go and rolled off her.

‘You had a vasectomy right after I got pregnant?' She sat up, crossing her arms over her breasts, feeling hideously exposed when he didn't deny it. ‘Why?'

He swore under his breath, his expression tight. ‘Because I never wanted to get anyone accidentally pregnant again.' The curt revelation felt like a blow. He caught her wrist. ‘Please tell me we're not going to talk about this now.'

‘Of course we bloody are.' She tugged her wrist out of his grasp.

He slapped a pillow over his lap. ‘So much for batting for England. At this rate I may never get another stiffy again.'

She walked over to the dresser, ignoring the pained tone. She pulled out a T-shirt and put it on, her fingers shaking. She knew the black hole opening up in the pit of her stomach was an overreaction. But overreaction or not, she couldn't seem to stop it.

‘What do you want me to say, Hal? I panicked, OK? I was terrified of becoming a father. That was who I was then. That's not who I am now. I spent two years in therapy after that breakdown getting myself straight. I made a mistake. I made a lot of mistakes, but I can't go back and undo them now.'

Firm hands settled on her shoulders, and he turned her to face him.

He stood close, the towel tucked back around his waist. ‘So what's the point of dredging it up all over again?'

She stared into his eyes. And saw regret and confusion.

How was it possible that he really genuinely didn't get it?

‘The point is, I still don't know why you left me.' Her voice sounded surprisingly calm, she realised, considering the way her heart was battering her ribs. ‘I understand you had a breakdown, but now I know exactly how terrified you were of becoming a father. Enough to go out and do something that would ensure you would never become a father again.' She gulped down a breath, forced to finally voice the fear that had haunted her but she'd never been strong enough to say then. ‘Did you think I'd tricked you? That I'd got pregnant deliberately? Is that why you didn't trust me enough to talk about it?'

To know now how much he hadn't wanted to be a dad, though, brought all the old guilt rushing back. Guilt she'd refused to acknowledge for sixteen years but unfortunately had just found out was still there, festering under her breastbone.

She'd adored being a mum. Because loving Lizzie had been so much simpler and more rewarding than loving Luke. If Lizzie cried or fussed, fixing the problem was easy. With a cuddle, or a fresh nappy, or a quick schlurp of breast milk, or a dose of gripe water and a jiggle until she burped. When Luke looked haunted or hunted and eventually became more
and more remote, she couldn't fix it, because she didn't know how. Until eventually she stopped caring enough to try.

‘Jesus, Hal, no, of course I didn't. I knew it was an accident. That's not it at all.'

He drew his thumb across her cheek, his hand trembling, and the painful sting of tears lodged in her throat.

She caught his hand, pulled it away from her face, the tightness in her chest refusing to go away. ‘Then why did you have to keep so many secrets? Why couldn't you just be honest with me about how you felt? I spent months after you left torturing myself, convinced it was all my fault. That I'd shut you out somehow after Lizzie was born, that I hadn't done enough to keep you, and it nearly destroyed me.'

He placed his hands on her shoulders, ran his thumbs across her collarbones. His face was a mask of so many conflicting emotions—confusion, frustration, pain.

‘Then I'm sorry for that, too. It was never your fault. And I swear, it had nothing to do with you. You've got to believe me. It was me. It was what I came from. It just all became too much, OK?'

‘No, it's not OK.' She shook her head, folding her arms around her midriff, the black hole still huge in her belly. ‘What was so horrific you couldn't tell me about it? I loved you, Luke, and you abandoned me. If it really wasn't me, or Lizzie, or even another woman, then what was it?'

Panic clawed at Luke's throat. She didn't look angry or bitter or even resentful. That he could have handled. And deflected and ignored. She simply looked devastated.

And that he couldn't ignore. Not any more. Because unlike all the other women whom he'd slept with but had been
so careful never to get too close to, with Halle the sadness mattered.

He thought he'd healed himself. He thought he'd picked up the pieces and remade himself from the ground up. And finally become a man, ready to own up to his responsibilities, instead of a terrified kid.

But how could he have? When he'd never been able to own up to how much pain he'd caused her?

Time to man up, Best. Because you'll never stop running until you do.

He strode away from her to slump down on the bed, his body rigid with tension and shame. He couldn't look at her and say what he had to say.

‘I guess the reason why is pretty simple really. My parents were both chronic alcoholics,' he said. ‘She mostly drank to escape. But he was a mean drunk who couldn't control his temper any more than he could control his drinking.'

‘He hit you?'

‘Occasionally.' He shrugged, remembering the backhanded slaps across the face, those nasty little jabs to the belly that would leave you retching, the mean pinches, the vicious kicks. The parade of everyday abuse that he had lived in fear of as a child but had eventually become as accustomed to as breathing. ‘Generally, he pounded my youngest brother, Curt, though,' he said. ‘Curt was small for his age and weedy, the runt of the litter. Plus, he had a real knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He pretty much used to wet himself every time Brian …' He stopped, amazed that he still couldn't call the guy by anything but his given name. ‘Every time my old man was in the same room. Which would probably explain why Curt was forever pinching my clean underwear.'

Bloody hell, how could it still be so tough to talk about?
Even after all these years and the thousands of euros' worth of therapy? Why did the old ghosts still have the power to make his palms sweat and his head hurt?

But then she sat down beside him, the mattress tilting, and placed her hand on his thigh. Warm through the damp towelling. ‘Why didn't social services intervene?' she said.

‘They didn't know.' He thrust shaking fingers through his hair. ‘The therapist said, when you come from that, you learn not to tell. You learn to keep secrets, because that's your normal, your reality. And you convince yourself your thoughts, your feelings, don't matter, because they fucking didn't. The place was always a tip. Soiled nappies everywhere. Rotting food on the plates piled in the sink. The smell of cigarette butts and stale Special Brew still makes me gag to this day. They didn't hug us, or care about us, or look after us. And a part of me always believed it was our fault, not theirs.'

‘I had no idea it was as bad as that.'

His thigh muscles bunched beneath her palm, and guilt rolled through her at the stark, grim picture he was painting. He'd said it wasn't her fault, but maybe it had been. A little bit.

It had been so easy for her to romanticise and exploit the few things she knew about Luke's home life as a teenager. He'd been the quintessential bad boy. Wounded and wanting, someone who could love her just for her. Unlike her parents, who had always set limits and conditions on their affection.

Leaving home at seventeen, shacking up with Luke, having Lizzie a year later had been an easy way to liberate herself from the weight of those expectations. But all the time it had been the opposite of romantic for him.

‘Of course you didn't know.' He focused on her, the
haunted look she remembered shadowing his eyes. ‘Why would I ever tell you? You were my escape from all that. Being around you was like having this force field that protected me from them.' He covered her hand on his leg, circled the skin with his thumb. ‘The first time we made love, you held me afterwards. You said all sorts of cheesy things about being in love with me.' He chuckled. ‘You were such a starry-eyed romantic. But it felt so good to have you hug me like that. To have you hold me like you cared. You made it better, at least for a while.'

‘And then I got pregnant with Lizzie. And you were trapped again.' Even if she couldn't have made the connection then, she could see it clearly now. She'd been playing at being a grown-up, while he'd been looking for a way out.

How young and naive she'd been. Because as much as she'd wanted to nurture him in their early days, she'd abandoned the quest as soon as she had Lizzie to focus on. Lizzie, her beautiful baby girl, who had been tiny and new and needy, and had none of the frustrating complexities, the unbreachable defences of her father.

And how ironic, that it had been those dark unknowable qualities in Luke—his moods, his secrets, his inability to share and discuss—that she had blamed him for later on, that had made him so wildly attractive to her in the first place.

She blew out a breath.

God, what a mess we made, both of us.

‘We should have waited,' she said. ‘We were far too young to have a baby.'

‘Well, thank God we didn't wait.' He hooked a tendril of hair behind her ear. ‘Or we wouldn't have Lizzie now.'

‘I know, but even so, you weren't ready for that kind of responsibility.'

The tightness in her chest loosened. The tightness she had refused to acknowledge for years but had always been there, crouching under her heart, ready to pounce out of the shadows if she didn't keep it ruthlessly controlled.

Was that the real reason she'd refused to talk to him for sixteen years? Not anger, not hurt, but guilt? Because she'd made the decision to have Lizzie without a thought to his feelings, his fears, and had always known, however much she later tried to deny it, that she had been partly to blame for his withdrawal?

‘Hal, I would never have been ready. Not until I dealt with where I came from.' Shifting round, he placed his hands on either side of her hips.

She drew back. ‘But I put so much pressure on you. And after you'd had all that therapy to get yourself straight, I wouldn't let you come back. I wouldn't even talk to you.'

‘Has anyone ever told you you've got an overdeveloped sense of responsibility?'

She let out a shaky laugh at his exasperated look. ‘Your daughter has called me a control freak, on numerous occasions. Does that count?'

‘It's on the spectrum.' The wry smile was ridiculously comforting. ‘The thing is, the therapy helped. But you know what really got me straight?'

‘What?'

‘Lizzie. Even if you wouldn't talk to me, you let me have her for six weeks a year, when you didn't have to.'

She coughed out a laugh. ‘I hate to say it, but I'm pretty sure the main reason I let you see her was because I thought you'd cave after one week of looking after a three-year-old on your own.' She played with the hem of her T-shirt, keen to look anywhere but his face.

God, honesty hour is a bitch.

‘You have no idea how miffed I was when Lizzie came back from that first trip with a thousand and one stories about how terrific her daddy was and what a great time she'd had.'

‘Oh, yeah?' He sent her a wry smile. ‘I'm guessing she didn't mention being sick on the Phantom Manor ride at Disneyland, then. Or wetting the bed the first night because I'd forgotten to stock up on night nappies.'

‘No, funnily enough she didn't mention any of that.' Halle laughed at the thought of his struggling to look after a three-year-old, but her amusement was bittersweet.