by R. K. Lilley
“Who are you to judge me? I’m better for him. I don’t have to wonder if I’m in love with him, I know. I never would have left him, pining and alone, to suffer for years, to look for comfort in other women, for years. You did all of that. Who are you to judge me?”
“How far along are you?” I asked her. I couldn’t believe how calm my tone sounded.
Inside, I was a mess.
A bloodbath.
“Does it matter? I know he’s the father. I haven’t told him yet, but you know Tristan. He could never turn his back on something like this.”
I stood up. I wasn’t sure how. I made my way slowly, unsteadily, to the bar. I didn’t look back at Mona again. I would have done a great deal to never have to set eyes on her again for the rest of my life.
Stephan met me halfway, and just swooped in and picked me up. I studied the chiseled line of his jaw.
“You look like a blond superman,” I told him.
He smiled. “You don’t look well, Danika. I’m driving you home, unless you have an objection.”
I shut my eyes. “Will you take me to your place? I need to keep away from my life for a bit.”
“Of course. We have lots of room. You can stay for as long as you need to. I’ll take you, and Javier will bring your car, later, so you aren’t stranded.”
“Thank you. Absolutely everyone on the planet should have their own Stephan.”
“I think you might be a little bit in shock, Danika.”
I only wished. Shock smacked of numbness, and I wasn’t that.
To say I didn’t handle the news well was a gross understatement.
I lost it. Just lost my mind.
The first stage was avoidance. It was pure cowardice.
And utterly necessary.
I avoided him with skill. With talent. I not only anticipated where he would be, I anticipated where he’d think I would be, and steered clear of it all.
At one point, he camped out in his car on the curb in front of my house.
That night, I got a hotel room.
The next stage was worse. It was anger.
Rage, fury, outrage, utter devastation. I stopped avoiding him because I wanted him to feel my wrath, needed it.
I went to his house and strode up to his door. He opened it before I could knock. I had no clue how he’d known I was coming. What, had he just been watching for me out the window?
No matter.
I walked in, not even looking directly at him.
I took a deep breath and turned to face him, raising my trembling chin to meet him in the eye.
“Sweetheart,” he said, his voice so, so soft, his golden eyes softer.
My arm jerked back and swung forward. There was no tangible communication between my brain and my arm as I slapped him as hard as I could, hard enough to leave my arm sore and my palm numb.
I staggered back, eyes wide on his face. I suppose I expected some sort of an angry reaction from him, something volatile, or perhaps mean. Some normal response to being struck in the face.
His eyes were wild, but not with anger, not with rage. Something else moved there, something more worrisome, though I could not put my finger on what, precisely. At least, not right at first.
He followed me as I took jerky steps backwards, still with that light in his eyes that was trying to break me. It was unholy.
“I’m sorry,” I gasped out. I wasn’t even sure if I meant it. It just seemed like the appropriate thing to say.
“Don’t be. Not for that. In fact, you do that again, if you want to.”
That sent a jolt of a shock through my body. “What is wrong with you? You want me to slap you again?”
“I’ll take it. I’ll take any reaction you need to give me, as long as you’re not walking away.”
“What were you thinking? How could you get her pregnant? How could you?”
“I didn’t.”
It happened again. One minute my arm was at my side, and the next it was whipping across his face hard enough to sting my palm and send a shock through my arm. “Don’t you lie to me. Don’t you dare. You might not know if it’s yours, but you were sleeping with her, so you cannot tell me that you’re sure it’s not!”
“Yes, I can. I am not lying. She knows it’s not mine. It is a matter of days before this lie of hers comes clean. But go on, do what you need to, say what you need to, to vent your feelings about this. As long as you don’t leave.”
I felt all semblance of control slipping away from me. I felt myself getting hysterical. I backed away from him, step by step, sobbing uncontrollably.
He followed me, step by step, a world of sympathy in his unholy eyes, and I did not want it. All I wanted on earth in that moment was to go back in time, and get the picture out of my head of some other woman pregnant with his child.
“If you’re lying to me,” I warned him, voice shaking, knees shaking, hands shaking, “I don’t ever want to see you again. Not ever. If you’re lying about this, I want you out of my life forever.”
That made his mouth twist down, and my mind instantly latched onto that as a sign of his guilt. “Oh my God! You liar! It is yours. You-you got-got her pregnant?”
He shook his head, but I was past the point of all reason. He was standing so close now that I slapped him again, and again, and again, then clutched at his shirt with both hands. I gripped it so furiously that it ripped, and I raked my nails into his chest, scoring deeply into his flesh.
Lashing out like a wounded animal.
I glared up at him, barely seeing past the tears, but seeing enough.
Enough to make me shake. Enough to break me.
It was as though every blow I landed only softened him, tenderized him, and with each abuse I inflicted, more love would pour out of his eyes.
“Shh, Danika, shh. Listen to me. Calm down and listen. I did not get her pregnant. The only woman I have ever gotten pregnant is you. The only woman I would ever get pregnant is you.”
I sobbed harder at that, though he couldn’t have known why.
“Look at me. Look me in the eye and see the truth. I have not touched that woman in well over a year. I have not been with anyone but you since I saw you with Andrew on that red carpet. I was celibate for a full year before the ranch.”
Slowly, gradually, the sobbing stopped and his words sank in. I began to study him, looking for the truth, or God forbid, the lie.
If he was lying to me now, if he could make his eyes do what they were doing right now with artifice, then I was done for. There was no limit to what he could get away with, if he could fake a thing like that.
Because I was incapable of cutting him off when he looked at me like that.
My entire body froze.
“Excuse me?” I finally asked him, not processing all of it right away. He’d given me too much information all at once.
“I did not want to do this now, but I will if you need it. But first, I need to know that you understand that that woman is not pregnant with my child. Do you understand that?”
My head started nodding before my brain gave the order.
He still had way too many weapons in his arsenal against me. And he still used them mercilessly.
“Good. I was celibate for a year before the ranch.”
The impact was just as severe the second time he said it.
“After I saw you with that punk on the red carpet.”
I took in one deep trembling breath. “Andrew.”
He flinched. “Yes. That punk. I saw you with him, and I knew you were together. I saw it up close, not from any distance at all, with no filter, and I realized that I couldn’t live like that anymore. It was wrong.”
“Stop.” My voice was a whisper.
“You never should have been with him.”
“Stop.” My voice got louder.
“And I never should have touched another woman, no matter that you wouldn’t speak to me, wouldn’t look at me. I was celibate for two years after the night of the
accident and for one year before the ranch. Everything else was wrong. It should have never happened like that. My only excuse was that I’d lost all hope.” His voice went from unsteady to breaking on each word. “If I’d had even an ounce of hope left that you would let me so much as kiss your fucking feet again, I would have waited for you.” He made a visible effort to calm himself.
He took a very deep breath. “And then I saw you with that piece of shit—“
“Stop it! He’s not a piece of shit. He’s actually a very nice man.”
“Well, I fucking hate him, so please don’t talk him up to me.” His voice was shaking, and getting louder by the word. “When I saw you that night, the way he was with you, touching you with privilege, I knew that I couldn’t go on like that anymore, couldn’t go on pretending that I was okay with the way things turned out.
I tried it your way, Danika. No one can say, that six fucking years later, I didn’t try to respect your wishes, but I am done. This was wrong. You were wrong. And I’m here to tell you that, if it takes me the rest of my fucking life, I am going to make this right again.”
I had no words, for once. And I couldn’t move, couldn’t begin to imagine how to react to his statement. Something was happening inside of me, some hardened part of me had thawed out and the repercussions of that thawing were not something I was ready yet to contemplate.
“So that is how I know for a fact that it is not my baby,” he continued relentlessly, “and she knows it too. She’s turned malicious. She’s not who I thought she was, and that’s unfortunate; it has cost her job, but she does not have the power she thinks she does to hurt what you and I have. No one has that power, with the exception of you and me. So, sweetheart, please, I just need you to have a little bit more faith.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before now that you hadn’t been with anyone in so long?”
“You hadn’t even admitted to me that things were over with Andrew. Did you expect me to admit to a thing like that, when I didn’t even know if you were jumping from his bed to mine? I do have some pride left, even when it comes to you.”
“I told you about Andrew—”
“Yes, well, that was later, and by then we were avoiding this subject, not finding new reasons to talk about it.”
I’d been so full of anger, so fueled by wrath, that when it left me, I was completely deflated.
I would have fallen to the ground if he hadn’t caught me.
But caught me he did and swung me up into his immeasurably comforting arms. I laid my head on his chest as he kissed the top of my head. I could have stayed there forever.
It felt like coming home.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
We were in the kitchen of his house, cleaning up after one of his amazing dinners.
“What did you come to the apartment for that night?”
I didn’t have to ask what night he meant, no matter how we’d been tiptoeing around it. We talked about the before and the after like reasonably well adjusted adults. But the other, the incident, that night, and the sequence of events that led directly to it, that we’d been avoiding. Well, okay, I had been. He’d been quietly but persistently asking and then waiting me out for answers.
I would have loved to keep avoiding it. It had already caused us so much pain. What was the point of dragging it all out in the open and letting it hurt us again? Because it could. I knew it was only a question of when.
There was no doubt in my mind that we weren’t done bleeding for that night. Weren’t done suffering.
“What could it matter, Tristan? Why do you keep digging at this? What’s the point? Just let it go.”
“I can’t. It’s always bothered me. I find myself thinking about it all the time. On the edge of sleep, at the oddest quiet moments, that’s where my mind goes. To this day. I need to know. What were you doing at the apartment that night? Did you come to reconcile? Is that what happened?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “That is what happened. I came there to try to work things out.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him jerk. As I’d suspected, he hadn’t taken that well.
“My God. You came to make up and I—I—“
“Yes. You were too far gone to talk just then. You couldn’t be reasoned with.”
“There are so many holes in my memory that night. In rehab, they call it a blackout. You function, sometimes almost like normal, and have no memory of it. It’s a sign of alcoholism.”
I, unfortunately, had had no such mercies. I remembered the details of that night so clearly that they haunted me. I had been so stupid. I remembered that. So completely naive, thinking I was tough, meanwhile a predator had been lurking in our midst, taking advantage of our every emotional misstep.
I had a thought. “I have a question for you. Something you said that night never made sense to me. Do you remember when I sent Jerry to you with the divorce papers?”
I’d even gone so far as to ask Jerry about this, but he’d assured me that he handed the papers and the note directly into Tristan’s care, so I’d gotten no answers there.
Tristan had seemed so ready to take on the subject when he was asking the questions, but something about my question seemed to have weakened him.
He moved to the table in his breakfast nook, felt for a chair, and sat down, looking at his hands. “Yes, I remember.”
I moved to sit as well, but not facing him. No, I turned my chair away, staring out the window. This subject was hard enough to face, without having to face each other, as well. “Do you remember the letter I sent with the papers?”
There was a very long pause, then some agitated movements behind me, as though he’d taken exception to his chair or the ground it was sitting on.
My stomach churned when he answered behind me, his tone just awful with pain and confusion, “What letter?”
My eyes squeezed shut. I didn’t want to dig into the old wounds, but ignoring them had obviously never made all of the questions go away. “When I sent Jerry to you with the divorce papers, there was a letter with them. A very important letter. For you. Jerry swears to me that he handed both directly into your care.”
A longer silence passed with more agitated movements.
“What did it say?” he finally asked in the most wretched voice.
I wished instantly I’d never brought it up, but I trudged on. There was no going back now. He’d been like a dog with a bone before I’d opened my big mouth about the letter. There was no question he’d be even more relentless with still more questions in the mix. “I’ll tell you. First, though, I want to know what happened to it. Were you alone when he came to see you? He told me he didn’t see anyone else at the apartment.”
More silence, then the sound of something breaking in the kitchen. Near the sink, likely a plate, I thought, but I didn’t look.
This was rough enough, just hearing what it was doing to him.
“Dean was at the apartment with me. He came out of his room after Jerry left. He’d heard Jerry’s voice, wanted to know what was going on.”
“The letter was tucked into the papers,” I explained, keeping my voice gentle. I’d come to terms with this years ago. No new fresh wounds for me here, just sore old ones. Not so for Tristan. Some of this was very new to him. “Impossible to miss once you started going through them. Is there any chance you set them down before…before you read them?”
More silence, more things breaking in the kitchen. I could hear his heavy, ragged breaths catching as he moved. He was not taking this well.
“I did. I set them on the coffee table and went to pour some shots. I didn’t want to read the papers without a drink. I didn’t think I could handle them.”
There it was. All of the puzzle pieces fit right into place.
“And Dean, I take it he was near the coffee table when you turned your back?”
More things broke in the kitchen. And then his ragged breaths were directly behind me. “What did that letter say, Danika?”
I sat there for a long time, even after he’d left the room, my mind in dark places.
Regrets were such useless things, and even so, it seemed impossible to dislodge some of them.
So many mistakes on both our parts, and here we were, six years later, still dealing with the aftermath.
I loved him every bit as much as I ever had, and that love was more useless than it had ever been, even now, when I could get through to him.
I found him out back sitting on a lawn chair, staring into his pool. He was bent forward, fists clenched. He looked wound up so tight that he might just curl into a ball at any second.
I stroked his shoulder and he jerked like he’d been shocked.
I touched him again, and this time he seemed prepared for it. “Come on. Let’s go to bed.”
I led him by the hand up to his bedroom, and he let me. I certainly couldn’t have moved him otherwise.
Slowly, tenderly, I stripped him and then he me. I tugged him under the covers with me. I hugged him tight, trying to ease the frigid remorse that was gripping him. It had me in its grip as well, so I knew better than anyone how the touching helped.
We held each other for a very long time before he spoke, his voice rasping out, breaking on some of the words. “I would have gone to rehab, even as fucked up as I was back then, if I had seen that, I would have gone. I thought you were dead set on staying away. I thought you were so done with me. If I had read that letter, everything would be different.”
“It’s no use,” I told him gently. “We have enough to contend with. We don’t need to harbor these regrets, as well. We’ve got to let it go. The past is the past, and we cannot go back.”
Those words weren’t only for him. I was still convincing myself, as well.
I pulled his face closer, and laid my lips very softly on the corner of his mouth.
He shut his eyes, and I turned his head just so, pressing my lips gently to the pulse in his neck. I held them there for a prolonged moment, then pulled back, tilted his head down, and rubbed my lips against his forehead, then down, brushing against his stubbly cheek, his jaw.
