I opened Jamie’s door, holding it for Clara as she passed through and sat down. She smiled and her body language was eerily pleasant.
‘I’m sure you know why I’m here,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure I do.’
‘You’re very pretty. I can see why he’s been holding a flame for so long,’ she said in a frighteningly calm voice.
‘Clara—’
‘Has he told you about me?’ she asked, still so calm.
‘I know who you are, yes.’
‘That’s funny because he’s never mentioned you.’ She smiled somewhere between false and stellar restraint.
‘Why would he?’
Clara laughed silently and picked up her bag. She rummaged through until she pulled out a stack of letters tied together with a piece of thin leather. My heart dropped and I instinctively put my hand to my mouth. I knew immediately that they were mine.
‘He’s been working from home a lot. I thought it was sweet, that finally he was starting to care about me in the way I’ve so desperately wanted him to. I found these a week after we moved in together. They were hidden at the back of the wardrobe. Not a great hiding place.’ She smiled again. Calm. Collected. Serene.
‘We have history,’ I said quietly.
‘You certainly do. I’ve read them. Every single one.’ She picked up the pile and untied the leather, picking one out of the envelope and holding it up. ‘You know, I didn’t tell him I’d found them. I was pregnant, felt like death, and this didn’t help,’ she said, shaking the letter in front of me.
‘Jesus,’ I said, holding my hands on my head as I leant my elbows on his desk.
‘I’m assuming you know about our daughter,’ she said.
‘Yes. I know. I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine—’
‘No, you can’t. Don’t even try. You won’t come close,’ she spat. ‘I should have guessed he would have told you. It’s just me he doesn’t talk to.’ She shook her head and the steely calm disappeared, leaving behind a nervous leg kick and trembling mouth. ‘I was being nosy one day. He had some papers lying across the desk and I was missing the buzz of casework, so I picked them up. Supervision notes. Yours. Imagine my surprise when I saw your name,’ she said, smiling again. ‘Do you have any idea how it felt finding out that the fresh start he’d promised wasn’t a fresh start at all? He’d sought you out. Couldn’t live without you it seems.’
‘He didn’t know I was working in this team. He was as shocked as I was.’
‘Abi, give me more credit. I’m not stupid. If he didn’t know, he was certainly hoping.’ She set her eyes to the floor before looking directly at me. ‘He’s beautiful, isn’t he?’
‘I’m not going to answer that.’
‘You don’t need to. I’ve read your letters, remember?’ she said in a cocky tone she hadn’t shown before. ‘I loved the little drawing. Infinity. He would never tell me what his tattoo meant. I’d guessed it was a past love, and then it all made sense once I read these.’ She held the letters up again. ‘Very romantic.’
‘I was shocked when he showed it to me. I didn’t know. It was just a way to remember what we had.’
‘When did you see his tattoo?’ she asked, her eyes widening and her mouth opening in shock.
‘I…erm…we…’ I stuttered and stammered knowing I’d just landed myself in a whole heap of trouble. Honesty overruled thought. ‘He showed it to me. We were on a training conference together and he showed it me. Nothing happened. Nothing,’ I said, shaking my head at the awful awkwardness of it all.
‘The conference where he was speaking? The overnighter? The night I…’ She stopped herself as realisation dawned on her that it was the same night she had been admitted to hospital. ‘Oh my God.’ She dropped her head, causing her curls to fall across her face. She was silent for what seemed like minutes. ‘You have the same tattoo?’ She laughed bitterly before I could answer. ‘Of course you do.’
‘I’m sure this isn’t easy for you, but I promise you that nothing has happened between us. He told me he was married and I’d never come between that. I’ve asked for a transfer. I’m leaving next week.’
‘You were already between us, Abi. Always have been.’
She stopped talking as I covered my mouth with the tips of my fingers and took in the heavy words. My hearing was heightened and I sighed in despair for the heartbroken woman in front of me. I could hear short bursts from her as she tried to calm her breathing.
‘He was never mine, was he?’
‘You need to ask him,’ I replied on a whisper. ‘I can’t answer that.’
‘I knew when he agreed to marry me that he didn’t love me. I was hoping he would grow to.’ She looked to the floor. ‘When I read the letters, I knew that we would never share a love like yours.’ She wiped her hand delicately across her nose and reached into her bag for a packet of tissues. ‘I always knew.’ She cleared her throat and visibly straightened her shoulders. ‘It’s been nice to finally put a face to a name, but I think we’re done here.’
Suddenly, Jamie’s door swung open with such force it made me jump. ‘Clara! What are you doing?’ he asked, troubled and confused.
‘I’m not here to see you, Jamie. I’m here to see Abi.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, come on,’ she said, turning to face him. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know. We’ve come to the end, haven’t we? I think we all know that.’
He studied her face, his eyebrows squeezing together creating a look of what the fuck? before changing completely into a look of defeat as he dropped his head when she held up the letters.
‘Abi, if you could leave us. Jamie and I have some talking to do.’
I slowly stood and ran my hands down my trouser legs, smoothing out the fabric in a pathetic attempt to delay leaving the room. As I walked towards the door, I stopped at her side, but she didn’t attempt to look up or speak. She just sat with a look of sorrow and hurt.
Jamie was waiting beside the door, rubbing his neck with his hand, his face contorted in a look of pain and anxiety. I walked past and silently gasped as he lightly brushed my fingers with his before closing the door behind me.
Chapter Fifty
Jamie
Now.
‘You were never truly with me, Jamie. I know the reason why. I’ve always known. But I’m glad we tried. I’m so glad we tried.’
As soon as Clara said those words, I knew she’d finally reached an understanding where closure for us would surely follow.
She left at the end of the week. Our marriage was finally declared over even though it had barely had time to start.
After she came to my office, we went home and talked about everything. We started with my reasons for agreeing to marry her when we discovered she was pregnant, my feelings for Abi, and then the letters. Clara’s decision not to approach me about them was not an easy one. She admitted that she’d hoped they would go away if she ignored them for long enough.
After a lot of crying and plenty of shared whiskey, Clara accepted that our marriage was never based on our love for each other. Instead, it had been based on the mutual love we shared for our daughter. She was surprisingly resolute. I believed talking to Abi had a lot to do with that. She seemed to accept that our relationship would never come close to what Abi and I had shared before her.
We spent our last days together remembering Lily, promising we would never lose the connection we held and the bond that was formed between us because of our daughter.
She went to stay with her brother, who, after threatening to push my teeth to the back of my throat, finally promised me Clara would get all the support she needed so that she wouldn’t slip back into depression.
We agreed to keep in touch whenever we felt we needed to. She was doing well considering everything she had been through.
I took four weeks off work after she left, which Luke agreed to after I spilled my guts on his office floor. It meant I missed Abi’s leaving party, b
ut I needed time to think, time to get my head in order. It was more for Abi’s sake than mine. She’d told me I needed to make the decision to end my marriage for me, not her. I couldn’t deny that Clara had pushed that decision, but I didn’t want Abi to feel that my next actions hadn’t been thought through.
After everything, I always felt we were destined to be together. I thought we would be the sad news item on local TV as the elderly couple married for sixty years who died minutes apart because we couldn’t bear to live without each other, holding on to each other’s hands as we took our last breaths.
I was always a cheesy romantic. Back on the train platform where I’d told Abi we would find our way back to each other if we were meant to be, I thought it was the start of a romance of epic proportions. I hadn’t thought for a second that it would become the worst decision I’d ever make.
In the clarity between whiskey hazes, I grasped the concept of love but battled with the word.
Love.
It was so small. Saying I love you would never be enough. Those four letters couldn’t come close to describing us. We had more than love. There would always be thousands of possible theoretical love matches for every one of us, but no one could match our chemistry, sparks or major fireworks.
Chemistry can’t be manipulated. It is there or it isn’t. I felt if I opened my palm to the sky, I would produce a lightshow of hearts escaping from my fingertips, and that was why I found myself outside her flat one month later.
I could hear the gasp from behind the door. She must have seen me standing on the other side through the spyhole. She opened the door at high speed. Her hair was in plait that trailed down her shoulder and she had one of those pore strips across her nose. She was wearing a man’s shirt that rested just under her thigh.
Mine.
I recognised it immediately. I’d left it one night after we spilled tingling gel lube down the cuffs after a monumental fuck that ended up with me coming all over her hand. Don’t ask for more details. They would blow your fucking mind.
How could I resist her?
I was a single breath away from kissing her.
‘You look fucking hot, Abi Sinclair,’ I said on a smile. She drew the shirt together where it was gaping open at the collar. Fuck, I hated that. She had never been reserved around me. She was so bloody comfortable in her own skin I was surprised she didn’t turn up to work in an oversized t-shirt and nothing else.
I smiled when she opened herself back up to me, dropping her hands, oblivious to giving me a sneaky peek of her white lace bralette.
‘How’s the new job? I hope it’s awful, shit, rubbish. I hope your new manager is a cock because your old manager was one of the best in the business.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Didn’t think much of him myself,’ she said, crossing her arms and tilting her head in full on cocky mode.
‘Abi, if that’s your mum again, tell her she’s too bloody old to borrow my bodycon dress.’ Elle stopped dead in her tracks as she spotted me at the door. ‘Oh hey, sorry, I didn’t realise it was you.’
‘How are you doing, Elle?’ I asked as I continued grinning at Abi.
She looked at Abi’s face and back to me, surveying the atmosphere, sizing up the scale of the moment before shouting, ‘Ben, we’re going out!’ They picked their shoes up from the hall, Ben patting me on the back as they walked away, shoeless and coatless but smiling like loons.
‘Can I come in?’
‘That depends,’ she said, playing with her plait.
‘I’m soon to be divorcee if that’s what you’re going to ask.’ She nodded and bit her lip, squashing down the grin that threatened to light up her face. ‘She left a few weeks ago and I’ve been…finding myself since then…finding myself thinking about you. A lot.’
‘That’s good to know. Can I ask you something?’
‘Go on.’
‘Can you remember when you said that if two people who were lovers at one point stay friends, they’re either still in love with each other or they were never in love in the first place?’ I remembered distinctly. I was offering advice to Gem in a café a few weeks after we met. A few weeks after I started falling in love with the ball of awesome that was Abi.
‘What are we then? What category do we fall into?’
‘Do I need to answer that?’
She smiled and pulled her plait through her fingers before turning serious. ‘Let’s not hurt each other again.’
I blew out a breath and shook my head. ‘Never.’
‘I mean it. I couldn’t survive. I wouldn’t live. It would fucking kill me.’ I saw a flash of hurt cross her beautiful face. That look killed me, sucking the air from my lungs in one swoop.
‘I couldn’t, Abi. I wouldn’t. Please, just give me a chance to prove myself again.’
She started pulling at the hem of the shirt, twisting one side around her finger, struggling to keep her eyes off me. But I could tell she was having some kind of internal battle with herself. I understood that, of course I did.
‘I know there’s a lot of shit to wade through. I know I need to explain a lot. I won’t push you. I’d wait a fucking lifetime for you. You’re everything to me,’ I reassured her.
She took in a sharp breath. ‘Make me yours again.’
We crashed together like a couple starved of each other for so long. Our kisses reconnected us, made us one again. She breathed into my neck, kissing all along and pulling me closer with her hand firmly on the other side, sliding her fingers between my ears.
‘You’ve always been mine,’ I growled as I ran the tip of my tongue down her neck. She shuddered and gasped, throwing her head back and laughing silently. She pulled me in. I shut the door with a kick of my foot, never breaking our kiss. I pressed my hands into her arse cheeks and squeezed them like my fingers needed to remember her skin. She smelled so good. She was a fucking dream. So perfect.
It was like I was looking at her from a fresh perspective, claiming her as mine again, letting the want, desire and aching need pour out of me completely. I pressed my hands against her skin feeling like I needed to soak every bit of her in. My fingers were vibrating with a soft, warming buzz—the almost feeling of pins and needles. She stared at me with wonder, like she couldn’t believe I was there in front of her, but just to make sure, she dragged her fingers along my smiling mouth.
I unbuttoned her shirt as I walked her backwards into the bedroom. I threw it to the floor and traced my fingers along her breasts. The bralette left nothing to the imagination. I could see her pink nipples through the white lace. I felt her nipples harden in my mouth as I sucked them through the thin fabric. I needed to talk to her, tell how I felt, but my natural urges took over. My cock was hard, ready and waiting.
I pulled the straps down her arms and she reached around to unclasp it at the back. It fell to the floor as I pushed one hand across her hip and squeezed the other on her breast. She couldn’t keep still, her body squirming and writhing against me until she stopped to unbutton my jeans.
‘We’re not a normal couple. We don’t follow the rules, never have,’ I panted as she cupped my balls and ran her fingers up and down my hard cock causing a moan I wasn’t aware I had in me. I tried to steady my breathing. ‘We don’t need engagement rings or a bit of paper to define ourselves.’
‘Fuck no,’ she moaned as I slipped my fingers across the white lace covering her pussy. Always matching. I sat her down on the bed, spreading her legs and pushing her knickers to the side, going full on fucking Jay-Z style. Drunk on love. She moaned deeply as I ran my tongue across the hard bundle of nerves that made her legs vibrate. Fuck, I’d missed that.
‘I want to make a promise to you,’ I said.
‘Too much talking.’ She propped herself up on her elbows. ‘It means your mouth isn’t on my pussy.’
‘We’ve waited long enough. I’m going to tease you,’ I said, swirling my tongue in the place she loved best. ‘Now, let me say what I’ve got to say.’ I smiled again
st her thigh and looked lovingly at the place I’d missed. I couldn’t wait to sink myself into her. ‘Do you want me to make you come?’ I said, losing more breath with every look. ‘I know exactly how you like it. I’m going to fuck you for every moment we’ve missed.’
She smiled, and that smile broke out into a laugh as she covered her face with her hands and pulled her legs up to her chest. I kissed her bum cheek through her knickers and was rewarded with a squeal.
‘Come to me,’ she said as I fell into her. She wrapped her arms around me. ‘It’s been too long. Say what you’ve got to say and fuck me so I can’t sit down tomorrow.’
‘God, you’re so sexy. Even with a whatever the fuck this is across your nose.’ I laughed as I ripped off the pore strip, causing her to wrinkle up her nose and smile. I traced my finger over her tattoo and pressed so many kisses against it I lost count.
‘Say it, Dawson.’
‘This is it for us, you and me.’
‘Say it again,’ she laughed.
‘This. Is. Fucking. It.’
She sat up again, smiling like she couldn’t stop, reaching down for my cock and moving her hand along it, twisting and grasping it firmly and then softer, alternating the pace until I was going to lose my mind. I put my hand on hers and laced our fingers together, both working my cock but allowing me to kiss her, my tongue fucking her mouth just as I knew she liked it.
‘I’m going to come. Stop!’ I smiled as we both took our hands away. I pushed her down onto the bed, pulled a condom from my back pocket and wrapped her legs around my waist. I put the condom on at a speed so fast I wasn’t sure a stopwatch would have recorded it. I put my hands under her bum as she arched her back, lifting her with a force that made her pull her lip under her teeth. I angled myself perfectly, knowing I was going to hit every nerve and every spot that would cause that bloody fantastic whimper that turned into full blown fucking yelps. I slammed myself into her and she cried out, not caring who could hear. She was in full abandonment and never more raw than when I was fucking her. I nearly cried I’d missed her that much.
Let Me Be Your Hope (Music and Letters Series Book 2) Page 25
