The Christmas He Loved Her

by Juliana Stone

  “I don’t know,” she said so softly he barely heard her.

  “You don’t know,” he said, feeling the well of anger inside him burst open and hit him hard in the chest.

  He took two steps forward until he was inches from Raine. “Don’t you think you owe it to Jesse to see what’s in there?”

  “I don’t know,” she said again, her face averted, her voice weak.

  His hands bunched at his side. “Okay, you don’t know. I get that. I get that maybe you’re confused, when it comes to what you felt for Jesse.”

  Her head whipped up at that and she pushed him in the chest. Hard. So hard that he took a step back and nearly stumbled over the damn dog. Gibson had jumped off the sofa and was tangled up near his feet.

  “Don’t you tell me that I don’t know what I felt for Jesse.” She pointed to the satchel. “And don’t give me attitude about not opening a bag that belonged to your brother. What do you care? It doesn’t belong to you.”

  Something ugly twisted inside him, there, where he’d been dead before. Like a sleeping giant, the darkness in him erupted.

  He watched her closely. “You’re right. It doesn’t belong to me, and neither did you. And now Jesse is gone, and I’ve got his wife and everything else he ever wanted. How fucking fair is that?”

  Raine pushed a wild curl from her eyes, wiping at them angrily as the sheen of tears threatened to fall. “Life isn’t fair, Jake. It throws shit at us all the time. It’s how we deal with that shit that decides whether we’re going to make it or not.”

  He clenched his teeth together so tight that pain shot across his jaw. The rage inside him was intense, and his mind was filled of images of him and Jesse…and Raine.

  For a few moments, they stared at each other in silence, their pain so heavy that Gibson began to whine and eventually slipped away to hide in the shadows.

  “This isn’t about the bag, Jake.” Raine rubbed her hands over the thin robe she wore. “It’s so not about the bag.”

  He shook his head and reached into his pocket, where he retrieved a black-and-white image that he handed over to Raine. “No,” he said carefully, because he didn’t trust his voice. “It’s not.”

  She took the photo from him and stared down at it for the longest time, her shoulders hunched forward, her body trembling as if she were cold, when in fact the cottage felt like a furnace.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” His voice broke and Jake took a step back, the image of a fetus burned into the back of his brain. “I promised Jesse I would be there for you, so why didn’t you call me? I know things weren’t great when I left. I know that, but Jesus, Raine, I would have come for you if you’d have told me.”

  “I did,” she answered slowly.

  “What?” He shook his angrily.

  “I tried to tell you.”

  “When?”

  “When I lost the baby, about four months after you left.”

  The world tilted a little then, and it was all Jake could do to stay on his feet.

  “I called.”

  He stared at Raine, his chest so tight he could barely breathe. He was defeated, and it seemed that he’d failed everyone.

  “I’d just miscarried, and…” Raine cleared her throat and spoke quietly. “I called, but a woman answered your cell phone. I heard her tell you that it was someone with a”—she paused and wiped away a fresh batch of tears—“screwed-up weird, hippie name. I heard a noise then, like you’d grabbed the cell off her, so I knew that you knew it was me, and then the line went dead.”

  Raine walked over to the fire and held her hands out. “You called me eventually and left a drunken message on my voice mail. I think you apologized for everything under the sun, and then I didn’t hear from you again.”

  “Why didn’t you…” He was speechless for a few moments. “Why didn’t you keep trying? I would have. I’d have come. To be there for you and Jesse.”

  “I was so hurt, and I felt like I didn’t matter to you anymore.”

  For a long while neither one of them spoke, and when Jake finally managed to put together a few coherent thoughts, his voice was rough and he could barely keep it together.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. But Jesus, Raine, no one told me…my parents never said anything. Why would all of you keep this from me?”

  Raine glanced away, her voice small. “They didn’t know.” She paused. “They still don’t know.”

  “What?” he said sharply.

  “They don’t know that I was pregnant.”

  Jake ran his fingers through his hair, more confused than ever. “This doesn’t make sense. How the hell did they not know you went through with the procedure to have Jesse’s baby? I don’t… How could you keep that from them?”

  Raine’s eyes opened slowly, the pain inside them so intense that it was all he could do not to grab hold of her and never let her go. When had things gotten so fucked-up?

  “Oh, Jake, I didn’t want you to find out like this.”

  That thin ribbon of pain behind his eyes throbbed harder as the dread in his belly tightened.

  “I didn’t go through with the in vitro. It wasn’t Jesse’s.”

  The roaring in his ears was so loud that at first he wasn’t sure what she’d said, and then when the meaning sunk into his brain, Jake stared at her in shock.

  And when she whispered again, when she bared her soul and a secret he wasn’t prepared to deal with, his heart shattered.

  “He was ours. Jake, I lost our baby.”

  Chapter 26

  When Raine heard the soft knock at the door, her first thought was that Jake had come back. She tossed the pink blanket onto the floor and rolled off the sofa, hitting her hip against the coffee table. Ignoring the pain, she jumped to her feet and was nearly to the door when she realized that it wasn’t Jake.

  Jake would never knock. He would walk in, and his large frame and big personality would fill up every nook and cranny in the cottage.

  She slid to a stop, her bare feet cold against the wooden floor as she stared at the door, her bruised heart in her throat.

  When had things become so screwed up? Was there always going to be something blocking her happiness?

  A soft knock sounded again, but she was in no mood to talk to anyone, so Raine turned around, her plan to burrow back under the covers and wallow in her pain.

  The look on Jake’s face when he’d learned about the baby was seared into her brain, and it was one she was never going to forget. He had stared at her for so long that the silence became unbearable, pounding into her with the strength of a hammer.

  He’d glanced at the picture in her hand—the ultrasound of their child—and he’d left without another word.

  The whole situation was awful, and there was more than enough hurt and blame to pass around, but the simple truth was that none of that mattered anymore. Raine had already lost so much, and she didn’t want to lose Jake, but she wasn’t sure how to fix something that was so broken.

  “Raine?”

  Tiredly, she wrapped her arms around herself and glanced over her shoulder. It was her mother. The woman’s timing was crap, as usual.

  “Raine, I know you’re in there. Can I come in, please?”

  Something in her mother’s voice sounded different, and Raine bit her lip as she slowly turned around. Gibson sniffed along the bottom of the door and barked a few times, his tail wagging crazily as if the god of dog bones stood on the other side.

  “Raine?”

  She opened the door and stood back so that Gloria could pass.

  Her mother’s blue eyes, so like her own, widened when they took in what Raine supposed was a pretty sad sight indeed. She was still dressed in her clothes from the night before. She hadn’t brushed her hair or her teeth, and she was pretty damn sure her makeup looked as if she’d just done the
walk of shame.

  She glanced at her reflection in the window and winced at the sight of her puffy eyes.

  “Have you eaten anything? I could fix you a sandwich, or something else, if you like.”

  Leave it to her mother to ignore the obvious and act as if nothing were wrong.

  Raine shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

  Her mother was quiet for a few moments, her expression unreadable. She crossed over to the Christmas tree and folded her arms across her chest as she cocked her head to the side. “It’s beautiful.”

  Again silence fell between them. It was big and awkward and so very tiring.

  Raine sighed, her eyes on the sofa and the pink blanket, her mind on the little blue pills in her bag. Prescription strength, they’d be good to knock her out until tomorrow, if she took enough.

  “Gloria, I’m not feeling real good, so if there is a reason for your visit, can we skip all the stuff in between and just get to why you’re here?”

  Her mother’s hand shook a little as she touched one of the sparkly stars nestled among the fragrant branches. She smoothed her gray skirt and turned to face Raine, that polite, calm expression Raine was so used to firmly in place.

  Gloria clasped her hands in front of her as if she didn’t quite know what to do with them and exhaled a long, deep breath.

  “I want to fix us.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I think it’s time that we tried.” She moistened her lips and touched her hair, obviously nervous. “I think it’s time that we really tried to… Uh, this is harder than I thought it would be.”

  Her eyes glistened. With tears.

  Disbelief didn’t come close to describing what Raine felt. Her life was falling apart. No, it had been free-falling into a pile of shit for the last few years, and her mother wanted to be buddies?

  “Oh my God, your timing is as perfect as ever.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you mean.”

  Raine closed her eyes and took a moment to collect her thoughts. When she opened them, she couldn’t help the thin, high-pitched laugh that escaped her lips. It sounded crazy, even to her own ears, and she wasn’t surprised to see her mother wince.

  “You want to fix us,” she repeated, sitting on the edge of the sofa because her legs were suddenly weak and she didn’t trust that she wouldn’t fall on her ass.

  Her mother nodded slowly. “I do.”

  “We’re not broken, Gloria, because there is no ‘us’ to fix. To suggest that means that we were whole at one point, and I don’t know what freaking rose-colored glasses you’re looking through, but we were never whole.”

  Raine pushed off from the sofa and stomped over to her mother. “We were never a family, Gloria. We never fit together. You made sure of that.”

  She saw the hurt in her mother’s eyes, but she didn’t care. In fact, it fed her anger and pushed her on. If she was going to live through hell, then why shouldn’t Gloria?

  Gloria held her chin up, though it trembled. “Can’t we try?” she said quietly.

  “I don’t have the energy to deal with your insecurities.” She leaned closer, not caring that her mother winced. All she cared about was making someone else hurt as much as she did, and if it was Gloria? All the better.

  “You have no idea what I’m going through right now. What I went through after Jesse died and Jake left me.”

  Raine closed her eyes and grabbed the edge of the sofa. God, she felt weak and used up. And old.

  She was thirty years old and felt like she’d lived at least twice that long.

  “Let me help you,” Gloria pleaded.

  “Oh, that’s a good one. You want to help me?” She pushed off from the sofa again, which probably wasn’t a good thing to do, because she swayed slightly, but when her mother reached for her, she recoiled and shook her head.

  “You don’t get to come back after all this time and think that a pat on the head and a few meaningless words are going to make a difference in my life. That’s not the way it works. You’ve been living in a dreamworld, Gloria. A hot and hard and foreign dreamworld, mind you, but nothing in your scope of knowledge will make a difference to me.”

  “I can try,” Gloria whispered.

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  Her mother looked horrified. “How can you say that? Yes, I wasn’t with you, I was halfway around the world, helping the less fortunate, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t know what you were up to or keep in touch. Jeanine made sure I knew everything that mattered.”

  “What’s my favorite color?”

  Gloria threw her shoulders back. “Purple.”

  “Wrong, it’s blue. How old was I when I broke my left arm?”

  Her mother was beat and she knew it. “I don’t know.”

  And still Raine pushed forward. “How old was I when I lost my virginity?”

  “Raine, please don’t do this.”

  “Seventeen. How many men have I slept with?”

  If she thought that would shock her mother, she was mistaken. It did nothing but deflate her. Defeat her.

  The pain inside Raine stretched so tight across her shoulders that she shook out her arms in an effort to alleviate it.

  “Two,” she said softly, all the fierce attitude suddenly gone. “I’ve slept with two men. Jesse and Jake.”

  Tears slipped from her eyes, and when Gloria took a few tentative steps toward her, Raine did nothing to stop her. No poison fell from her lips. There was only the pain.

  “When I found out Jesse had died over there, my first thought was that Jake was coming home. Jake would make the pain go away. He’d make things better.” She closed her eyes as memories from those turbulent weeks after the funeral settled into her mind.

  “But that didn’t happen. Things got screwed up and everything changed. We had one moment, a night when we’d both had too much to drink and the pain was just so hard and heavy, and we found comfort in each other. Or maybe it wasn’t comfort. It was about feeling alive. But it didn’t last. The guilt and pain just made it too difficult. Jake left and I didn’t see him for almost a year and a half. And I thought…I thought when he came back that maybe we could work things out. But I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

  Raine wasn’t aware that her mother had moved closer until she felt her warm touch against her cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” her mother said.

  “So am I.”

  Slowly Gloria withdrew her hand. “I know you think you don’t need me, Raine, and maybe you don’t. Maybe I need it more, but it’s Christmas. Won’t you please let me look after you?”

  Raine looked into her mother’s eyes and for the first time felt as if she was really seeing the woman. She saw pain but she also saw regret.

  “Will you let me try?”

  Gibson jumped onto the sofa and growled, a playful challenge, before he tossed his bone onto the floor and ran after it. Raine watched him disappear behind the tree and glanced at the clock. It was nearly four.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I can’t promise anything, and maybe I’m just too tired to fight right now. But we can try.”

  Raine headed for the shower, not really sure what the night was going to bring, but sure in the knowledge that she couldn’t hide in the cottage forever. She couldn’t hide from Jake. She’d done that for eighteen months, and there was no way she was going down that road again. She wouldn’t make it.

  As she turned on the hot spray and stripped off her clothes, she thought that maybe a Christmas miracle was possible, and if not, hell, she’d try and find one on her own.

  Chapter 27

  Jake had been sitting at the bar in the Coach House since noon. He wasn’t drunk. In fact, he’d hardly had any alcohol. Not for lack of trying. He just didn’t seem able to stomach the stuff righ
t now and had been nursing a tumbler of whiskey for almost an hour.

  The bar was nearly empty—which wasn’t surprising, considering it was Christmas Eve—and only a few souls were enjoying a last-minute drink or get-together with friends. Behind him, near the DJ booth, sat a boisterous group of college kids, while at the far end of the bar was Mr. Lawrence, owner of the Tackle & Bait. He was doing a crossword in between shooting the shit with Salvatore.

  Jake knew he should just leave, but there wasn’t anywhere for him to go. Wyndham Place was out—he couldn’t face Raine right now—and there was no way he was bringing his parents down with his black mood.

  They didn’t deserve his shit, not after everything they’d been through.

  He hung his head, unable to deal with the overwhelming guilt he felt, and as he thought of Raine, of her alone and dealing with something as awful as losing a baby—his baby—his head fell even lower.

  He’d spent the night in his Jeep, driving around aimlessly, and had eventually ended up in the next county, where he’d sat in an all-night diner until he overstayed his welcome, and pointed his wheels home.

  The Coach House was as good a place as any to pass the time, and the permanent scowl on his face was enough to drive most people in the opposite direction. Of course, beneath the scowl was a hell of a lot of heartache, pain, and overwhelming guilt.

  Lily had already come and gone. She’d tried her damnedest to find out what the hell was going on inside his head, but he wasn’t sharing with anyone, not even Lily, and in the end she had realized he wasn’t going to spill. Annoyed, she had left, though not before telling him he’d be the biggest asshole on the planet to let his happiness slip away. If he didn’t fight for what he deserved.

  Jake stared down into the amber liquid and swished it aimlessly. He didn’t have the heart to tell Lily that he didn’t deserve shit.

  “Jake, we close in an hour.” Salvatore wiped down the end of the bar and glanced his way. “You gonna finish that drink or stare at it for the next sixty minutes?”

  The door flew open behind him and unleashed a cold blast of wind that ruffled his hair, but he paid it no mind. Not even when Salvatore swore—something he rarely did—was Jake even remotely interested in who had just walked through the doors.