“I’m sorry I said it,” he said, and just as tears pricked behind her eyes he turned his head with a curse. “I mean, I’m not sorry I said it. I’m sorry I said it the way I did. Fuck.”
He sat up and rubbed his whole face into his hands, repeating “fuck” over and over again.
Rory bit her lip to keep from whatever insanity was brewing on her tongue and busied herself with putting the babydoll back together.
“What I mean is, I didn’t mean to tell you I loved you while I was blowing my load.” He sighed, clearly sick of himself, and turned his head to look down on her. “I meant it, Rory. I love you.”
For Rory, she didn’t know whether the most overwhelming thing about that moment was the raw vulnerability on his face or the strange caved-in feeling in her chest. She wanted to say something; she needed to say something, if not to be rid of this feeling but to chase it away from him.
She’d never felt heavier than when she pushed herself up onto her hands and sat shoulder to shoulder with him. It took several tries of opening and closing her mouth before she was able to get anything out. “I don’t know what to say. I’ve never been here before.”
“You think I have? Yeah, I’ve had girlfriends that I’ve been close with, but I’ve never--there’s never been anyone like you.” His eyes brightened as soon as he breathed out his last words, and then the clouds came back. “I know it’s complicated, but--”
“I love you, too.”
She almost clapped her hand over her mouth. She wanted to. Hell, she wanted to leap from the bed and lock herself in the bathroom.
The urge became too much she started to tremble, and he took her hand.
“Did you say it because I said it?” he asked.
Rory shook her head. “No, I--I don’t know why I said it back except that--that it’s what I feel.”
“Rory--” Noah crooked his finger under her chin and leaned close, and the gravity of it all finally became too overcome. She pushed off the bed and hugged herself as she paced in front of him.
“I don’t know why I said it. I shouldn’t have said it.”
“Why?”
“Because I meant it, that’s why. Because I’ve been pretending I don’t, but when you said it I felt it here.” She pressed her hand to her throat where all her emotions seemed to have fused together in a hard ball. “I don’t know what to do with it.”
“I didn’t know we were supposed to do anything with it.”
Rory halted. The quirky little smile on his face almost killed her. She wanted to be someone else for a little while, to throw herself at him and enjoy this whole being-in-love thing for a little while.
But she couldn’t. It would show on her face as long as she kept it in.
“What about when we both leave?”
His only reaction was to press his lips together and swallow hard. “We’re not going to be so far away.”
“You want to do this--this--on weekends? On the phone? Over the computer?” Needing to do something with her hands and she resumed her pacing, she clenched the billowing skirt of the babydoll. “Don’t you know how that ends?”
“Yeah, and I know we’re different.”
She turned away as the tears started to come. “How can you say that?”
“Hey. Hey.” The bed creaked and she tried to evade him, but it was a poor attempt once his arms closed around her, back to chest. “Don’t cry. I don’t want to be the asshole that makes you cry.”
“It’s not you.” She wiggled around until her cheek was against his warm chest. He slipped his hand under her hair, his touch gentle where not long ago it had been insistent, but the effect was still the same.
Mine.
“You and I are different,” he murmured, his breath fluttering at the top of her head. “I knew it the first night we were at the camp site and we were just sitting in lawn chairs, and God, you looked so pretty in the lamplight. I knew that’s what I wanted.”
She could have believed it as warmth spread from his body to hers. She buried her face into the skin and breathed him in. He smelled foreign to her with the aftershave he’d patted on before dinner, but beneath it was his scent: his soap, his sweat, his heat.
“We could rearrange things a little,” he murmured. “One of us could transfer.”
One of us. Meaning her. She wasn’t going to university. She was going to take a one-year course and get a job to pay her bills. He was going to get an MBA and continue the family legacy.
She suddenly felt the same shameful feeling that had come over her the first time she let him into her cottage. That ugly sense of feeling like she wasn’t good enough mingled with the implication that she could--should--be the one to rearrange her life, and it made her feel sick.
Inside his embrace she tensed, and he didn’t smother her. He drew back and cupped her face. “This isn’t as bad as it seems in your head.”
“How do you know what’s in my head?”
“I’ve been reading you since I knocked you down. I’m getting pretty good at it. Here, come over here.” He led her to the bed and pulled her next to him, and shuffled against her until their legs twined together and her head was on his chest. “This is how it should have ended a few minutes ago. Just like this. Just … together. We’ll figure it out.”
Rory closed her eyes and tried to disappear into his heartbeat and his warmth, but she couldn’t banish her sense of being out of place now that the specter of what was to come was in the room with them. After pretending it wasn’t there for so long, it was impossible not to feel it.
It was dark when she opened her eyes. She was surprised that she’d dropped off to sleep at all.
Noah was awake. He hadn’t roused when she did, and he probably didn’t even know she had come out of her slumber completely. He didn’t move. He remained where he was, chin against the top of her head and his arm around her shoulder. She would have thought he was asleep if a finger wasn’t drawing a circle against her arm.
Rory wondered if he had slept at all, or if he had just left her to her rest and simmered in his own thoughts for God knows how long.
She drew a deep breath to alert him that she was awake, and as he squeezed her closer she turned her face into his chest and pressed a gentle kiss above his heart.
Neither of them said anything as she turned on the light and reached into the condom box on the night stand. As she sheathed his dick, he drew apart the babydoll. The gown was quickly discarded as she mounted him. The silence didn’t endure as they moved together. No words ever transpired, but as she took him balls deep each time they communicated in moans and sighs.
We’ll figure it out.
She played his words over and over in her head as she rode him towards her climax. She needed to believe it. She loved him and needed to know everything would be all right. As she came, he gripped her hips and held her in place as her inner walls rendered him captive, and she knew he needed it too.
Chapter Seven
“It chaps my ass a little, but I figure if it was anyone else, I’d jump at the chance.”
This is what Noah explained to her as he flipped kebabs on the grill outside her cottage. This was how it started. He would talk about the plans that seemed to grow more ambitious by the day, and eventually it would come around to the horrible thing they hadn’t talked about since that night.
“It’s a good idea. It’s either that or go up to your eyeballs in debt.”
“Yeah, but it feels less mine.”
He’d been busy in the last few weeks, though never too busy to spare her a moment. He’d initially pulled back at the notion of buying the adjacent property to the one he already owned. The purchase would drain his funds almost completely, and he had nothing to borrow against. His father had proposed partial ownership. The cottages would operate under The White Tip banner and become a more economical offering to visitors who wanted a little more seclusion. As a part of the hotel, Noah could take advantage of The White Tip name and pay a modest fee to the hotel with eac
h reservation made through their system. The new venture would be Noah’s to operate, and if it was a failure he would have no bank to deal with. If he wasn’t paid up in ten years, he could relinquish the cottages to his father and walk away, or try for a bank loan and go on his own.
Rory considered it a smooth move on the part of Vincent Hyland. If it was responsibility his son wanted, Noah had it. It was entirely up to him to make something of his impromptu purchase and prove himself. Whatever Noah had been lacking his four years of university, he seemed to have found it in his little plot of land and its potential. She could tell he believed in himself. She could tell his father believed in him.
She believed in him, and it made her ache to think of him settling down with a family in a spot he began with her.
It had been almost two weeks after their excursion to town. Since that night, they’d avoided the subject. Or, rather, Rory avoided the subject. It was obvious that Noah wanted to press her on where they could go next, but he never pushed too hard once she backed off.
She didn’t think she’d be able to do it any longer. There weren’t many days left in the summer, and she was trying to convince herself that she might feel better if she just had this talk with him and get everything out in the open. It would be over and done with, at least, and they wouldn’t be living under the illusion that everything was all right and would be all right.
She didn’t really believe it. This was going to be what she had feared back when he’d first pursued her.
The end.
She had no one to blame but herself. She knew it would come one day, but as each day passed she just ignored the inevitable, and part of her thought that maybe, just maybe, this mess would just work itself out.
It was hard not to have regrets, especially when he was still in arm’s reach and so warm and comforting.
“Ah, well,” he said and sank into the plastic patio chair next to hers. He nudged her foot as he collected his beer. “How about we head up Sunday night? I can get you back here in time for three o’clock.”
“Sure.”
“We can do the whole weekend. You took next Monday off, right?”
She hesitated. “I have to go over to the mainland with Pa.”
“Something wrong?” he asked, though there was an odd strain on his voice.
He knew.
She turned her face to the water and took a deep breath. Now that the moment was here, she could feel her body and her mind conspiring together to shut down on her.
“I’m going to look at an apartment.”
Noah said nothing for a moment, and she couldn’t look at him.
“Then you really don’t want to go with me to Halifax, do you?”
She felt sick. She wanted to go inside, shut the door and cry. “You know that’s not it.”
“Do I?” He leaned forward, elbows propped on his knees. “This seems pretty straightforward to me.”
“Yeah, it does.” She didn’t mean to sound so caustic, and he picked her up on it right away.
“You think I’m asking you to give something up?”
“To be honest, Noah, that’s not that I think; that’s what’s going to happen if I go with you. I’m going to be left floundering at the last minute--”
“Oh, come on!” he growled, then held his hand up. “No, I’m not going to get hot-headed, and neither are you. We’re going to talk about this because, yes, we have something to talk about. I’m just going to put it out there: if you don’t want to come to Halifax with me, I’ll come to Moncton with you.”
“You c--”
“Don’t tell me I can’t. You don’t get to make my decisions any more than I get to make yours. If I can’t get into a program for next month, I’ll start in the winter.”
Rory bit down on her own temper and clasped her hands on her knees. “You’ve been so excited talking about your plans for when you finish school. Do you really want to add six more months to that? A whole other summer?”
“Who says I have to add six months? I can take credits next summer.”
“So your plan is to burn yourself out so you can be with me?”
He looked at her as though she had suddenly started speaking tongues. “Do you not get that there’s a lot I would do if it meant I could be with you?”
And underlying that statement was, wouldn’t you do the same?
She wished she could say she would. If things were different, if they had met a few years later when she didn’t feel so lost, maybe …
All along it had been so easy to just say yes when it came to Noah. When he’d asked her out. When he’d wanted to take her to bed. All of his little schemes and plotting. Yes, she said, over and over again. She wanted to be with him. When she woke up in the morning he was there, and when he wasn’t she wondered with her first lucid thought what he was doing. She wanted to live and breathe in his presence.
And now when it counted, she couldn’t. She couldn’t just give up what she wanted for a man, even one she loved as much as she loved Noah.
“Either I come to you, or you come to me.” He delivered this statement quietly, cautiously. “It would be easier, you know.”
“Until things turn to shit.”
“Who says things are going to turn to shit? People do tweak their lives a little and still survive. Why couldn’t we do that?”
“You mean, why couldn’t I do that?” She pushed out of her chair and poked at the food on the grill. “My Mom never finished high school. She married a guy who got drunk and killed himself driving home from the bar one night, and she scrubbed toilets until she got too sick to do it. There must have been other things she wanted to do, but that was her life because she didn’t do anything for herself. And look at my sister. She met Linden and told herself she’d stick around until he finished school. Then he got a job with public works and the money started rolling in, and it was easier for her to just give up what she wanted and stay. Now, ten years later … well, you’ve met Francie.”
“Yeah, but Francie’s an asshole. You said yourself she’s always been an asshole.”
“Maybe she never had anything for herself. She had her opportunity and she just let it pass. Now what does she have?”
“A family? Kids? A job she’s sort of good at, or at least one she loves.”
“She’s a big fish in a small pond.”
“Is that what she thinks or is that what you think?” He sagged back. “I don’t even know what your sister has to do with it. I don’t know what your mother has to do with it. We’re talking about you. We’re talking about you and me.”
“We’re talking about me dropping everything and following you just because this summer has been more wonderful than I ever imagined it could be. We’re talking about making a big decision because we had a few good weeks. We’re talking about me putting what I want on hold.”
“And what you want doesn’t include me? I’m not buying it.” He tipped his head back and groaned. “You know, people like you who moan about not having the things they want are usually the only ones standing in the way of what they want. You could have both. You could go to school in Halifax with me. You could live with me.”
“And then I’d have to leave to find a job somewhere else.”
“Oh, come on. You’d find something no more than an hour’s drive away, or the more likely scenario is that you find something in walking distance from our place.”
“What if I want to go somewhere else?”
“Then I’ll go with you.”
Her frustration reached its limit. “Noah, stop it. I just turned nineteen. You’re twenty-three. We’ve been together a little over a month. The only life we’ve had together has been here. You don’t have a job, and neither do I, and yet you want to go off and have a life together. Do you not foresee how this might be a huge mistake?”
His cheeks were a hot red as he responded. “No, I don’t. I told you that the moment I met you on that road I knew this was it for me. I knew you were the one f
or me.”
Just like the first moment he said it, Rory’s whole body seemed to squeeze around her heart. There should be happiness there, she thought, and there was--happiness strangled by all the reasons to say goodbye.
And so she said, “I can’t say the same.”
It had hurt saying it. It hurt more seeing the shattered look on his face.
He shook his head and set his beer aside, then stood. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not. I love you, but--”
Rory shrank back as he stuck his face in hers. “You’re lying to me.”
She didn’t know what to say as he leapt down the stairs and headed to his car, shoulders tense. This wasn’t how she had wanted it to end. She didn’t want him to be angry with her.
“You know where I am,” he snapped as he crawled behind the wheel. “You know where to find me, but I’m not going to listen if the only thing you have to say is that this means more to me than it does to you.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said meekly, and anything else she could have said was chased back by the roar of his ignition.
She got her wish. In the wake of his leaving, she plucked the food from the grill and tossed it in the garbage can, then closed herself in the cottage and cried until there was nothing left to cry out.
*****
She dreaded going to work that night. She really thought of quitting, but if she did that, her whole argument with Noah would mean nothing. If anything, she needed to work. She needed the feeling of doing something.
She just wished she didn’t have to work in the one place she was most likely to find him.
After parking her bike in its usual spot, she walked to the hotel and felt heavier with every step.
Even the discovery of Noah waiting for her by the service entrance didn’t make her feel lighter. Her stomach gave a sickening roll and she felt cold as he stood to greet her.
“I’m sorry I left like I did,” he said.
“It’s okay. I … It was a messy conversation.” Said some things I shouldn’t have. I want to take it all back. She gestured to the door behind him. “I have to get changed.”
All To Myself Page 10
