So Now You're Back

by Heidi Rice

  ‘We do, now.’

  ‘Well, next time don’t bloody steer into one, then.’ The stern rebuke wasn’t all that convincing accompanied by the spluttering laughs.

  His hands cupped her shoulder blades as he dragged her off his chest. The wide smile caused that tempting dimple to wink in his cheek. ‘Aye aye, Captain.’

  She shoved him over and rolled off his prostrate form to flop down by his side. The laughter slowly subsided, accompanied by the drift of the river and the muffled buzz of an insect. She batted it away and stared up at the empty blue sky. Knobbly pebbles dug into her spine.

  She caught Luke watching her, the fierce gaze almost as disturbing as the tight feeling warming her clammy skin. And even though she knew she was being insane, she grinned, happy to be alive, in this moment, with him.

  ‘I’ve got some bad news, Hal,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We lost a paddle.’

  ‘That’s OK, Captain. You’re only going to need one paddle to get us to the marina tomorrow. I am now officially a passenger.’

  Lurching up, he levered himself on top of her, his knees planted on either side of her hips, his arms above her head, caging her in. The raw-boned face, so handsome, so familiar, his wet hair, shaggy across his brow, only inches from hers. Close enough to make out the twists of silver in the pale blue of his eyes, and trigger the traitorous pulse of arousal.

  ‘Who said it was your paddle we lost?’ he muttered, his breath tasting of peppermint against her lips.

  ‘I do.’

  His body lowered until his weight pressed into her belly. The delicious pressure made her want to stretch and rub against the hard contours. He lowered to his elbows and framed her face between chilled hands. His gaze glided up to the top of her head, the approval in his eyes not daunted by the bird’s nest she probably had doubling for hair.

  ‘Near-death experiences agree with you.’

  She gasped, acknowledging the growing ridge in his pants.

  Then his lips settled on hers, firm and seeking, his tongue taking advantage of her shocked gasp to claim her mouth. She sucked on his invading tongue, drawing it in. Sensation exploded, pinching her frigid nipples into swollen buds of need.

  She flattened her hands on his chest, his T-shirt cool and damp despite the heat, and let the sensual haze envelop her.

  Then she pressed her palms to the solid wall of his chest to shove him back. ‘Stop, Luke. This isn’t happening. We’re not doing this.’

  ‘Too late.’ His lips nipped hers with sly butterfly kisses.

  She braced trembling elbows, shoved harder. ‘No, it’s not.’

  He dragged out a tortured breath. ‘OK, OK. You’re right.’ His laboured breathing echoed in her sternum as he searched her face, his eyes glassy with lust. ‘Bloody hell, I can’t believe it.’

  She clenched her fingers, taking fistfuls of wet T-shirt—barely resisting the urge to pull him in for another round. ‘What can’t you believe?’

  That the heat’s still there after all this time? That we’re making out like a couple of horny teenagers, soaking wet on a riverbank in the middle of Nowheresville, North Carolina?

  She needed specifics, because right now there were too many unbelievables to pick just one.

  He groaned. ‘That I’m supposed to be a grown-up, but right now I’d give my left nut to be able to fuck you again with no repercussions.’

  The hot, hazy fog of nostalgia froze as if she’d just done the ice bucket challenge at the North Pole.

  ‘Get off me.’ She slammed her palms against his chest. ‘You prick.’

  He climbed off her and she scrambled up. She was soaked and exhausted. She didn’t have a spot of make-up on. Her chin felt tender where she’d bumped it on the hull, and her lips and jaw stung from the ferocity of his kiss—but the anger was flowing through her like molten magma, ready to incinerate everything in its path.

  ‘No repercussions? No fucking repercussions? Excuse me, but what repercussions did you ever suffer from? I’m the one who ended up having to bring up our child on my own because you got me pregnant at eighteen.’

  He got slowly to his feet, looking impossibly sexy even with his shorts covered in sand and wet to the waist, his T-shirt ripped at the neck—the rat. ‘I wasn’t talking about getting you pregnant again.’

  ‘Then what were you talking about? What repercussions?’ The word cracked into the air, crass and irrational and selfish.

  How dare he talk about repercussions when he’d sailed off to a new life in Paris without having to suffer a single one.

  ‘I’m sorry, Halle, OK? I’m sorry.’ He tried to take her arm, but she yanked it out of his grasp, the tears stinging her eyes making her even madder.

  You’re over him. Remember.

  But she knew however much she tried to tell herself that, it wasn’t true. Could never be true, until she knew the truth.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. As if repetition would make it right. ‘I’m sorry I left without a word. I’m sorry you had to survive in that stinking crap hole without me. That I ran out on you and Lizzie. And I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you that a long time ago. And what I’m sorry for most of all is that you still hate me because of it.’

  ‘I don’t hate you.’ I wish I did. ‘And I don’t want a bloody apology. What I want—and what I think you owe me—is an explanation.’

  He dropped his chin, perched his hands on his hips, and she could almost hear his mind working, trying to find a way to dodge and evade and escape the request again.

  ‘What’s the matter, Luke? Can’t you admit it, even now? That the reason you left us was because you didn’t want me to have Lizzie?’

  She’d always known it. And the reality of that still tortured her.

  ‘You dragged me all the way out here, to the middle of bloody nowhere to talk about her, and put us both in this pressure-cooker situation, and yet you still can’t face the truth, can you?’

  She wanted to hear him say it. To own up to it.

  He’d bonded with Lizzie, had been unable to resist his baby daughter once she was born, but there had always been that unspoken truth between them. That she hadn’t given him a choice.

  ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ he said. ‘It’s complicated. I told you, it wasn’t to do with you or Lizzie. It was me. It was something I had to deal with that you couldn’t be a part of.’

  ‘Bullshit, Luke.’ Not that again. ‘Don’t talk in bloody platitudes and don’t patronise me. I’m thirty-six years old. I’ve been a single mother for sixteen years. I’ve weathered destitution, your desertion, that prick Claudio deciding he didn’t fancy being a dad, Lizzie’s epic sulks, Aldo’s anger management issues, God knows how many hours of family therapy feeling like a total failure. I’ve iced about a billion cupcakes, finger-mixed pastry until my hands cramped and built a career while juggling two menial jobs. And I’ve even managed to survive horse riding, hiking, near death in a kayak and eight never-ending days stuck in a cabin with the only man to give me a multiple orgasm sleeping upstairs after a year-long dry spell and forgetting to pack my bloody vibrator.’

  His head shot up, the muscles in his jaw twitching as the flash of lust leaped towards her. ‘You’re not putting that on me. I’m not the one who initiated that bloody kiss at the waterfall. And I’m also not the one who put a stop to what could have been a perfectly good way to let off steam a minute ago.’

  ‘Oh, grow up, Luke. We’re not becoming bonk buddies when we still have enough baggage to fill the Millennium Dome.’

  ‘Why not? It’s just sex, for Chrissake.’

  ‘Spoken like a man who still thinks with his penis.’

  ‘You kissed me back, Hal.’ He shot an accusatory finger at her. ‘And I’m not the one who just mentioned her vibrator.’

  ‘Fabulous. How clever of you. You’re absolutely right. I still desire you. I always have.’ She snapped her fingers in front of his face, the loud click ricocheting off th
e surrounding trees. ‘We could screw like rabbits right now and I’d enjoy it. But I’m not sixteen years old any more. So I can’t just screw you and forget about it. Because letting off steam, as you so charmingly put it, is not going to make all the baggage magically disappear.’

  ‘Who cares? Why would you even want to unpack baggage that’s over sixteen years past its sell-by date?’

  Is he actually that clueless, or has he had a lobotomy?

  ‘I’ll tell you what the bloody point is. The point is, I’ve been lugging that baggage around with me for sixteen years and I want to dump it now. It’s always been there, dragging me down, making me think less of myself as a woman and question my abilities as a mother. It’s the reason why I can top the Sunday Times bestseller list six weeks in a row, and why A-list stars will pay fifteen thousand pounds for a birthday cake from my studio, but why I can’t have an honest conversation with my daughter about why she’s lost two stone in six months without getting a two-hundred-pound-an-hour therapist involved.’

  ‘What if I don’t want to talk about it?’ He cut her off, desperation edging out the temper. He grasped her arms, his fingers digging into her biceps. ‘Can’t you see? Lizzie’s the only thing that’s still relevant between us. We don’t have to rake through all that shit any more. We’re both past it.’

  ‘You may be, but I’m not.’ It took every ounce of her courage to admit it. But she was past caring now. And past pussyfooting around and letting her pride and her fear of humiliation get in the way of getting the closure she needed. ‘We made love that morning, you know. The morning you left.’

  The knowledge flashed in his eyes. ‘Yeah, I remember. We woke Lizzie up.’

  ‘Then I made you a sandwich to take on the train,’ she continued. ‘Your favourite, ham and cheese on my home-made poppy seed bread. You kissed Lizzie on the forehead and called her your Best girl the way you always did. And you told me how excited you were, that this was it. That you were going to ace the interview. And I was so excited, too. And then you walked out the door and I never saw you again.’ She gulped air. She mustn’t cry. How could the memories of that day still be so vivid? When she thought she’d buried them so deep? ‘You didn’t even contact me to talk about seeing Lizzie for two whole months.’

  ‘Jesus, Hal. I know. And I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. But I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t really thinking at all. Not for a long time.’

  ‘You made me feel like nothing. For a very long time. Can’t you see an apology isn’t enough to take that away? I need an explanation. About what happened to you that day.’

  The question hung between them.

  He turned his head towards the river, the wet hair sticking to his forehead. ‘OK, I guess I owe you that.’

  Finally!

  She held her breath, not entirely convinced he was really going to give up the information.

  He didn’t look at her, but after a pause of several never-ending seconds, he finally started to speak in a rough monotone.

  ‘Amelie and I went to some seedy club that night in the Pigalle, after the assignment.’ He focused on her at last. ‘The interview had gone OK. I’d got some good quotes. We drank too much and I got into a fight with one of the bouncers. I woke up the next morning in her spare room, with a black eye and an unexplained bite mark on my shoulder and the worst hangover of my entire life. I’d missed my train.’ He dug the toe of his boot into the pebbles, concentrated on it as he continued. ‘I got dressed, got to the Gare du Nord to buy another ticket. To come home to you and Lizzie.’ He cleared his throat. ‘And I just …’ The hesitation turned into a weighty silence.

  A million questions slammed into her brain, but she refused to voice them. Imagining herself back at their flat, already worried because he hadn’t called, but having no way of knowing the horror that was about to unfold, when the communication never came.

  ‘And I just couldn’t buy the ticket,’ he said. ‘My head felt like a wrecking ball had smacked into it and my shoulder stung like a son of a bitch and my hands were shaking as if I had the DTs. And that’s when I started to cry.’

  His voice cracked on the word. And she wondered if she’d heard him correctly.

  Luke crying? But Luke never cried. That couldn’t be right.

  ‘It was a really weird feeling at first, probably because I’m pretty sure I’d never cried before in my life.’ He planted his fists into the pockets of his wet shorts. ‘Afterwards, during therapy, I figured out those tears were ones I’d been storing up for years. But at the time, it felt like it wasn’t me doing it. That I was looking at myself, shouting, “Snap out of it, Best.” But even so, once I’d started, I couldn’t stop.’

  He braced his shoulders, digging his fists further into his pockets as a shiver ran through him.

  ‘Eventually, though, I ran out of tears. So I sat there until a gendarme came and told me to leave the station because it was closing. It was after midnight. I’d lost my bag, with my mobile and my wallet. I suppose it had been pinched. I wandered around in a daze and eventually found my way back to Amelie’s around dawn. She let me get back into the spare bed.’ Finally, his eyes met hers and she saw the hollow look she’d seen so often in the weeks, the months before he’d left. ‘And I didn’t get out of it again for two weeks.’

  A million questions hung in the air.

  Hadn’t he thought about her, about Lizzie? Not once? Why didn’t he ask for her help? She could have saved him. Because she had loved him.

  But all those questions were in the past now. Futile and pointless.

  A shudder ran through her, her damp clothes chilly against her skin. The sunlight unable to penetrate the icy haze of shock.

  He’d had a breakdown. A catastrophic one by the sounds of it. And she’d had no idea.

  Whatever she’d expected him to tell her, this wasn’t it. She thought she’d been prepared, but she hadn’t been prepared for this. Because it felt like losing him all over again.

  She gripped her elbows, pulled her arms into her chest to stop the chill branching out through her whole body, and bringing with it the miserable feelings of inadequacy and futility that had haunted her at the time.

  ‘Let’s set up camp and I’ll get a fire going,’ he said, running his fingers through his hair and sending it into damp furrows. ‘I don’t know about you, but my balls feel like they’ve frozen to the size of walnuts.’ The light tone was in direct contrast to the strained expression on his face.

  ‘Mine, too.’ She sent him a weak smile, grateful not to have to talk about his revelation. There were so many things she wanted to say, so much more she could ask but wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  Like a typical guy he’d given her an entirely literal answer. The exact details of why he hadn’t made it home that day, why he hadn’t contacted her for two weeks. But he hadn’t told her why he’d felt so trapped. What he had been so terrified of.

  But could she bear to hear the truth? Her chest already hurt at the thought of him, as he had been then, so smart and witty and full of himself, curled up in a ball of misery on the platform at the Gare du Nord, unable to function.

  He dragged their gear out of the kayak hatch and they took turns to change into dry clothing. She gathered firewood, placing the broken branches into the firepit. He set about putting up the first of their two-man tents.

  She glanced over at his muffled cursing as he wrestled with the guidelines and hammered the tent’s pins into the hard-packed earth.

  How could he seem so tough, so invulnerable, so confident now? And yet have been so broken then? Surely it must have been her, and Lizzie—what else could it have been? But how could she not have understood how unhappy he was? And if she had, would she have been able to make it better?

  He came over, crouching to light the fire, and she forced the confusing, treacherous thoughts to the back of her mind, keen to encourage the silence. She’d stopped blaming herself years ago and she refused to drop back into that sinkhole
of recriminations all over again.

  He stood and stretched out his spine. She heard his vertebrae popping, noticed the pebbled skin on muscular forearms, the wisps of sun-bleached hair standing on end. And had the strangest yearning to be close to him tonight. If only to reassure herself he was OK now.

  ‘You want to eat?’ he asked as the dry kindling crackled and caught. ‘Before I put up the other tent?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, although she’d never felt less hungry in her life.

  Had she totally mucked this up? Trying to rewrite the past? Perhaps Luke was right, and all they needed to put all their old demons to rest was a good hard shag.

  ‘Why don’t we just share the one tent?’ she suggested, her jaw stretching in a huge yawn. ‘Save you having to put up the other one and break any more of your fingers.’

  He glanced at her. ‘You sure? It’s going to be pretty snug.’

  ‘Don’t take that as an invitation,’ she qualified quickly, just in case he’d read her mind. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’

  While her spirit might be insane enough to risk doing the wild thing with Luke again, and her mind might be exhausted enough to be able to argue her into it, her body certainly wasn’t.

  Weeping thigh muscles never lie.

  ‘Don’t worry, I know that,’ he said, his expression as weary as hers.

  ‘So, the much more burning question is …’ She rummaged around in the box of supplies and pulled out two sachets of freeze-dried entrées. ‘Do you fancy rehydrogenated chilli mac or rehydrogenated chicken gumbo to go with your sides of beef jerky and trail mix?’

  Prepare to be tortured tonight.

  Luke glanced in Halle’s direction, stuffing their leftovers and the remaining food into a heavy-duty disposal sack. Her bottom stuck out of the tent, jiggling enticingly in fleecy pyjamas as she struggled to get the sleeping bags into the confined space.

  He tied the disposal sack to the cable suspended between a couple of trees at the back of the campsite and hiked it up to the required fifteen feet above ground level that Chad had stipulated.