by Amy Brent
I finally closed my eyes, dawn having long-since broken, and pulled the covers over my head. Maybe I could sleep long enough that Cormac would change his mind and we could talk this over. And maybe, just maybe, I could sleep long enough that my heart wouldn’t ache every time I thought about the man in the next room and what I had just lost with him.
Chapter Sixteen
Two weeks. That was how long I held out. Two weeks.
I was amazed that I had made it that far, if I was being honest. Every moment around her was a living agony the likes of which I never thought I’d see again as long as I remained broken up with my ex; sure, I had know that maybe things wouldn’t always be roses with Laurie, that we might annoy each other or get under each other’s feet as the pregnancy drew on, but that hadn’t happened for one second of those few months we were together. But now that we were split up, the cabin suddenly seemed oppressively small, in a way it hadn’t before.
I did my best to avoid her, especially those first few days after the break-up. I could tell she wasn’t sleeping much and some part of me wanted to intervene and get her to eat and rest, for the sake of her and the baby, but I knew that she must have been trying as hard as she could and didn’t need any more lecturing from me on the matter. Still, I would watch her as I went to make myself coffee (about the only thing I could stomach in those first few days, when the break-up was fresh and stung every time I thought of it) and see those dark rings beneath her eyes and the way that her head would droop down every now and then as though she was about to fall asleep on the spot, and I would have to fight the urge to march over there and scoop her up in my arms and take her to bed.
Speaking of bed, the physical side of it was…harder than I’d though to let go of, if I was being honest with myself. Just seeing her walk around the house, often in not much more than a shirt and a pair of panties, it was hard not to just grab her and throw her down on the nearest hard surface and fuck her until I felt that familiar sensation of her pussy clenching around my cock as she came, hard. I remembered so vividly the look on her face when she would come, the way her body would tremble in my arms, the way her breath would pick up and then hold as she tipped over the edge. Before I had met her, I had been sure that sex was just sex and that it was pretty much the same with everyone that you did it with, but I knew now that there were some connections which were impossible to hide from. I still felt this pull to her, something more than physical, something deeper than that, and it was harder than I’d ever thought it would be not to touch her. Those casual little moments, where she would rest her hand on my back when she brushed past me or when I would absently plant a kiss on her temple as I passed her on the couch, those were the hardest habits to break.
Once, early on, I forgot that we were broken up at all. She was sitting on the couch, staring into the dead fireplace with a blanket wrapped around her, first thing in the morning when I got out of bed to go collect some wood. I was a little bleary, pulling on my shirt as I came out of the door, and when I saw her there I felt that unfettered rush of affection for her that put an instant smile on my face.
Making my way over to the couch, I squeezed her shoulder and leaned down to kiss her; she turned her head towards me and planted her mouth on mine eagerly, a smile on her face as she did so. When I pulled back and saw that hope in her eyes, my heart sank when I realized what I’d just done.
“Cormac…” She murmured, and I quickly withdrew my hand from her shoulder.
“Sorry,” I muttered, looking away from her. That earnest expression on her face, the one that told me if I’d wanted to fuck her right there and then she would have let me, that was hard to ignore.
“No, no, it’s okay,” she got to her feet, the smile blossoming across her face, lighting her up with the kind of joy I hadn’t seen for a hell of a long time. “If you want to…”
She watched me for another moment, that smile wavering as she seemed to realize that I wasn’t actually going to do anything else. I closed my eyes for a moment, forcing myself to remember everything that I’d been focused on these last few days, all the good damn reasons I’d come up with for calling this off. In that moment, as she looked at me, they seemed distant and unimportant. I could hardly remember any of them, finding them muted to grey in my memory.
“Sorry,” I apologised again, and went to pull on my coat and my shoes. “Reflex action. I shouldn’t have done that…”
Her shoulders dropped down and her head sank. The smile was gone, and it was painful knowing that I could have put it back on her face but had to actively choose not to do that.
“I should go,” I headed for the door before I could say or do anything else that was going to give her the wrong idea. The ground was crunchy underfoot when I got outside, and I tried to focus on the crisp sound of my footsteps instead of all the thoughts rushing through my head.
I could still practically smell her on me, her sweetness lingering in all of my senses. I swear to God she was like some kind of drug, impossible to deny, her effects impossible to argue with. I wanted to storm back in there and take as much of her as I could – her smell, her taste, her lightness, the way she made me feel. But I knew I would come around to my choice in the long run. Wouldn’t I? I would see that a life spent wondering if she was hiding something else from me was worse than one where I spent all my time thinking about what could have been between us. There was no point lingering away in the past – I had the future to think about, the future with my baby and my family and my cabin, all the way out here and far removed from the real world.
What would I tell my parents about her? I had been thinking about it a lot recently, specifically what I was going to tell them about the nature of the kid’s conception. I knew my mom would eat me alive if she knew that I’d dropped a good stack of cash on having someone supposedly removed from me to bear my child for me, when she would no doubt argue there were loads of women who would have done this for free if I’d just looked. Call it instant gratification, call it protecting myself after what had happened the last time I’d fallen for someone, but I had wanted a child now and had wanted one with someone who I could at least pretend I wasn’t emotionally invested in. I had convinced myself that my life was best lived all by myself, where no-one could hurt me, but I wasn’t sure how the fuck to explain to my parents that hooking up with this girl strictly for the sake of conception had led to me falling in love with her and then calling things off when I found out she had been hiding something from me. The whole thing was a clusterfuck, and the cold morning air wasn’t doing anything to scrub my brain free of all the shit that had been rotating around and around it since we had broken up.
I decided the best course of action, after the accidental kiss, was just to avoid her entirely. It was childish and I knew probably not the best way to go about handling my feelings, but it was all I could deal with for the time being – we could figure things out when the wound of us wasn’t so raw, but for now, I needed time to myself to think it out. To solidify in my brain how I had made the right choice and would be ready to move on from her soon enough.
But it didn’t happen. We had only been together a few months, but the bond we had created already felt indelible. And I supposed that I knew something was going to bubble over at some point during her stay here – but I didn’t realize it was going to happen so soon.
Two weeks after the day that had split us up, I was sitting in my bedroom and flicking through some book that I had been telling myself I was going to read for months now, but was having trouble focusing on any of the words on the page before me. None of it was sinking in, not even close. My brain refusing to take in anything remotely useful. I had closed the door to the bedroom after she had emerged from her room to get something to eat, in the hopes that it would force her out of my head for a while, but I had failed dismally. I lifted my gaze and looked at the panelling on the wooden door, listening to her rummaging about beyond it. At least she was eating something. She had begun to look a li
ttle less tired these last few days as well, from what little I’d allowed myself to see her. Her belly was really starting to show, too, and it was hard to be around her and not just want to touch the spot where I knew my baby was growing. I wanted to be involved with every part of this process, but I knew that laying a hand on her would just be asking for trouble, so I held myself back as best I could.
But something in me that night just didn’t have the energy to hide from her any more. I sat there, on the edge of my bed, and thought about what lay beyond that door – of the woman who was out there, the woman who still wanted me. I would have given anything to have her in my arms right then, to be waking up after a nap together, to roll on top of her and hold her arms above her head and…
I got to my feet. Something in me snapped. I needed to see her, to talk to her properly – none of this bullshit the two of us had been trying to make work these last couple of weeks. I wanted to look into her eyes and remind myself what it was that I had fallen for in the first place. I wanted to forget, if just for a while, what stood in our way.
I opened the door and stood there for a moment; she was standing in the kitchen, staring at the open fridge, her eyes glazed over as though her head was somewhere else entirely. I wondered if she was thinking about me. After a moment, she looked up, and jumped slightly as soon as she saw me standing there.
“Sorry, do you need to get in here?” She asked, ducking her head down and breaking our eye contact. “I didn’t mean to get in your way-”
“No, don’t go,” I moved towards her, and she looked up, staring at me as though rooted to the spot, a deer in the headlights. She was wearing a heavy sweater and a pair of old boxers, looking so delicate under all those layers of clothes. She bit her lip as I drew closer, and I instantly imagined biting it for her.
“What’s up?” She asked, leaning up against the counter and crossing her arms in front of herself awkwardly, protectively, like she didn’t want me to get too close. But she didn’t move – she didn’t run, didn’t look away from me, as I came to a halt on the other side of the breakfast bar from her. I planted my hands on the table and stared at her for a long moment, and it all came flooding back to me, all that I had been pushing down since I had called things off with her. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to live a life without her, in some half-life of a fake marriage where we shared a house but not a life.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. She had always been able to read me almost better than I could read myself – I wondered if she had known this was coming, if she had been sure I was going to crack. Well, if she had, she had been fucking right. I felt as though these last few weeks had stretched me to breaking point, and I needed to get everything that was filling up my head out once and for all before I went totally crazy.
Chapter Seventeen
The way he was looking at me – I had never seen that of expression on his face before. He looked angry. I had never seen him angry. Even when he had broken up with me, he had looked more sad and tired than anything else, none of this rage that seemed to be radiating off him in great pulses present back then. The air was so thick with tension I was surprised I could even make him out through it. I chewed my lip, which was almost raw after the last few weeks, and watched him, waiting for him to say something. Anything. I just needed him to actually talk to me, to stop ducking and hiding the way he had been since the two of us had split.
“What’s up?” I repeated myself, but the words came out almost as a whisper instead of sounding as certain as they had in my own head. He hadn’t moved. His hands were by his side, and one of them had balled into a fist, like he was trying to find his way to forcing the words out of him.
“You know what’s wrong,” He muttered at last, finally breaking my gaze and brushing past me. I knew what he was talking about at once, but I turned to him and played the fool, needing to hear the words out of his mouth.
“No, I don’t,” I replied. This felt odd – the last time we’d had a serious conversation like this one, he had been the one in control and I had been the one spiralling out. But this time, it seemed as though it was entirely the other way around.
“You know,” He repeated himself impotently, planting his hand at the top of the fireplace. “You must have felt it.”
“What are you talking about?” I pressed him, crossing my arms tight over my chest as though I was attempting to keep him out. Even though all I wanted was to walk over there, throw my arms around his neck, and tell him that I forgave everything and that I would put it all behind us if that’s what he wanted.
“I can’t fucking live like this, Laurie,” he gestured to me, still staring into the flickering flames of the fireplace; the way the light was hitting his face, one half in shadow and one in light, seemed to reflect the conflict that was clear in every word that was coming out of his mouth.
“You think I want to?” I replied, suddenly giving up any sense of playing it innocent. I didn’t want to anymore. I still felt like a wound, picked the raw, and I was ready to give all of that up for now. For good. “You think this is how I pictured the two of us being together? You think I wanted…you think I wanted to be stuck around you, knowing the whole time that you hate me?”
“I don’t hate you,” he corrected me at once. “I never did. It’s just – I broke so many of my rules for you, and then you had to go and break mine.”
“What the fuck was I meant to tell you?” I shot back, angry now. I had been brewing up this argument quietly inside of me since he had called things off, repeating the words and the defences over and over to myself until I knew them off by heart, and now that he had given me a chance to come out and say them, I wasn’t holding back.
“The truth, Laurie,” he snapped. “That’s all I asked from you. And you couldn’t give it to me.”
“The truth?” I tossed my hands in the air. “Like it’s that easy? Like I can just…like I can just tell someone like you everything about the kind of person I was?”
“What do you mean, someone like me?” He demanded, rounding on me at last, looking me in the eye. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“I mean, look at the kind of life you’re living,” I gestured around the place. “Look at the kind of money you were offering me. That’s more – that’s more fucking money than anyone I ever knew saw in their entire lives, do you understand that?”
“And what about it?” He fired back, voice tense.
“What about it?” I raised my eyebrows at him. “You know what that kind of cash does to separate your life from mine? You always had everything you wanted – the business took off, the money came in-”
“It hasn’t always been easy for me,” He furrowed his brow. “You know that-”
“Yeah, of course I do,” I conceded, pinching the bridge of my nose between my fingers. “But the way your life has been hard and the way my life has been hard – they’re so different.”
“And you think that I wouldn’t understand what you’d been through?” He asked, his voice breaking a little bit, as though he couldn’t believe I’d ever thought of him that way. I lowered my head.
“Yes, I thought you wouldn’t understand,” I admitted. “I thought you’d judge me for getting involved with people like that. I thought you’d think less of me. I thought you wouldn’t want this baby anymore.”
“You really thought I wouldn’t want the baby because of the life you used to live?” He was mad again, maybe in an attempt to cover up the hurt.
“I had no idea what to think,” I spread my hands wide, admitting my mistake. “I’ve never felt this way about anyone before, Cormac, I’ve never had this kind of relationship before. You know how hard it is to believe that someone like you could actually want to be with me?”
“So hard you would hide literally everything about who you were from me?”
“Yeah, that hard,” I replied. “It scared me shitless, the thought of you finding out the truth. And now that you have, look, you broke up
with me just like I thought you would.”
“Yeah, but it had nothing to do with the fact that you were…it didn’t matter what you were keeping from me, it was that you kept it from me in the first place,” He shot back.
“Then give this another chance,” I implored him. “I know it’s hard. I do. But think about…I’ve spent the last two weeks not even sure that you’re going to let me be a part of this kid’s life. I’ve gone from thinking I had a future with you to having all of that ripped away. You don’t know what the fuck that’s like.”
“I know what it’s like to have everything you were sure of pulled away from you,” He replied softly, that flash of vulnerability in his eyes.
“Then why are you making me do this?” I demanded, imploring him, my voice almost cracking with emotion. I couldn’t handle this. I felt like we were so close, but so far, standing only a few feet apart but a mile away when it came to our heads.
“Because I can’t spend the next six months wondering if I made a mistake ending things with you,” he replied through gritted teeth. It was clear that, like me, he’d been doing his best to crush down the feelings that had been coming up in waves since he had broken up with me.
“What do I need to do to convince you that you did?” I asked. “Really, tell me. I want to be with you, Cormac, I want to believe that you’re…that you…”
I let the words hang in the air unspoken between us. He knew what they were. So did I. But it wasn’t my place to say them, not when he had been the one to reject them the last time I had come out of them.
“Laurie, you know how I feel about you,” He rubbed his hands over his face. “I just don’t know if I can…”
“Then say it,” I demanded. “Tell me.”
