Bailey. My dad. They were probably wondering where I was.
I needed to check my cell, and it was in my purse. Wherever it was. A vague recollection of dropping it when Michael swept me up into his arms came to me. It was in his sitting room.
Once I put myself back together (well, sort of), I made my way down the hall. I wasn’t sure it was possible to ever be put back together the way I had been before sex with Michael. It had fundamentally changed me, and wasn’t that a big kick to my metaphorical cojones?
The kitchen sat off the sitting room, and I stood in a daze, staring at the awful emptiness of the place. Why did it bother me so much that his apartment was filled only with the necessities? There was no warmth, no personality. It tugged at something deep in my chest. I stood there so long, lost in those thoughts, Michael wandered into the room. Thankfully, he was dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt.
“Coffee?” He walked over to the coffee machine. “Sorry it’s so cold in here. I have the heating on a timer. It’s coming on now.” He pulled two mugs out of a cupboard.
“I need to go. Can you give me my boots?”
In answer, he threw me my balled-up socks. “Your feet will be cold.”
I glowered as I bent to put my socks on. “They’d be less so if you’d give me my boots back.”
“Dahlia, stay and have a coffee with me.”
“I need to check my cell.” I ignored his placating tone, glancing around the place. Moving out of the kitchen into the sitting room, I saw my purse on the floor. My hands were shaking as I bent down to pick it up, and once I found my cell, it jumped out of my trembling fingers.
Suddenly Michael was there, bending down for the phone.
I opened my mouth to protest, but he took my hands, squeezed them in reassurance, and placed the cell in between them. His dark eyes held something like the tenderness they used to. “It’s okay, dahlin’.”
I bit my lip against the well of emotion that wanted to pour out of me and instead opened my cell phone case to distract myself. There were messages from my dad and Bailey.
Michael must have been looking because he said, “Tell them you’re fine. That you’re here.”
“I’m telling them I’m on my way home.”
His sigh was beleaguered. “Dahlia, I’m not going to say I’m not still fucked up about you. Sex didn’t change that, no matter how amazing it was. I’m still angry with you. But maybe if you’d stay and talk to me, I could let that go. Please.”
It was the please that did it.
Even though I imagined my heart was about to be bruised and pounded by whatever came out between us, I knew I had to have this conversation if either of us were to move on.
Flicking open my messages, I texted both my dad and Bailey to let them know I was at Michael’s and I was okay. Done, I shoved my phone back into my purse and met Michael’s wary gaze. “I’ll need that coffee, then.”
His features relaxed and he nodded, gesturing for me to go ahead of him back into the kitchen. Once there, he handed me a mug, and I settled down at the kitchen table. Michael took the seat next to me, and I tried not to look at anything but his face.
It was hard.
The T-shirt he wore did nothing to disguise his physique, and I wished we could hit a replay button on the scene in the bedroom, but this time add in way more of me exploring his body.
His hands curled around his coffee mug, and I unwittingly studied the movement. I’d always loved Michael’s hands. Maybe it was the artist in me. I knew that they were large and masculine but at the same time long-fingered, big-knuckled, and graceful. It was a sexy combination, and I flushed remembering the feel of his hands all over my body.
“Why?” His voice was hard again. It drew my eyes from his hands to his face. There was so much turmoil in his expression. “Why did you leave and not come back?”
As difficult as it was to tell him, I knew I had to. He deserved to know that I hadn’t just abandoned him. I released a shaky exhalation, feeling a wave of nausea in my stomach.
Wrapping both hands around my coffee mug, I drew from its comforting heat. “I pushed everyone away after Dillon died. Not only you. I don’t know what might have happened if I’d been given more time. I like to think I would have let you in again, but we’ll never know.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off.
“Before you argue about that …” I couldn’t look at him as the memories of my mom’s behavior swept through me. Since I was twenty years old, I’d wanted Michael Sullivan to love me. As messed up as it might sound, I’d worried for a long time that if he knew that my own mother couldn’t love me, he’d question why. Start to find reasons not to love me too. It was irrational and moronic considering his family issues, but I’d twisted a lot of things up inside me over the years. It was time to explain.
“Dahlia?” Michael’s eyes narrowed in concern. “What am I missing here?”
“My mom,” I blurted out. I could feel the emotion thickening in my throat, the tears burning in my eyes, and it made me so goddamn angry because I wanted to be past it. I wanted to make peace with the fact that my mom resented me and move on. “Not long after Dillon died, my dad was out. There was no one in the house but Mom and me. I was in my bedroom …” Grief thickened my words. “Surrounded by Dillon’s stuff. I was sitting on her bed, trying to make sense of it, you know. Like, how all of her things were sitting there waiting for her to pick them up, to use them, to put them on. And it would never happen. I had her brooch in my hand. You know how she loved roses, so a few months before everything went to hell, I’d made her a silver brooch. It was a single rose in bloom. She’d loved it. Wore it a lot.”
I fought back the tears. “She wouldn’t ever wear it again, and I couldn’t make that make sense. It was driving me crazy. The agony of all her things sitting there was driving me nuts, so I started to put everything away.” I looked up at him, and through the sheen of emotion in his eyes, I saw the vision of my mom’s face when she caught me. “That’s when Mom walked in. There was no buildup. No questions. She … she just slapped me.” I could still feel the brutal sting of those hits. “I was so stunned, all I could do was cower on the floor as she kept hitting me, open palm, on my head over and over, screaming that God took the wrong daughter. That it was my fault and she’d wished God had taken me instead.” The last word broke out in a sob, and I heard the screech of a chair over the floor seconds before Michael’s arms pulled me up out of mine. I buried into him, into his strength, as if I could somehow melt into him and in doing so, he’d draw out some of the pain and relieve me of it.
His arms banded tight around me and he pressed his lips to my hair as I shuddered and sobbed all the feelings I thought I’d cried out of me long ago.
* * *
Sometime later, with my head hurting a little, I sat on Michael’s couch with a fresh cup of coffee and a used tissue crumpled in my hand.
I tried not to notice Michael’s proximity on the couch or the way he kept looking at me like he was ready to take a bullet for me. It was beautiful and terrifying at the same time to see how my story had transformed him back into my old Michael.
“So that’s when you started drinking?” His voice was soft, coaxing.
Nodding, I took a sip of coffee before responding. “That night I wanted to disappear. I was too ashamed to tell anyone, and I thought if I told my dad, I’d only make my mom hate me more. I convinced myself she was grieving, that she didn’t mean it, but in truth what she said festered. So to get to sleep that night, I stole the gin in my parents’ liquor cabinet. When I realized everything hurt less when I was numbed by alcohol, I kept drinking.”
“I remember.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I was so fuckin’ scared. Didn’t know how to help you.”
Flinching as I remembered everything I’d put him through, I turned away. “Dad was scared too. Like you, he thought it was only about Dillon. That’s when his sister, who lived in Hartwell, reached out
to him. She owned the gift shop on the boardwalk, and he convinced her to let me rent it. I said I’d go because I couldn’t bear to be around my mother, but I promised him he couldn’t tell anyone where I was.”
“That’s the part I don’t get.”
Meeting his gaze, seeing the betrayal in his eyes, was difficult. “I hated myself, Michael. I was responsible for my little sister’s death, my mom hated me, I was drinking so I could sleep at night, and I’d pushed everyone I loved away. You deserved better.”
“I deserved the truth.”
I shook my head. “I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. I thought leaving you was the best thing for you.”
Seeing that I wasn’t getting through to him, I realized I’d have to tell him everything. How low I’d gotten.
“I’d hoped the pain would stop once I was out of Boston. It didn’t. It got worse, and so did my drinking. I wasn’t there long when one night I was drunk and took a walk on the beach with my bottle of gin.” Stray tears leaked out of my eyes. Annoyed that there could be any left in me, I swiped them angrily away. “My memories of that night are fuzzy. I vaguely remember walking into the ocean.”
Michael stiffened.
“I … I remember the cold. I remember a momentary fear as I went under. But I also remember the relief.” The tears fell faster, these ones with shame. “I don’t remember Bailey pulling me out. I don’t remember her giving me CPR. And I don’t remember telling her she should have left me to die. But she told me all of it.”
“Fuck.” Tears brightened Michael’s eyes, and he sat forward, his hands clasped on the back of his head as he glared at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
He shook his head, his throat working to hold down his emotion.
“That’s the place I was in, Michael. And no one, not you or my dad, could pull me out of it. The only thing that did was waking up the next morning in a hospital bed, sober and hurting, to a stranger telling me I was going to let myself drown and she’d saved my life.”
Michael turned to me, dropping his hands. “Why didn’t you come to me? I should have known all this shit, Dahlia. I should have known. And if you’d let me in, I would have poured so much fuckin’ love into you, you’d never spend a day feeling as worthless as you had to have felt to walk into that water.”
“Michael …” I shook my head, his words a balm and a wound in equal measure. “It wasn’t that simple. You and I had never … and we never said we loved each other … and everything my mom said, and the shame of giving up on myself, all of it twisted everything. I truly believed that you would move on. Easily. That you were better off without my brand of fucked-up in your life.
“I gained a modicum of peace in Hartwell. Bailey became family, I made more friends because of her, and life there seemed simple. I was afraid that if I came back here and I faced my mom, I would shatter again. So I stayed away, and the longer I stayed away, the harder it became to return. I felt so guilty for missing out on everyone’s lives. I’m not proud of it, Michael, but it’s the truth.”
“So why did you come back now? Because you saw me?”
“Partly. Seeing you was shocking and scary, but I didn’t die. I survived the encounter,” I said, smiling sadly. “Seeing you with your wife was painful, but it also made me feel less guilty. That I’d been right. That you’d moved on. So when Dad called about the divorce, I knew I had to be there for him and after seeing you, I knew whatever happened, however bad it felt, I would survive it.”
Michael seemed to stew on my words for a second or two, and then he pushed up off the couch. Outrage pulsated from him.
I watched him warily as he strode over to the window.
“Moved on?” he bit out, turning to face me. “Moved on! I didn’t know any of this, Dahlia. When I wouldn’t stop hounding your family to tell me where you’d gone, your mom told me you’d packed your shit and taken off. Without coming to me, without even a fuckin’ goodbye. So I stopped hounding them. I got angry instead. Dermot eventually told me that your dad sent you away and that only he knew where you were. That fucked me off, so I went to Cian, and I tried to get him to tell me. But he said that if I loved you, I needed to let you go. That you’d come back on your own.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know what you were going through so all I could think was ‘If she loved me, she’d be back already because if she felt half of what I felt, she couldn’t stay away.’”
“Michael.”
“I knew I could find you. If I wanted I could find you, but I didn’t want to find someone who ultimately didn’t want to be found. So I decided to move on for good. And I thought I had.”
“Your wife.”
Michael walked back across the room to sit down. He braced his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor. “My ex-wife. The divorce finalized a week ago. Her name is Kiersten.”
Loving Michael meant I didn’t want to know about her. I didn’t want to know about the woman who had gotten to sleep by his side for years. To talk to him every day. To laugh with him. It cut me up inside so badly, I could hardly breathe. Yet, the masochist in me needed to know how much he’d loved her. “Why did it fall apart?”
He snorted, the sound derisive. “Why did it fall apart?” He turned his head to look at me. “Neither of us knew why it was falling apart. That’s the honest truth. When we met, she was the first woman in ages who made me laugh. Kiersten is cute, and she’s funny, and I liked that she could make me laugh. Over our four years together, we stopped making each other laugh, and I didn’t know why. Until we took a vacation in Hartwell to try one last time to fix our marriage.”
His gaze drifted over my face and down my body before he flinched and looked away. “After we met you, we got back to the hotel, and Kiersten lost it. She wanted to know who you were. So I told her. That I’d loved you. That you left without a word and I hadn’t seen you in nine years. And you know what she told me?”
It was hard to breathe, let alone speak.
“That everything made sense now. That I’d kept her at a distance the entire four years we’d been together. That I never let her in. I never talked about my parents. I never talked about my past. I never talked about my work. Sure, I’d listen to her, but anytime she asked anything that was too personal, I avoided the question.” He shook his head. “I didn’t even realize I was doing it. But she was right.”
“Because of me?” I was almost afraid to ask.
“I thought about it when I granted her the divorce. Decided maybe I’d been a shit husband because I was afraid she’d hurt me like you had. But these last few weeks … I know it wasn’t only that. It was because she just. Wasn’t. You.”
Remorse filled me, and I hoped everything I couldn’t say was in my eyes.
“I fucked over a good woman. I didn’t mean it. But I did it.” He rubbed a hand over his head and sighed. “Thankfully, she’s moving on. Met someone new. A good guy.”
We were quiet as I let all that sink in. I ached for him. I felt guilty that my leaving had caused him so much pain. Worse, there was an ugly part of me deep down that was glad he couldn’t love his wife the way he’d loved me. Now wasn’t that disgustingly selfish?
Attempting to push away those feelings, I thought about Michael’s confession and how he wouldn’t talk to Kiersten about his family. What did that mean? Had he completely lost touch with them? And what about Gary? I’d known they were drifting apart after Gary found out we were together, but there had been no mention of him at all since my return. “Do you still talk to your parents? To Gary?”
If he was surprised by my questions, he didn’t show it. Instead, he relaxed against the couch. “I see Mom sometimes. I try to avoid Dad as much as possible. To say it fucked him off that I made detective and he retired as a plain old beat walker is an understatement,” he told me. “Things between us went from bad to worse when I first made lieutenant. You know my dad. No matter what I do, I can’t win. Last time I saw my mom was after Kiersten and I filed
for divorce. My dad is usually out on a Sunday at a bar, but the bastard had deliberately stayed around so he could go on and on about how I might think I’m something with my detective badge, but a man isn’t a man if he can’t keep his woman happy.”
Anger boiled in my blood. “Motherfucker.”
Michael gave me a small grin. “Yeah.”
“And Gary?”
He shook his head. “Gary left not long after you. Took a decent paying job in construction with a cousin in North Carolina. He never came back, and we lost touch over the years.”
Goddamn it.
I left.
Gary left.
“I’m sorry.”
“I had Dermot. Your dad.” He shrugged. “They’re like family.”
The swelling feeling of love and heartbreak building in my chest was almost too much to bear. I knew we’d needed to have this discussion, to put it all out there, but it also became crushingly clear that I needed to let go of that little spark of hope I’d held onto all those years concerning Michael.
No matter what he’d discovered today, he would always feel abandoned by me. After his parents’ abandonment came mine. Then Gary’s. It didn’t matter if he learned to let that go, I wouldn’t.
I would live with all kinds of remorse, that feeling sharpening every time I looked at his handsome face.
The thought exhausted me.
I loved him.
God, did I love him.
But at some point, I had to start loving myself too.
My tangle of emotions wouldn’t go away overnight, and I knew it was the same for Michael. “Do you blame me?”
Michael turned, studying me, and I wondered if he could hear my heart pounding. “I understand better now.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I can get past it.” He sat up, determination hardening his features. “To be with you, I can get past it.”
Wrong answer.
Because while he was attempting to get past it, there would be more moments that would throw up our history, that might lead to arguments. And Michael had proven he could gut me worse than anyone.
Things We Never Said: A Hart's Boardwalk Novel Page 17
