Chapter Twenty-six
I know you’re afraid, but I will protect you. We could leave the village, go somewhere else. Not Europe, not now, but perhaps America? We could go to New York. It’s a big city, we could lose ourselves there.
H
SEBASTIAN
Kate’s face is white and I hate myself even more than I did already.
Dan was right all this time. I’m in love with her.
I had to admit the truth, the second I walked out and saw her talking to Fuckface, glowing in her rainbow dress, looking like an angel fallen to earth. Even if just to myself.
I’ve always seen her this way, right from that first moment when the sun caught in her hair as she peered through the window of what would become Portable Magic.
Fate, Lisa called it, except I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe in past lives or serendipity. I don’t believe I’m my great-grandfather and she’s her great-grandmother, and that we’re destined to play out the same tragic love affair that they had.
I don’t believe I was destined to love her; I just did. But that’s the problem. I know people believe love is a positive force in the world, and maybe it is for some. But not for the Blackwoods, and not for me.
I mean, for Christ’s sake, the first thing I did when her ex hove into view was to punch him in the face, which is not acceptable behaviour these days. That didn’t stop me, however, and perhaps that’s the problem. Perhaps I should have been born in an earlier time, at an earlier date, when duels were acceptable.
Except it’s not the violence that disturbs me so much as the feeling itself. The relentlessness of it. The force of it. The way it takes away your self-control, makes you crazy, turns you into someone you don’t even know.
It’s like an addiction, and the only way to handle addiction is to go cold turkey. Cut it off at the root and ride out the consequences.
Dad never did. He’s no doubt still drinking where he lives in Bournemouth, still sipping from the bitter cup that love left him. I will not be him. I refuse. I won’t drink from that cup, and so this relationship/situationship/casual thing I have with Miss Jones has got to come to an end.
It’s too late for me to escape unscathed, yet I thought – I hoped – it wouldn’t be too late for her. But it is now.
She loves me.
The words are arrows, each one hitting its target – punching clean through my heart.
It makes everything so much worse. It makes me know the truth, that I’m no better than Fuckface. I hurt her too, and if this goes on any longer, I’ll keep hurting her, keep disappointing her, because that’s what the men in my family do.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, because there’s no other way out of this and I’m trying to find the words that will explain to her how much this whole thing disturbs me. ‘I’ve never been a violent man, Miss Jones, you have to understand that. Yet I punched your fucking bastard ex in the face, because he hurt you. And I don’t like feeling that way. I don’t like feeling as if I’m not in control of myself, and that’s all I’ve been feeling since you came to Wychtree.’
She stares at me, but I’m not sure what she’s looking for. ‘Why?’
I hold her gaze, every part of me tense. She told me her truth and I want to tell her that she shouldn’t have said anything. That she’s made everything so much harder, but it was important to her to say it, I can see it in her eyes. And I didn’t stop her. I had to be different from Fuckface in at least one way, and that was to honour what she needed to say.
Even if I can’t say the same and give her my own truth. It will only make things ten thousand times worse.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, lying through my teeth like a politician. ‘I don’t understand myself. I’ve never felt this way about any other woman, yet the first time I saw you . . .’ I bite down hard on the words. ‘It’s not important, though. What’s important is that I can’t do casual, Miss Jones. Not with you. Not now. And if it’s not casual, then I can’t do it at all.’
She’s still white but there’s something calm about her, something serene. ‘Why is what you feel not important?’
‘Because feelings don’t matter.’ I inhale, trying to calm the painful beat of my heart. ‘They change nothing.’
Her eyes glow silver in the night. ‘You’re wrong. They change everything. I was afraid of Jasper, afraid of what he might manipulate me into doing, but then I realised it wasn’t him I was afraid of. It was myself and my feelings. And once I realised that . . . It made me brave, Sebastian. I never loved him and I know that now, because what I felt for him wasn’t what I feel for you. It wasn’t anything like it.’ She takes another step, getting into my personal space. Her cheeks are pink in the light from the hall, her hair a glorious messy fall down her back.
She’s beautiful and I love her. Which is why none of this can work.
‘You gave me pieces of myself back again,’ she says, her voice slightly hoarse. ‘You made me believe in myself, and that’s what love should be, Sebastian. You taught me that. You showed me that.’
The words are a punch to my chest, directly above my heart.
Terrible news. Devastating news. Suddenly, I’m incensed, furious that she should feel this way about a man who will do nothing but further the hurt her ex has already caused.
‘Why the hell,’ I demand, ‘would you fall in love with me?’
‘Because you’re amazing,’ she says. ‘You’re not cold or reserved or aloof, or any of the things everyone here says you are. You’re warm and generous and caring and protective. You’re the most passionate man I’ve ever met. No one else makes me feel the way you do, not one single person.’ She takes a breath, her dress a glowing rainbow. ‘You gave me back some of my family history, a story that I lost, and you made this village feel like home. And I feel as if I’ve known you for ever and that you’re . . . you’re part of me.’ She takes another breath, looking up at me as if she’s staring into the face of God and not just into the face of a lowly bookseller. A lowly bookseller who is going to break her heart.
He has no choice.
He’s none of the things she thinks he is and he can’t be. He’s an exposed nerve, as Dan says: a seething pit of rage. A child whose love wasn’t enough to save his mother or make his father give up the bottle.
A man who gave up a potential career in medicine to stay home and read.
To stay home and sell books to people who weren’t much interested in the first place.
A man who is nothing compared to a woman who had her mother die and another man treat her like shit, yet who found the courage to come to a new place, start a new business, meet new people, build a new life and not just thrive in it, but own it.
A man who can commit to nothing and no one except his bookshop.
A coward, no better than Fuckface.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Jones,’ I say, forcing the words out, because no matter how deeply I know it’s the right thing to do, it’s hard and it’s painful. It’s agony. ‘But you’ve got the wrong man. I’m none of those things and I never will be.’
Then I turn on my heel and I leave.
She doesn’t stop me.