Chapter Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Eight
Francis mutters something about putting his foot in it but I don’t catch a response from Tom, and I know it’s because he’s following me outside. My hands are trembling on the front door and when I finally wrench it open I realize it’s pouring. Goddamn Ireland.
Whatever has given me the confidence that I can outmaneuver Tom on his own craggy grounds in his native country’s brutal weather, I double down on.
I tramp through tufts of primrose and winding weeds.
Around boulders and fresh puddles that douse my ankles in mud until I hear the deep timbre of his voice calling out my name like Heathcliff on the moors.
Conry’s barking like a lunatic after us and thunder clashes above and I’m soaked through my jeans and really didn’t want to cry but it’s too damn late.
“Hey.” He’s breathless when he catches up and takes my chin in his hand. I twist my face from him to hide my tears. “No more of that. It’s pitch-black out here and lashin’.”
The porch lights click on and reflect the eyes of a creature in the weeds. It scuttles off into the dense bushes.
“We can talk inside,” he manages. “Where it’s dry.”
For a moment I just stare at him. Kerry’s nightfall has a thickness to it, heady and floral and wet. I inhale nothing but damp heather and blow it out on a shuddering breath. “Is this what being in love does to people?”
“Terrible, isn’t it?”
“I feel like I’m going insane.”
“You and me both.” His laugh is rough. “These last few weeks without you…I about needed a mercy killing.”
His hand is still wrapped around my chin and his thumb sweeps softly over my soaked skin. I want to close the gap. Press up on my toes and seal my mouth to his. All our kisses are sliding too far back in my memory. I’m scared this moment could be the beginning of forgetting him.
“Clem, let me get you warm.” I know he’s genuinely struggling, watching me like this. “Your teeth are chatterin’.”
But I need some answers first. “The whole time we toured…I thought you’d dated Cara. That she was your muse.”
Tom’s hand abandons me. “No, never.”
“Jen said—”
“Conor told me what she said. All of the horseshite.”
Oh, Tom is pissed—narrowed eyes, tensing jaw—and that murderous expression coupled with the unceasing torrent of rain drenching his shoulders and hair makes him look like a thundering god.
“You knew what she told me and yet you never called me? Never texted?”
“I didn’t think Jen’s lies were really why you left. Were they?”
He’s got me there. I shake my head slowly. We stare at each other, battered by the downpour. Thunder growls again. “Who is Eden?”
“She was my first serious girlfriend. At Trinity.”
“She’s who the songs are about.”
Tom’s nod might as well be an uppercut.
“Why didn’t you just tell me about her on tour? You had so many opportunities to.”
“I don’t know, honestly.” His eyes well with regret. “I should’ve.” He draws a hand over his soaked beard. “I just knew what you’d think. Another tally for your scorecard. Heartache prevails and all that.”
It’s a fair answer, and it only makes me angry with myself. Just another reminder that my data’s been biased for years: always looking for proof that relationships were a waste of my time.
“Why did it end?” It must have been horrific for him to think the story would prove all my fears true.
Tom sucks in a breath between his teeth. “Can I please get you inside? I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
But I’m too scared. “We both have exes. I don’t see—”
“She died, Clementine.”
The word sinks down, low into my stomach. Died.
“I met her in the same poetry class as Cara. The three of us and Conor were going to start a band together.” I touch his hand, and he pulls my entire palm into his grasp.
“That accident I told you about, the one where my friend was killed…” His voice is low enough that I can hardly hear over the rumble of rolling thunder overhead.
“She was coming home from a gig we played together. Stopped to help an animal out of the road. A fox, apparently. She’d had a few drinks with me after the show, but she wasn’t drunk.
The guy that hit her was, though. He was plastered. ”
“Oh, God.” All I can do is squeeze his fingers. “I’m so sorry.”
“Cara and I wrote ‘If Not for My Baby’ about her.”
The way Cara sings that song like she’s still in mourning…I wonder if Tom’s ever considered that his friend may have been in love with Eden, too. Or maybe he’s known all along, and they’ve just left it unsaid. Less painful that way.
“I had half a mind to quit singing altogether after her death. But the work sort of demands to be written. It’s all the more insistent when you’re in pain.
” He releases my hand and rubs his beard.
“We never expected it to be a hit. Cara’s and my careers took off, but based on the loss of her.
The guilt was…Every piece of press, every photo shoot and music video felt like I was spittin’ on her grave.
She didn’t have an ounce of ego in her. She would’ve hated the lot of it. ”
“She’d probably have been overwhelmingly proud of you.”
“Even if. Still feels wrong sometimes.”
“Does dating someone else feel wrong? That’s why you haven’t, right?” I’m steeling myself for the end. It’s coming and I know it.
“No.” His resolve takes me by surprise. “Maybe back then—I’d tried to date after.
It was like you said—women I knew would hurt me.
Maybe I thought it was what I deserved. The drinking came along with that…
too many months on the road, too much pain unresolved.
After that first tour I cut all of it out.
The dating, the drinking…” He wipes the rain from his knotted brow.
“But, Clementine…I fell in love with you that night in Raleigh. Right there beside that vending machine.” He shakes his head. “It never felt wrong.”
The memory brings a flush to my cheeks despite the rain whipping at my face.
“I was so mortified,” Tom admits with a half smile. “Itchin’ to go put on a feckin’ shirt, but terrified of coming back out and findin’ you’d gone to bed. So I just stood there like a half-naked eejit.”
“I thought you looked like an underwear model, so…”
His incredulous laugh soothes the stress across my body.
I can’t believe how much I misunderstood.
I think back to Melograno—the tears in his eyes.
Not because he was still in love with Cara or Eden or anyone else, but because of a senseless tragedy.
One he didn’t want to drown our dinner in, when I was already so skittish. A dinner where I accused him of—
“Oh, God, Tom,” I say with fresh horror. “I said you loved to be heartbroken…How could you have let me get away with that?”
“You didn’t know. Which was my fault.”
“It was still a nasty thing to say.”
“I’m not sure you were entirely wrong, though.
I think at some point I allowed my grief to become a defining quality.
I told myself I was worried about what it would do to her memory if I were to allow myself to move on.
The truth is some part of me feared even more what it might do to my music.
” It sounds as though he’s never admitted it out loud before.
“At one point I was convinced I wouldn’t be able to write anything if I wasn’t miserable. ”
Fury ignites across my body. “Jen made you believe that. She was wrong, Tom.” Jen, who capitalized on his grief when he was still freshly in it. “Your work is about so much more than loss.”
“It’s all the same now. None of it mattered once I met you.”
This would be easier if I’d listened to him ages ago and gone inside.
We could have been warm and dry and better aligned than we are now as we stand face-to-face.
But I’m not waiting another minute. When I reach up on my toes to push his wet curls from his forehead, he sighs out sheer relief.
The noise sends sparks skittering through my limbs.
For a man who’s told me to slow down more times than I can count, tonight Tom kisses me voraciously.
His lips find mine through the curtain of rain with an exhale so raw I choke on emotion.
He kisses me like he hasn’t breathed a day since we’ve been apart.
I see the entire night with perfect clarity now: the full-body discomfort he sat in waiting to tell me everything.
Waiting for this moment to finally arrive.
Tears prick my eyes as we kiss. I wish I could say I’m grateful the rain will mask them, but I’m learning lessons in love in real time these days: when you feel about someone the way I do about Tom, there isn’t much room for shame.
To be loved is to be known—the worst of you, the best of you.
Maybe that was what I was hiding from all along, and now I can’t understand why.
We’re melting into each other, his teeth tugging at my lips, his hands unable to hold enough of me at once. He lifts me from the ground and I lock my ankles around his back.
“Now, for the love of Christ,” he breathes against my mouth, “can I please get you inside?”
He stomps us through the grassy marsh, careful not to tumble into wet puddles. Conry’s long since gone inside, and he’s tracked mud across the hardwood.
“I’ll clean that later,” Tom tells me.
I wipe some of the rain from his face with my damp sleeve. “You can put me down now.”
His fingertips dig into my ass. “I don’t think so.”
He carries me through a hall filled with simple framed drawings and I know they’re his. Small birds on a tree branch—kingfishers. A city rising from a tranquil sea. The sun setting over the Hollywood Bowl. Long, slight pen lines and thick smudgy charcoal.
“I love those,” I say. “Who forced you to hang them?”
He chuckles roughly. “My mam.”
“Promise you won’t take them down. They’re”—his lips press hotly under my ear—“so beautiful.”
Tom’s voice is gruff. “Like you.”