Chapter 9
DAYNA
We left the club in silence but hand in hand.
We’ve made it to the chalet, still in silence, still hand in hand.
I don’t know what to say. There’s not a coherent thought in my head, only a frenzied mix of lust, love, hurt, passion, hatred.
I promised myself I’d never be back here again, eating out of the palm of his hand, playing the role of someone he can use.
Except it’s not like that. I tell myself he’s toying with me, because I want to despise him for breaking my heart.
But when we’re together, even rough and ready in the corridor of a club, he’s right there with me, in it with me. He always was.
‘It was never the sex that was the issue,’ I mumble at the entrance to the chalet. I tug his hand so he stops, and I look up at him, pleading, with myself, with him. ‘Clark, I can’t do this.’
His eyes look… hurt. But he nods and raises his palm to my cheek.
‘I know. It’s okay. It got a bit crazy back there.’
I lean into him. His touch feels natural. His words genuine. This is the man I fell for.
I liked it. I wanted it. I needed to come, to feel the relief, and for him to be the reason for it. But I know I shouldn’t have wanted it at all. I part-laugh, part-cry, a noise of complete confusion. Exactly how I feel. ‘The cold is pretty sobering.’
He lifts my chin to face him. ‘Look at me. I want to make love to you, Dayna. There’s nothing I want to do more. I know I hurt you, and I know you can’t turn that off overnight. I get it. When you’re ready, I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.’
His devastating eyes drown me. He used to look at me like this – almost docile with emotion, for me.
He looked at me like this that final Saturday night, when we made love, or rather, when he took me like nobody ever had.
Because whatever his father had done to him that day made him need a release.
And from the way he looked at me – the same way he’s looking at me now – I thought I was the most precious thing in the world to him.
I told him I loved him and meant it with all of me.
But the next day, he left. He didn’t call, didn’t even message me. Ghosted me.
A day later, I was on Little Princess – SP’s rig in the Persian Gulf – for the last time. He still didn’t call. And when I was in hospital getting checked over, when the scale of the explosion was broadcast around the globe, the phone still didn’t ring.
I take his hand from my face and turn towards the door. We walk inside to find Amy and Matty – the way they quickly stop talking makes it obvious which haters to lovers (and back again) are the subjects of their conversation. I stiffen in anticipation of another showdown.
‘Hi,’ I tell them sheepishly. ‘We’re sorry for ruining tonight.’
Amy twists her lips into a strained smile. ‘You didn’t,’ she lies.
Matty glares at Clark. I’ve known him longer than I’ve known Clark and he’s always been a good friend.
Yet it’s Clark I’m concerned about, and Clark I turn to now, silently questioning him.
There’s a shift in his face and in his demeanour.
He’s lost the sparkle he had just minutes ago.
I know he isn’t going to apologise, too, but there’s no fight in him either.
‘Are the others back?’ I ask.
‘No, they stayed,’ Amy says, then she glances to Matty and I wait for whatever they were discussing to be shared.
‘Look, we know you two have been set up on this trip, and we know there’s so much history and clearly still feelings between you.
But it’s not fair that the group is getting caught up in this.
We all want to have a great time here, with you guys.
Since you are both here, maybe now’s the time for you to talk it all through, each say your piece and see where you end up. ’
Selfishly, I really haven’t thought enough about how Clark and I are affecting the others. ‘I didn’t mean for anyone to?—’
‘We know, babes.’ She puts her hand on my arm and kisses my brow. ‘I’m going to bed.’
‘Same,’ Matty says. ‘’Night, guys.’
I give him a grateful smile. He and Amy came home to make sure I’d be okay. They’re good friends and great people. ‘Sweet dreams.’
They’re right, Clark and I need to talk, really talk. In the past, Clark has locked things up and lashed out, but since we’ve been here, maybe there is something different about him. Even the way he spoke to me on the doorstep – old Clark wouldn’t have said that.
I hug them both, then locate Clark, standing in front of the fire, watching me. ‘Hot chocolate?’ I ask.
He laughs shortly. ‘Sounds good.’
I pour milk into a pan on the hob and stir in cocoa powder.
‘When you told me you loved me, I panicked.’
Clark’s words make me pause, mid-stirring in the pan.
‘I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know how to be loved.
I was certain I’d fuck up loving you back.
And, I admit, I didn’t know if I could be—’ His inhale is audible.
I start to ladle the hot chocolate into two mugs.
‘I was afraid of how I felt about you. It was like everything hurt when I wasn’t with you, and when I was.
I knew, or I thought, you would be the rest of my life, and I was foolish enough to think I wasn’t ready for that.
I had a seed of doubt that grew and I listened to people I shouldn’t have. ’
His words sting, and yet they give me that light feeling in my chest I used to get around him – the sickly sweet drop of my abdomen, like I’m free-falling from a plane, terrified but high on adrenaline, on him.
It wasn’t all in my head. What we had was real.
I loved him so much I’d have moved heaven and earth for him, done anything for him, been whatever he needed.
Now he’s telling me he listened to other people.
He walked away instead of talking to me.
He didn’t fall as hard as I did. But he felt something. Something strong enough to scare him.
I stir the hot chocolate in the mugs until the glaze disappears from my eyes, then I hand a mug to Clark. ‘That took you four years.’
He takes the mug. ‘A regret to put all others in its shadow.’
I wrap my hands around my drink and move to the sofa by the fire.
I unfasten the straps around my ankles, take off my shoes and lift my legs up to the sofa.
Clark comes to join me, lifting one knee onto the cushion and facing me, his mug in one hand, his opposite arm propped on the back of the sofa.
‘I don’t want to make excuses, but I want you to understand that me leaving wasn’t about you. It was my failing. You were everything. You did and said everything right. I wasn’t ready for you then. I didn’t deserve you.’
I don’t know whether to be grateful for the sentiment or insulted that he thought I’d blame myself. ‘And you think you deserve me now?’
‘I couldn’t presume to deserve you, Dayna.
That’s your call. But you changed me. It took me a long time to realise it and even longer to actually do things differently.
But you were the catalyst. Nothing was the same after you.
Fun wasn’t quite as fun. Jokes weren’t as funny without your laugh.
And women, sex… they didn’t compare to you. ’
I wince at the mention and thought of him being with other women, but I know the feeling.
Being with someone else after Clark was robotic; it was necessary fuel but never an indulgence that I felt through my veins or rushing to my head.
I don’t tell him that. Instead, I do what my therapist does to me: I leave a silence for him to fill.
He’s talking, really talking, and I want to hear it, I think.
‘I was angry, too. Really angry. I’d always been a commodity to my family.
My parents, at least. I was something they had to do – a legacy, nothing more.
I wasn’t loved like you were. I wasn’t even loved the way Kathryn and Spencer are.
God, if I ever have a family of my own, I’ll do everything in my power to show them how much they mean to me.
It wasn’t like that for me. I was just something to be moulded into what my father needed.
I didn’t know how to love or be loved, how to really appreciate something.
And I listened to them. I took their crap on board. ’
He sips his hot chocolate. A tactical pause before he tells me more that I have a feeling I won’t want to hear but that I need to understand.
‘My parents didn’t approve of the Cross name.
They still don’t. Harold’s prejudice is from oil, I think.
’ He glances up at me sheepishly. I know exactly what the industry thinks of my dad – Roger ‘cost-cutting’ Cross.
‘My mother’s dislike is fuelled by his, or that you aren’t second-in-line to the throne. ’
I chuckle. I can believe it. ‘The female oil mogul who didn’t go to the nation’s best private school, who swears and who comes from a split family and a mother who abandoned her. No, I can imagine that wouldn’t sit too well in discussion over lunch in Knightsbridge.’
His lips curve slightly in a sad smile. ‘I realised too late that I shouldn’t take orders from my dysfunctional parents. But I did realise.’
‘Still, you never came back.’
He looks at me over the rim of his mug. ‘No. I wanted to. More than once. Then Harold had a heart attack.’
I watch my fingers turning my mug in my lap, ashamed. ‘I know. What the industry didn’t tell me, Teddy did. I asked him about it, but I never called you or came to visit.’
‘I did a lot worse. It’s a wonder you even cared enough to ask Ted.’
I look up at him. ‘I never stopped caring, Clark.’
‘Neither did I.’ He lifts his knee an inch higher so it’s touching mine, and he turns the ends of my hair in his fingertips. ‘My father has a heart condition. The risk of him having another heart attack was too high.’
‘That’s why you got made up to CEO so quickly.’