Chapter 21
SHE WIPED AT HER cheeks quickly, but it did little good. Her face was tear-streaked, her eyes flooded with moisture. Whoever was at the door could just go right away again.
Elodie ignored the sound of the metal knocker, walking slowly back into the lounge room as though in a dream-state, pressing a hand to the sofa for support.
She stared at the space Raf had just occupied, as though she could somehow conjure him up again.
The knock sounded once more. If it was parcel, why wouldn’t they just leave it and go away?
“Elodie? Open the door.”
Her eyes flared wide. Raf.
Maybe he’d forgotten something, she told herself, as her heart raced and her stomach looped. She didn’t pause to check her reflection in the hallway mirror, or she might have taken one more swipe at her cheeks to remove evidence of her crying.
She opened the door slowly, because seeing him again and watching him leave, had taken everything out of her.
She felt the way his eyes ran over her face, documenting her emotional state, and only just realized she should have fixed herself up a little before going to him.
Too late, she thought, straightening her spine and regarding him with what she hoped was calm curiosity.
When her insides were anything but calm!
“I don’t want to go back to London without you,” he said heavily.
Without the babies, she corrected mentally. This was all about the scan he’d missed today, not her.
“I don’t want to go back to London, and not see you,” he corrected, his voice a strange tone she hadn’t heard from him before. “This is madness.”
“What is?”
“This. Doesn’t it feel crazy to you that we’re not together? That we’re not living together, like we were before?”
She flinched, his invocation of that brief, halcyon time in her life almost cruel, for how perfect it had been. But nothing had changed—her reasons for leaving, that same sense of self-preservation—weaved through her now.
“I think it’s the only option,” she said, as her heart screeched at her to not be so foolish. Take whatever crumb he was offering—surely it was better than this.
He dragged a hand through his thick hair, and her eyes lifted to his fingers, as they drove through it. “I can’t keep doing it.”
Her heart pounded.
“Why not?”
Hope, eternal and irrepressible, shot through her before she could even try to contain it.
“Because you’re a part of me, Elodie, you’re a goddamn part of me. I have been fighting that since probably the first night we met, but I can’t keep doing it. Not if the result is us living in different homes, different towns. It’s destroying me, not to see you.”
She stared at him in a state of complete and utter surprise. This didn’t sound like it was about the babies.
“What does that mean?”
He angled his face away, sucking in a deep breath.
“I was only young, when my mother died. Young, and I adored her.” His smile was tight, and it pulled at something deep in her belly.
He turned back to her, eyes boring into hers, so loaded with emotion she could have started crying all over again. Instead, she held her breath.
“But it was the way my father was afterwards that really destroyed me. We’d lost our mother, but dad became like a stranger.
He drank too much, and when he’d been drinking, he’d either bring random women home, or he’d start lecturing us about the stupidity of love, the whole idea of marriage.
Even without his constant sermonizing on that score, I drew my own conclusions, when I realised how much losing our mother had ruined him.
It was far safer to be my own person. Never caring about anyone enough to go through what we did as boys, what our father did. ”
He cleared his throat then. “Then, with the baby Marcia told me we’d conceived, I started to open my heart, to believe I could love, and the world wouldn’t fall apart. You know how that turned out.”
Sympathy and rage burst through her in equal parts. It was even easier to feel anger towards Marcia now she’d seen her.
“I’ve spent the two years or so before I met you unintentionally following in my father’s footsteps, doing my level best to drink myself into oblivion and fuck anyone who showed an ounce of interest in me.”
She flinched at that, hating the idea of Raf putting himself through that.
“I need to be honest with you,” he muttered.
“Because I’m asking you to give me something I probably don’t deserve.
I need you to know who I am, all my flaws, all my issues.
I need you to understand that I’m not proud of my past, not at all.
I’m so far from perfect, whereas you—you are like an angel brought to earth. ”
Her whole body seemed to soar like the angel he’d just called her, she felt as though she were lifting clear off the ground. It was such an important conversation to be having like this, her just inside the door of her parents’ home, him on the other side of it, standing beneath the small porch.
“I’ve been hiding all my life from feeling anything real. Ever since I was a boy, and she died, I’ve unconsciously chosen to box away any feelings that got too big or real, because all I could think of was the flipside. The what if.”
“You were protecting yourself,” she said, her voice hoarse.
His eyes locked to hers in a way that was truly a meeting of hearts and minds. He nodded once.
“And it was fine until I met you. With you, everything was different. Harder. I couldn’t keep you boxed away.
We agreed it was just going to be casual, and that gave me cover, for a while, to pretend that everything was fine, and I could manage whatever we were doing.
That you weren’t a threat to me.” His lips tugged in a smile, but it was laced with self-recrimination.
“But I was lying to myself. I’ve been lying to myself this whole time, fighting what we are, what I want from you, and I don’t want to fight it anymore. Actually, I can’t.”
“What do you want?” She sounded strangely calm, given the sense she had that her whole future would be predicated on his response.
He was silent, his eyes darkly intense.
“Raf?”
“I want a thousand things,” he said apologetically. “But I don’t want to ask for too much. I failed you, Elodie, and so to turn up here, asking you to trust me again, I know how that must seem.”
“How did you fail me?”
“I think—and I could be wrong—that you were falling in love with me, in London.”
She swallowed over a razor-blade throat. She didn’t answer. She couldn’t.
“I didn’t want to repeat past mistakes—I should have ended things with Marcia, when I realized how much more she wanted from me, than I could give.
That was all I thought of, when I suggested we live separately.
Not what was in my own damned heart. I didn’t ask myself why it felt as though I was walking through wet cement, turning my back on you. ”
Shock had her moving her hand from the door to her throat and, by virtue of the fact it was old and heavy, it started to swing closed. She saw surprise on his face, and then determination, as he pressed his foot to the opening, keeping it wedged enough that they could still see each other.
“I was—,” she started to explain, but he spoke quickly, as if afraid of whatever she might say.
“This is not the time for me to ask what I want to ask, or say what I want to say. I know what I did, and I know it will take time to fix. I presume this village has accommodation?”
She furrowed her brow, genuinely confused now by what he was saying. “I—there are rooms above the pub.”
He nodded. “I’ll take a room,” he said, suddenly more recognizable as Raf, taking charge and making decisions.
“I want to be near you. I want to come to the scan with you—to all the scans, all the things, I want to rub your back if it’s sore, and your feet at the end of the day.
I want to go on walks with you,” he muttered, invoking the spectre of Aaron.
“I just want to spend time with you. Do you think we can start with that, Elodie? Would you see me, if I was nearby?”
She dropped her head forward, shaking it slightly. Heard his intake of breath. She was too overcome to be managing this properly. She reached for the door, pulling it open more widely.
“You can stay at the pub, if you want, but I think you should say whatever you came to say now. I’m a big girl; I can handle it.”
She saw his torment, his uncertainty, and she understood it, because she understood him. He’d never been in love before. He’d never let himself! And for Raf, loving someone had built up to be an enormous personal liability, that he thought might one day destroy him.
While she needed him to be brave, and admit what he felt, in order for them to move forward, she also wanted to tell him how she felt. To say the words that had been burning their way through her for months, tormenting her with the fact she hadn’t spoken them.
“You were right, about me. How I felt, about you. I think I probably fell in love with you that night at the bar. I’d never met anyone like you.
” She couldn’t help the smile that spread across her face, as she recalled the way seeing him had shifted something inside of her.
“But I was still hurting, after Aaron. So, like you, I lied to myself. I said it was just sex, a one night thing. And it didn’t matter how much I thought of you again afterwards, I was not going to go back to you.
Until I found out about this,” she said, hand on stomach.
“And I knew, deep down, that the reason I went straight to your house was because I’d been aching to see you again, ever since that night. ”
“And then I treated you like that,” he muttered, shaking his head.
“You didn’t treat me like anything.”