Chapter 21
When he’d set out to speak to Hannah tonight, it had been for the sake of achieving some honesty between them.
Jude was ready to confess that, however she’d wounded him in the past, he had feelings for her now that wouldn’t be denied.
He couldn’t face forcing them down anymore, even if that meant breaking their promise not to bring up what had happened between them four years ago.
Even if it meant finally, properly fighting about it.
He also had the creeping, discomfiting sense that the tale he’d been telling himself all these years might have chapters missing.
This afternoon’s revelation about his mother’s behaviour had floored him.
He’d discovered he fully believed her capable of unkindness to a teenage girl who’d done nothing to deserve it – yet it was incredible to him that Hannah could have kept it to herself.
Finding out had reminded him that Lillian was the one who’d insisted he couldn’t miss the opportunity to interview with Larry when he and Hannah got to Sydney.
His mum had argued it was just a conversation – no big deal – and that if Hannah claimed not to see how important this chance was for him, perhaps she was searching for an out from their romance anyway.
Hannah had taken a long while to agree to the Australia trip in the first place, and at the time Jude had thought it was because she had lingering doubts about being with him.
She’d known he loved her for years – of that, he felt sure – and in his less generous moments, he’d thought she was cruel for stringing him along.
For occasionally letting him believe there was a chance for them, when maybe all she wanted was to keep him like a pet.
Having spent so long feeling like her backstop, he was edgy and insecure as her boyfriend; constantly hoping his nerves would settle, at the same time as waiting for something to go wrong.
The thought that she might already be searching for an exit route had stuck with him, becoming a source of relentless, low-level torment – like a speck of something hard and immovable trapped between his teeth.
He found himself wondering now if his mother had lodged it there deliberately.
In the hot tub, he began with the most banal of questions. ‘Have you had a good night?’
‘Not really,’ Hannah said. ‘Bit of a nightmare, to be honest.’
‘Oh.’ Jude didn’t know how to respond to this, but her frankness alerted him to the fact that she was several drinks to the good. It wouldn’t be fair to press her.
However, she took his silence as a demand for an explanation and said: ‘It’s just so hard for me to hate you now you’re back.’
‘Hate me?’ He shouldn’t have asked, but the question left his lips without permission. Though he hadn’t shouted, it sounded loud in the quiet of the deserted glampsite.
‘Yeah,’ Hannah said miserably. ‘It was so much easier when I could tell myself you weren’t good, or funny, or kind, or .
. . fit.’ She pointed at him, and he felt his skin flash hot, despite the pleasant coolness of the water.
She, of course, looked perfect: elegant and beautiful in a black, V-neck bathing costume that wasn’t designed to titillate, but did precisely that because it was on her.
In the dim light that emanated from the lantern strung up above the tub, she looked like she belonged in a black-and-white movie.
‘I never presumed to think you might hate me, Hannah,’ Jude said. ‘I honestly thought you didn’t care at all.’
‘That,’ she said tightly, ‘is pure bullshit. It’s actually stupid, coming from someone as clever as you.
’ She stared at him angrily until he looked away, ceding the point.
‘Why would I have texted and called you if I didn’t care?
’ she demanded, driving it home. ‘Why would I have kept trying to contact you? I didn’t give up, you know.
Not until I figured out you’d blocked me. D’you want to know how long that took?’
Jude hung his head. He considered telling her that he’d blocked her because it hurt to see her name, because he’d missed her so much he felt ill, because the thought of her not being OK, or being OK and being with someone else, sickened him .
. . He briefly contemplated confessing that every time he’d been low or lonely or drunk, he’d picked up his handset to call her and beg her to get on the next plane to Sydney – but that if he had and she’d said no, the word would have broken him irreparably.
Instead, he stared at his own hands, submerged beneath the water, utterly unable to justify himself.
Every reason he’d ever come up with for cutting off contact with Hannah seemed weak and juvenile in the face of how badly it had hurt her.
Confronted with his own cowardice – with the sheer callousness of what he’d done – he found that words completely failed him.
Hannah held up her hands, showing a mixture of six fingers and thumbs. Six months? That meant she’d carried on trying to contact him up until . . . Christmas time, the year he left. The thought that she’d persisted for that long made him feel legitimately sick with shame.
‘I know I’m the one who refused to go,’ Hannah went on, her voice thick.
‘I’ve thought about that a lot, since you said it – that you saw it as me leaving you.
But you abandoned me, you know? Fully. Totally.
Deciding never to speak to me again was .
. .’ To Jude’s devastation, a tear rolled down her cheek as she struggled to complete the sentence.
After a beat, she said: ‘It was the worst. The absolute worst thing you could have done to me. And you’d promised me we’d always be friends, even if we didn’t work out as a couple. I made you promise that, remember?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jude said, and for the first time he meant it without caveat or reservation. ‘You’re right, and I’m sorry.’
He wanted to say more, but this conversation had already drifted wildly out of control. Hannah wasn’t fully herself, and it wasn’t fair to carry it on – for either of them to say anything important – until they were both in the right state of mind.
‘Even after I knew you wouldn’t, I used to wait for you to message me back,’ Hannah said.
He wanted to stop her from telling him this because he knew she might not have shared it sober, but he didn’t know how to interrupt.
Equally, it felt almost selfish to step in and shut her up.
She was saying things that wounded him, and he deserved every second of the pain.
‘It was a bit like waiting for my dad, on the days when he was supposed to come and take us out,’ she continued, her voice cracking as she choked back a sob.
Jude felt his heart plummet painfully, horrified by the comparison, which had never occurred to him before.
‘I used to sit in the living room window for hours, you know – long after the others had given up, till Mum came and got me down. She’d make hot chocolate to cheer me up, and she meant it to be a nice thing.
I got to a point where it made me feel sick, though – where it tasted like disappointment and I just couldn’t drink it.
I still can’t, as an adult. Even smelling it makes me sad.
’ Another tear brimmed over her lash line, tracing a path down her face.
Jude wanted to go to her and brush it away, but he didn’t have the right.
He’d never known this was why Hannah hated the cloying, marshmallow-topped beverages he’d sometimes tried to get her to drink when they were kids.
It made him wonder what else he’d missed; what other hurts she’d hidden.
He hated himself so completely in that moment.
The self-loathing was devastating. Total.
‘So you see, I did with you what I did with him,’ Hannah said, seeming to pull herself together.
‘I stopped hoping you’d come home, or even that you’d text.
I wrote you off. I told myself that if you were cold enough to ignore me like that, you’d have dumped me eventually anyway .
. . when someone more suitable or something more important came along. ’
‘I’d have dumped you?’ The idea was so ludicrous, Jude couldn’t hold his shock in. The word ‘suitable’ snagged in his brain, too; caught on a sharp edge and stayed there.
‘Exactly,’ she said, without noticing how incredulous he was.
‘So. I decided not to like you anymore, and never to think about you, and I got very good at those things.’ Hannah’s speech was coherent, but she sounded tipsier than ever.
‘And then, like I said at the start, you went and ruined it by being here again and being all . . . you. Or Ed ruined it. Maybe this is his fault.’
‘Honestly, I don’t think we can absolve Joe of responsibility for this,’ Jude said darkly, meaning it in a whole multitude of ways.
Hannah actually laughed. ‘That’s true.’
‘You should go to bed, Hannah,’ he said. ‘We both should.’
It was the right call, though a selfish part of him wanted to let her keep talking – wanted to ask her a hundred questions she might not normally allow.
He wanted to know how she felt about him now; whether the attraction between them was purely physical, or merely nostalgia, or whether it actually meant something.
He wanted to know if she thought she could get past the fact he’d ghosted her, if there was any sort of hope for them.
Under current circumstances, he knew it wouldn’t be right to push for answers – and he wondered how he’d dare form the questions, anyway.
Based on what she’d said tonight, he didn’t deserve Hannah’s forgiveness, let alone .
. . anything else. He had no idea how he’d even be able to look her in the face tomorrow, after everything he’d learned.
He stepped out of the hot tub, then lingered so he could help her down. He wasn’t going to leave her; he needed to know she was safely in her hut before he went back to his. She stood up from the water, and – inappropriate though he knew his reaction was – Jude found he couldn’t look away from her.
He’d spent four years living in a land of sunshine and beaches; he must have seen thousands of women in skimpy swimwear during that time.
And yet none of them had ever affected him the way Hannah did now.
Her pale skin shone in the gloom, and rivulets of water ran down her arms and thighs as she waded towards him like a siren.
It was the most he’d seen of her since coming home, and he discovered he’d forgotten how in love he was with her body; with her lithe limbs and trim waist and that insanely arousing collarbone.
Suddenly, he longed to be in an alternate reality: one where an encounter that began with them barely clothed in a hot tub didn’t end in separate beds, but with him on his knees in front of her.
Hannah stumbled a little as she came down the steps, and he steadied her.
Mumbled an involuntary ‘fuck’ at the feel of her damp skin beneath his hands.
She looked up at him, knowing what it meant, her eyes dark pools of wanting that Jude struggled to believe she could feel after all the things she’d just said to him.
‘We can’t,’ he said, with an effort that felt nothing less than Herculean.
‘You’ve been drinking, and . . . it’s a bad idea, like you said before.
I don’t think you really want this. I don’t know why you would.
’ He dropped his hands from where he’d placed them, at her shoulder and the small of her back, and stepped away for the sake of maintaining his self-control.
She eyed him defiantly, and he felt suddenly, powerfully aware that he was wearing nothing but swim shorts. ‘What if I said I do want this?’ she murmured. ‘What if I don’t care that it’s a bad idea?’
He groaned. Swore under his breath. ‘I’d still say no. Not now. I just . . . no.’ He was too hot, too guilt-stricken, too overwhelmed to explain himself.
Hannah looked some combination of embarrassed and annoyed, and he wished he could kiss the expression off her face. Instead, he picked up her sarong, bag and cabin key, then helped her up the flight of stairs that led to her door.
Once she was safely inside, and he’d encouraged her to take two pre-emptive paracetamol and drink half a pint of water, he went back to his own hut and locked himself in – like he couldn’t quite trust himself not to go back to her.
He’d begun tonight’s conversation expecting to lay bare his own hurts – even thinking it might end with Hannah apologising to him.
Instead, he’d been confronted by his own, catastrophic failure to keep a promise that he now saw had meant everything to her.
For the first time ever, he could appreciate the true depth of her vulnerability; the extent of her fear that she’d be let down by the people she put her trust in.
Jude had punished her by disappearing; he could admit that now, and he was ashamed of it.
In doing it, he’d also justified every doubt she might ever have had about whether she could rely on him.
He’d proved – just like her self-centred twat of a father – that when the going got tough, he’d just . . . go.
As he got into bed, he remembered something Joe had said in the early days after he arrived in Sydney; a comment his brother made during one of the few ‘Jude and Hannah’ phone discussions that had ever been allowed.
‘You won’t want to hear this,’ Joe had said, ‘but the same numbers can add up differently, depending on who’s doing the sums.’ Jude had scoffed at this, taking it as a deliberate taunt to his uncommonly rational brain.
‘To put it another way,’ Joe had continued, ‘there are always three versions of any story: yours, theirs and the truth.’
At the time, Jude had brushed this off as so much therapy-speak, but the words reverberated in his brain now, clamouring for attention. How ironic would it be, he wondered, if he of all people had spent so much time making two and two into five.