Chapter 3 #2
So, I took a deep breath and a step forward. “Hi,” I whispered like a fool. The old giddiness was back, that feeling of utter bliss whenever I was around him, it warmed me from the inside out.
He opened his mouth to talk but closed it again. Finally, he shoved his hands through his hair and said, “Hi.”
My stomach flipped over at the sound of his voice. I’d missed that so much. The videos I had on my phone were not enough. This was what I’d needed.
With that incredibly brief exchange, we fell back into silence. I wanted to reach out for him.
How the hell had I walked away from this man? It seemed impossible now that we were here.
I wrung my hands together, wishing that this was easier. What would he want me to say? I’d rehearsed a lot, but I had no clue what he was ready to hear.
We were standing in front of each other now as adults.
Shouldn’t we be able to talk to each other?
His eyes flicked over my shoulder, and he glared at something behind me. I looked around to find Jasper and Kerry peeking around the kitchen door. It was Jasper’s idea to give us some privacy, yet he was the one snooping.
Get lost!
Cole looked back at me and nodded toward the French doors leading to the back garden. I moved toward the door with my heart in my mouth, and he followed.
My hands trembled as I slid the glass to the side, and I could only hope that I’d be able to hold it together long enough to talk to him.
Stepping out into the chilly evening, I took a second to glance around their back garden.
It’d been redone. New patio, massive new barbecue, and a playhouse for Leona.
Swallowing a thick lump in my throat, I turned around as he closed the others out of our conversation. We were now very much alone out here.
He blew out a long breath and sat on a step leading from the patio to the grass, resting his elbows on his knees.
It was my move. I stepped down and lowered myself beside him, leaving a gap that I hated.
We were closer now, his scent filled my lungs and wrapped around me like a hug.
Tears filled my eyes as I realised that, despite moving halfway around the world, I hadn’t felt this safe since the last time I was with him.
Finally, he twisted his head and looked my way... and the pain in his eyes gutted me. Every cell in my body wanted me to reach out and touch him, to feel his skin against mine again.
“How long are you back for?” he asked.
That wasn’t what I thought he was going to start with.
“Um, I’m not sure.” I blinked away the stinging in my eyes. “It depends on the trial, I suppose.”
How long would the jury take to deliberate? I prayed not long.
He frowned, glancing out at something in the garden, nodding his head.
The action felt like a mean girl moment. There was a lot he wanted to say—a lot of anger and betrayal in those perfect blue eyes. I’d put that there and it killed me.
“I didn’t think you were coming back for it… for anything.”
All right, that wasn’t what I expected at first. I thought he’d kick off with asking why I stopped communicating with him.
I tapped my fingers against my legs. “I wasn’t going to at first. It scared the hell out of me, actually.
But, as time went on and I opened up more in therapy, I started to feel like I could do it.
Now, I need to. You know, to face them… to face my dad and have him know that I don’t fear him anymore, and I was believed. ”
Cole closed his eyes and nodded.
We shouldn’t have come here first. It was stupid. I wish I’d got Mum to drop me off at Ali’s and then come alone.
“Sorry, we should have called first. I didn’t want us to meet like this. I wanted you to know we were back before you saw me. Mum did email Jenna, but your Internet’s not been working, so obviously, you didn’t get it. I’m sorry again. We should have made sure—”
“It’s fine,” he says, and his lips twitched as he fought a smile.
I was rambling and had to get myself together. There was just so much I wanted to say—so many apologies I wanted to make. Cole was everything to me for a very long time, and I didn’t know how to handle this distance and awkwardness.
Yeah… that I’d created.
Still didn’t make it any easier, though.
“Sorry, I don’t really know what I’m saying here.”
“I haven’t heard you ramble like that since we were little kids.”
Cole was seven when I stopped talking, so I was surprised he remembered my old voice.
“What was university like?” I asked.
He lifted a brow, his jaw tightening. “You want to talk about school?”
Not really, but school was a safe subject. I nodded, wrapping my arms around myself, now feeling the cold sinking into my bones.
He sighed sharply. “All right. Uni was fine. The course was good. Could have done it anywhere.”
Ouch. He’d managed to tell me he could’ve got his degree in Australia without even mentioning the country.
Of course, I wanted him with me over there, but there was a lot I needed to unpack with my mum and brother.
It was heavy, and I didn’t want to drag Cole away from his family and his life to be thrown into our trauma.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. What’s Australia like?” he asked, clearing his throat. He sounded like he wanted to talk about anything else… or perhaps nothing at all, because his eyes drifted to the door.
The small-talk thing was new for us and massively uncomfortable—not something I had ever felt with him.
“Hot,” I finally said, missing off: tranquil, safe, heart-breaking.
“You’re cold now,” he said, nodding towards the goosebumps that covered my arms.
“Oh, I’m okay,” I said, looking down at my arms.
He clenched his hands twice and exhaled deeply through his nose. Without a word, he pulled his hoodie over his head and handed it to me.
“It’s okay, I–”
“Please… just take it,” he bit out through clenched teeth.
I reached across and took the hoodie from him. His fingers brushed mine for a heartbeat, taking my breath away. Cole retracted his hand as if I’d taken a flame to his skin, as if being close to me was agony.
“Thank you,” I said, putting the hoodie on. His scent surrounded me in an embrace that healed something deep in my soul. The old hoodie I took with me had stopped smelling of him years ago.
“When do you have to give evidence?”
“A couple weeks.”
He nodded once, and I could feel the anger radiating from his body, for my dad and Frank, and for me. “Are you staying at Ali’s?”
“Yeah. Weeks and weeks of Lizzie…”
“She hasn’t changed, then?”
“Not a bit. She calls me now, too, wanting all the goss on Australia’s hot surfers.”
Cole’s frown deepened. “Right… surfers. Hold on, can you surf?”
I laughed and shook my head. “I tried once, but it didn’t go well. I almost drowned and had to be pulled out of the water. Jasper’s pretty good, though. Surprisingly.”
Jasper could drown in a puddle but ride a wave like a pro.
After a few minutes of awkward silence, Cole said, “You finished school in Australia?”
“You really want to talk about school?” I asked, using his words.
His mouth twitched into a smile. “Touché.”
He was less closed off now, but I wasn’t going to get my hopes up. He was hardly going to start yelling at me with everyone else here. Perhaps if he did, we could clear the air a bit and stop this weird exchange that was leaving a nasty taste in my mouth.
I never thought we would end up here.
“I did, but I had to stay until I was seventeen.”
Which I didn’t mind really, it gave me something to focus on while I was doing a lot of healing, and no one ever bullied me there. I even made a few friends.
“An extra year. That’s rough.”
I desperately wanted to reach across and open his white-knuckled fist. He finally twisted his head just enough to look back at me, and I saw the torment behind his eyes that I’d sentenced him to.
“Cole… Please just say whatever is on your mind.”
“I honestly don’t know where to start.” He lowered his head, breaking eye contact. “But you made the wrong decision,” he said while I was trying to think of something to say to make all of this better.
I swallowed a metallic-tasting acid. “I did what I thought was the best thing for you. I didn’t want you to have to give up everything.”
He laughed without humour and shook his head. “But that’s exactly what you made me do. For fuck’s sake, Oakley! How many times did I tell you how much you mean to me? How much I love you? How you are everything to me? I don’t understand how you concluded that I was better off without you.”
My heart stalled.
Present tense?
Everything he just said was all present tense. Love, not loved. It knocked the air right out of my lungs because I’d never stopped loving him.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Cole. I truly am. I thought you’d eventually be fine, that you’d get over us and go to the university you’d wanted. I thought you’d find someone else and be happy...”
Though, selfishly, I never wanted him to be with anyone but me.
“Well, I didn’t. I’m not fine. I’m not over you. There’s no one else, and I’m not happy. I haven’t been happy since you fucking left… but thank you for letting me go to an English university.”
His honestly cut me open and left me to bleed in his parents’ garden.
“I guess it doesn’t matter to you, though. You’ve got your perfect little life halfway around the world,” he added.
His words were another blow to the heart.
“You think I have a perfect life? That it’s even possible to be close to perfect without you?
God, Cole! There hasn’t been one second that I haven’t thought about you.
Every single thing reminds me of you or something we’ve done.
Every morning, when I wake up, I still expect you to be there, and every morning you’re not, it breaks my heart.
I can’t get over it. As hard as I try, I’m stuck in the past, and not because of what happened to me, but because of you. ”
His jaw tightened. “You did that, Oakley! This was all because of you. I wanted to come. I was fucking ready to get on that plane!”
“I couldn’t ask you to move to the other side of the world.”
“I would’ve moved to the fucking moon!” he snapped.
I flinched, wrapping my arms around myself as nausea curled in my stomach.
“Cole…”
“I don’t understand how you were able to walk away from me. You knew I wanted to be with you, so why did you do it?”
I groaned, and before I could stop it, I blurted out the one thing I’d never told him…
“Because you deserve better than me.”
His body jolted, his face fell, and the colour in his cheeks drained. “What do you mean?” he asked, his voice lethal.
Why did I say that?
“Oakley. Talk.”
My skin was too tight, it was as if my scalp was shrinking. I hated this conversation already, hated how I felt back then, and hated how it still slipped into my life now.
I wasn’t less because I had been abused… but sometimes those old feelings were hard to shake.
“You deserve someone who wasn’t dir—”
“Do not finish that sentence,” he interrupted, the dangerous edge back in his voice.
He took three long breaths, and I wanted to crawl inside myself.
I’d worked hard for years to accept that I was worthy of love and a normal life. I wasn’t going to let myself take any steps backwards, but I wanted Cole to understand every reason I had for leaving him. It took a hell of a lot of work to accept myself.
“Look at me, Oakley.”
I did what he asked, my gaze sliding over his chest and up into his striking blue eyes, where he stared into mine like no time had passed at all.
The familiar heat flooded my cheeks and stomach, the need to feel his skin against mine and his taste on my tongue strong.
The hard line of his jaw disappeared. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”
“I know that, but I can’t help how it made me feel.”
“You—”
“Cole, please. I can’t talk about this now.”
I was just about holding it together, seeing him after four years and having that conversation was getting too much. I hadn’t prepared to talk about what’d happened to me, and I wasn’t at the point where I could just jump into it.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to… I thought I was doing the best thing.”
“You know how many times I wanted to come out there?” He ran his hands through his hair, lightly tugging at the strands. “I shouldn’t have listened to you. I tried to date again, but I compared every woman to you, and no one ever came close. It’s fucking annoying. I’m just as stuck as you are.”
“I’m so sorry,” I repeated.
“Doesn’t matter anymore.”
That was a terrible lie. It mattered now more than ever. “Don’t say that.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I can’t do this, Oakley. You blindsided me, and I don’t know what to think. It’s too much.” Standing to leave, he took one last look at me and asked, “Do you regret not letting me come with you?”
“Every day.”
“Good,” he replied.
And then I watched him walk away.