Chapter 38
After dropping into Nate’s to use his printer, Casey had taken to her bike with a wodge of papers carefully stashed in her rucksack and begun the cycle up to Ajay’s cottage.
In the last couple of days, she had written an outline for a novel.
A rom-com, something she never expected herself to be writing, but here she was, with a light heart and a heavy rucksack and a cast of characters who simply wouldn’t shut up holding conversations in her head.
It had been so long since characters had taken on a life of their own, and she was delighted to welcome them in, even if they did arrive with hearts and flowers instead of shadows and blood.
Who knew that all this time she’d been harboring happily ever afters in her dark little soul?
She wanted Ajay to be the first to see it. She couldn’t help feeling that he had played a large part in cracking her writer’s block, their first date to Sissinghurst Castle especially.
It was late in the afternoon. The sun had made a poor effort at melting last night’s ice, and a new layer had begun to weave itself over the last. Her hands were warm inside her thermal gloves and cycling uphill kept her body warm, but the cold was needles against her face, and her eyes watered, stinging her cheeks made raw by the wind.
The sitting room at the front of the cottage was dark, and she guessed since Ajay was working the late shift tonight that he’d be in the kitchen eating a hot meal before he left for work.
She parked her bike and walked round to the back.
Thinking it would be hilarious to pop up at the window rather than knock on the back door, she crept low until she was under the window and then bobbed up.
Ajay wasn’t looking out the window. He was sat at the table opposite a woman with long dark hair.
Tanzie? No, she’d seen pictures of Tanzie.
Who then? They were talking, it looked serious.
The woman dabbed at her eyes and then clasped her hands on the table in front of her.
Casey felt queasy. Her heart began to race and when Ajay reached over and placed his hand on top of the woman’s, she had the sensation of falling slowly backward.
And all that went through her mind was that she’d known it; all along she had known that happily ever afters weren’t for people like her.
When two faces suddenly turned her way, she knew she must have sobbed aloud.
Oh god! She had to get away from here, from him.
She turned on her heel and stumbled back around the cottage to her bike.
Ajay flew out of the front door to intercept her.
“Casey!” he called as he rushed to her. “It’s not what you think! ”
“It never is!” she shouted back, unable to free her bike handle, which had become wedged against a drainpipe. “Couldn’t you at least try to be more original?”
“I’m not lying to you!” he said, trying to help her free her bike.
She shoved him off. The pain in her chest was visceral, like her rib cage might shatter outward, shards of projectile bone embedding themselves in the trunks of the surrounding trees. “That was Bea,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She knew the answer.
“Yes,” Ajay confirmed.
It was too much. Of everything. Too loud, too hot, too sharp. She couldn’t let him see. Instead, she pulled her fury inward, where no one could reach.
“She’s pregnant,” said Ajay.
Another shot to the heart. This one made her stumble.
“It’s not mine!” he said quickly, the rest of his words coming out in a panicked rush, like he knew his clock was ticking down.
“It’s her ex-boyfriend’s, the man she broke up with, and she doesn’t know what to do and she came to me for advice and to apologize because she didn’t want me to think she’d asked me to get back together with her to trick me into raising another man’s baby.
” He was breathless. “Nothing happened. All we did was talk. I would never.”
She put her head in her hands and breathed deeply, trying to stifle her sobs, not knowing now if they were relief or anger at her own stupidity.
“I’m not Sam,” he said, his voice cracking. She dropped her hands and peered up at him. He rubbed his hand over his head. He looked broken. “Fuck,” he croaked. “You were so quick to condemn me.”
The hurt in his voice cut her to the quick, and she realized in that moment that either way, whatever they’d had was ruined—if not by his infidelity, then by her trust issues.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I do believe you. But I can’t do this.”
“What? Casey, what are you saying?” He was staring at her as if she’d begun speaking another language. “I thought you said you believe me.”
“I do!” she said imploringly. “But this—” She wrapped her arms around herself, trying to hold in the pain. “Sooner or later, I’m going to let you down or you’ll let me down and I…I just can’t do it. I’m sorry. I thought I could but I can’t.”
She climbed onto her bike, Ajay taking slow steps backward, shaking his head.
As she cycled away, her throat felt constricted by the force of all the emotions she was repressing, but it was better to end it now rather than in two or five or ten years’ time when the stakes would be so much higher.
If she was a coward, then so be it. Better a coward than a glutton for punishment.