11. Louella
— ? —
Louella
“How long.”
His voice was raw. I’d never heard him sound like that, stripped of every defense, every polished Lauder syllable, reduced to two words that cracked in the middle.
“Eleven weeks.” I kept my arms crossed, as if that could undo what he’d already seen. “Almost twelve.”
“You’re pregnant.”
“Brilliant deduction.”
“Were you going to tell me?”
The question landed like a match on gasoline. “Tell you? Tell you when, exactly? When you were too busy to notice I existed? When your mother was measuring me for my replacement? When your assistant was drugging you at hotel bars?”
“I didn’t know about Elizabeth…”
“You didn’t know about a lot of things.” I stepped forward, letting him see exactly how furious I was.
“You want to know why I didn’t tell you?
Because the last time I was pregnant, the last time we had hope, you couldn’t even look at me when it ended.
You came to the hospital, signed the discharge papers, and went back to the office.
I bled out our baby and you went back to work. ”
“That’s not…”
“That’s exactly what happened. So tell me, Hector, why would I trust you with this? Why would I hand you another piece of myself to ignore?”
He flinched like I’d hit him. “I would have been there.”
“Based on what evidence? Four years of evidence says otherwise.”
“I would have stayed.” His voice was climbing now, the first cracks of his own anger showing through. “I would have been there every single day because I love you…”
“Don’t.” The word came out like a whip crack.
“Don’t you dare say you love me. You abandoned me for months.
Months, Hector. You called it work and you called it stress and you called it giving me space, but it was abandonment.
You left me alone in that house with your mother’s criticisms and your sister’s contempt and nothing but silence from the one person who was supposed to choose me. ”
“I know…”
“No, you don’t know! You think you know because I’ve told you, but you don’t feel it.
” I was shouting now, tears burning my eyes, four years of swallowed grief pouring out in a flood I couldn’t stop.
“Do you know what it’s like to hear a heartbeat and then silence?
To wake up hopeful and go to sleep grieving?
To watch your body fail at the one thing everyone says it should do naturally, while your husband gets quieter and quieter until you can’t remember the sound of his voice? ”
“I was trying to protect you…”
“From what? From yourself? From your family? Because you didn’t protect me from anything. You just disappeared, and I was left picking up the pieces while you convinced yourself that distance was kindness.”
He pressed his palms against his eyes, his shoulders heaving.
“Every time you cried, I felt like a failure. Every time you looked at me with hope, I knew I was going to let you down. I couldn’t fix it, couldn’t give you the one thing you wanted, and watching you hurt was worse than dying.
So I stayed away. I worked. I pretended the distance was helping when I knew, I knew, it was killing both of us. ”
“Then why didn’t you stop?”
“Because I was a coward.” He slid down the wall, his knees drawing up, his head bowing forward. “I was so afraid of failing you that I failed you completely. And now you’re pregnant and I didn’t know and you’re looking at me like I’m a stranger and I deserve it. I deserve all of it.”
He was crying.
I hadn’t seen him cry in years, not at the funerals for our lost pregnancies, not when his uncle died, not once in all the terrible moments that should have broken him. But he was crying now, ugly and raw, his shoulders shaking with the force of sobs he couldn’t control.
I should have walked away.
Everything in me said to walk away, to let him sit in the wreckage of what he’d created, to protect myself from the weakness I could already feel spreading through my chest. He didn’t deserve my comfort. He didn’t deserve anything from me.
But he looked so broken. And underneath all the anger, underneath the grief and the fury and the walls I’d built, there was still the part of me that had loved him for four years. The part that remembered why I’d chosen him in the first place.
I grabbed his collar and hauled him up.
“Get up,” I said, the words rough. “Get up and look at me.”
He looked at me.
I kissed him.
It wasn’t tender. It wasn’t forgiveness. It was punishment, my mouth crushing against his, tasting the salt of his tears and the desperation of two people who had destroyed a beautiful thing and couldn’t stop reaching for its ashes.
He made a sound, shock, or relief, or grief, and then his hands were in my hair and he was kissing me back with the same furious intensity. Lips and teeth and the bitter edges of everything we’d lost.
“I hate you,” I gasped against his mouth.
“I know.” He walked me backward until my spine hit the door, his body pressing against mine. “I hate me too.”
“You don’t get to just…” I lost the words when his mouth found my throat. “You don’t…”
“Tell me to stop.” The words were hot against my skin. “Louella, tell me to stop and I will.”
I should have told him to stop.
Instead I fisted my hand in his hair and pulled him closer.
We collided like the storm outside, all chaos and heat and the electricity of a hunger too long denied. His hands slid beneath my dress, tracing paths I’d forgotten existed, and I arched into his touch with a sound I barely recognized as my own voice. Mine. He was mine. He’d always been mine.
“Four years,” he breathed against my collarbone. “Four years of wanting you and being too afraid to show it.”
“Shut up.” I pulled his mouth back to mine. “Stop talking and just…”
His thigh pressed between mine and I made a sound that was probably embarrassing, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.
The ache was building, the sweet tension I’d denied myself for months, and his hands knew exactly how to make it worse.
He’d always known. Even when everything else was wrong between us, this had never been wrong.
“I dreamed about you.” His voice was ragged, his fingers working the buttons at my neckline. “Every night since you left. Woke up reaching for you and you weren’t there.”
“Good.” I was reaching for his belt, fingers shaking. “You should suffer.”
“I have. I am.” He caught my wrists, pinning them gently above my head, and the shift in control made my breath catch. “Let me make it up to you. Let me show you…”
“You can’t fix this with sex.”
“I know.” He kissed the corner of my mouth, achingly tender after all that fury. “But I can try.”
His mouth trailed lower, jaw, throat, the hollow beneath my ear, and I felt myself dissolving into sensation. Every nerve ending was alive, every inch of skin hungry for his touch. When his free hand slid between us, finding the place that needed him most, I nearly came apart on the spot.
“Hector…”
“I’ve got you.” His fingers moved with devastating precision. “Let go. I’ve got you.”
I was so close. So close to that edge I’d been avoiding for months, to the release I hadn’t let myself want because wanting felt like weakness. His breath was hot against my neck and his hand was working magic and I was going to shatter…
I shoved him back.
He stumbled, barely caught himself, his eyes dark and confused. “Louella…”
“No.” I was shaking, my body screaming at me to take back what I’d just denied. “You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to have me and hurt me in the same breath. Not anymore.”
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
“It doesn’t matter what you were trying to do!
” I pressed my back against the door, needing the distance, needing the barrier between his body and my weakness.
“I am not going to fall back into your bed because I’m angry and you’re sorry and we both remember how good it used to be. That’s not enough. Sorry isn’t enough.”
He stood there, wrecked and panting, his shirt half-unbuttoned and his hair wild from my fingers. “Then what is enough? Tell me and I’ll do it. Anything.”
“I don’t know.” The honesty hurt. “I don’t know if there’s anything that could be enough. But I know it’s not this. Not tonight. Not when I can’t tell if I want to kiss you or kill you.”
He didn’t argue. Didn’t plead. Just nodded slowly, accepting the blow.
“Okay.” His voice was hoarse. “Okay.”
I locked myself in the bathroom.
Slid down the door until I was sitting on cold tile.
On the other side, I heard him slide down the wall. The mirror reflection showed my swollen lips and flushed skin, the evidence of everything I’d almost let happen.
Neither of us slept.