Chapter 26 #2
“One of the men…was mine.”
The weight of those words was… I could feel them. The sheer tension hanging in the air like he expected me to let him go. Walk away. Let him writhe in this cloud of…
Shame. It was right there. Surrounding us. A heavy cloud I wanted to lift away.
He had nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing.
“That was before. Before this. Before you met me.”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “But…” He took a deep breath. “Fairy Wings. There was a man…and I used to go sit backstage and wait for Mary, and he was one of the dancers. He was beautiful, Oliver. And…he took a bit of a shine to me. Mary thought it was hilarious.”
“She knew?”
“She always knew. We told each other everything.”
“No secrets.”
“Zero,” he whispered. “And she started sending him in. She’d go on stage, and he would turn up and kneel on the floor. Make me…”
“I don’t need to know.”
“It was… It became…”
“What?” I said. I made him look at me. Held his face in my hands. Stared at him. Because it was…a bit much.
“I fell in love with him. I almost left. I wanted to, so many times. And I tried to tell the boys and explain it to them, and I wanted…I wanted him so badly. I just wanted to be free and allow myself to not feel so…”
“Peter.”
“She got unwell a few weeks later. And I cut all contact with him. Never saw him again, and then things… They were never the same again.”
“I see,” I said.
“I wanted things, and instead I lost everything. It felt like a suitable punishment.”
“And then you went about whipping yourself all bloody for something you had no control over. You absolute idiot.”
I was only being honest. He had said honest.
“I did.”
I was still holding his face. Making him look at me.
“She knew I would fall into a deep, dark hole when she’d gone. She wanted me to go find him. She wanted…me to leave. She knew early on that she wouldn’t make it, but I didn’t want that. I didn’t…”
“You can’t control everything.”
“No.”
“And then, in the midst of all that, Mary’s book came out. And all my…our entire private life was suddenly out in the open. My indiscretions, and hers, every little secret and lie. Everything was there for the world to read.”
We stood there. Just looking at each other.
“I’m sorry.”
“She’d told me. She’d given me the manuscript to read. I could have…had things removed. But I was too wound up, too scared and too heartbroken. She was unwell. We didn’t have time, and it became too much. I refused to read it and she was angry and things were so unbearable.”
“Not your…” I started.
“Let me finish.”
“Okay.”
“It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It’s what happens when two people break each other. When you build this glass castle and you think it will last forever. But both of you are kicking at the foundations, and at some point?”
“Everything fractures.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not perfect,” he said, in a voice that was so low I could barely make it out.
“And neither was she. But we could have stopped. At some point, we should have. We’d both had enough of everything, and yet…
we just kept going. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t sane.
But we had the boys, and I kept thinking I could… ”
“We all do. We think we’re invincible. That we can deal with everything and still just live.”
“We can’t. The book came out, and the backlash was immense. There were excerpts in every newspaper. Parts being read out loud on TV. My patients started being funny with me. Some walked away. People I had known professionally no longer spoke to me. My tennis partner called me…”
“That must have been difficult.”
“It was hell. The hate was immense. We received very credible threats, letters through the door, online trolls everywhere. We had to move the boys out of school, and there was a police car outside here at all times. It…it changed me. I got…just so…”
“Oh, Peter.” I had to say it.
“And in the middle of that, Mary got admitted to hospital. I was so pushed in a corner I couldn’t see a way out. The boys were angry. I was… It was hell. Oliver, it was absolute hell. I felt like I couldn’t breathe anywhere.”
“Understandable.” I held him, having not quite realised when he’d fallen into my arms. Held him tighter than I ever had.
“So my hesitation with everything… I never wanted that to happen again. So I shut my mouth. Got on with it. And slowly…I became this. Sometimes I feel like I died when she did. Like there was nothing left of me. I just…woke and slept and sometimes ate, and we just…the boys and I. We just carried on like she was still here. Like the bubble had never burst and she’d never been carried out of that funeral home in a box and our bed hadn’t been put in a skip and we didn’t throw out all her clothes. ”
“You had no choice. That is what life is. A rite of passage.”
I had no idea what came out of my mouth. I was just trying to find something. Anything to soothe the violent jerks in his body.
“And here I am. And now you’re saying that I’m something I’m terrified to admit I am. But you make it sound like it’s real and good and worthwhile. Like it’s something worth…believing in.”
Which was when a pan fell off the top shelf.
Like…
I burst into laughter. “Shut up, Mary! He’s trying to tell me he loves me here!” I shouted.
“No shouting,” he said. He looked at me. With so much love.
“She’s ruining the moment.” I grinned. “A bloody saucepan.”
“She does that.” He was smiling. I loved it when he did. I liked it better than all the anger. The harsh words. The tears in his eyes.
The confessions. I hadn’t expected that. Well…
“I thought you might have had experience…with other men.”
“Ed did…kind of out me.”
“They know.” A statement. Not a question.
“Yeah. Apparently, I ruined their lives when they were twelve. And they have been traumatised since.”
I didn’t know if I was supposed to laugh there, but I couldn’t help it.
“I can see that,” I snorted. “You’ve obviously been terrible parents.”
“Mary still is. All this haunting is doing Ed’s head in. He’s threatening to move out for good.”
I stroked his cheek. Held his face. Let my forehead move in to meet his.
“And now we have to…start over. Make this something new.”
“It won’t be easy.” He looked like he meant it.
“I don’t expect it to be.”
“I’m not always a good person.”
“You’re the best person I know.” I meant that. “You really are.”
“Thank you.” His words were mere breaths. “She wasn’t a terrible person.”
“Neither were you.”
It was just us. Arms around each other, in an empty house. And I was completely and utterly…okay with that.
“And now you’re… Oliver, I know how messed up this is, and…”
“We’ll take this slow,” I started, but then…he pushed me backwards with a ferocity that should have frightened me.
It didn’t.
Because somehow? The way his fingers crushed the hair at the back of my head? The way his mouth pressed against mine? His chest expelling all the air out of my lungs as my leg rose to curl around his thigh?
It turned me on.
And my hand squeezed his buttock and his mouth kept moving and for a small, insignificant second?
A thought process flashed before my eyes, sharp and clear, like everything in that moment made perfect sense.
A momentary illusion of everything this could be. If we only let it.
I hadn’t expected that.
But it was exactly what it was.