Chapter 40
Chapter Forty
THE GUEST ROOM
LOUISA
I’m not surprised he’s waiting when I step out of the office.
He’s not pacing or checking his phone. He’s just standing against the wall of the building with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the door, like he has been there long enough to have made peace with however long it was going to take, while also ready to charge in the second he needs to.
I see him and I stop walking. He clocks it, but it’s not for the reason he thinks.
It doesn’t wash it all away, but the anger I was holding on to when I stepped inside that room, it’s not the same now.
Knowing no matter what the truth is, I got what I came here for, and in that, I also got him. No matter how long it lasts.
He pushes himself off the wall, and I don’t run (I’m not a runner) but I walk toward him with momentum, and like everything, he sees that too. Stepping with the decision made somewhere between the agent’s desk and the exit.
“They approved it,” I say, and I can see the relief wash over his face.
No matter how confident you are, you truly never know.
I read enough horror stories online. “And they did, because of whatever you said in there.” His lips press together in a way to contain what he might say, instead just nodding in acceptance.
Something shifts in his jaw and he takes his hands out of his pockets.
“I’ve spent a lot of my life being the person who fixes things.
Who makes himself the solution because it’s the only way he knows how to stay close to something without admitting why he really wants to.
” He looks at me steadily. “But that’s not what any of this has been, not for a long time. ”
He reaches for my left hand with his, and it’s as if the rings see their partner on the other and have us intertwine our fingers and fates without our permission.
“I was going to tell you,” he starts again.
“But I was afraid that you would look at me exactly how you did. Like I had some motive, like I’m your father trying to fix a problem I don’t think you’re capable of on your own, when that was never it.
And I became a coward, afraid of letting any remaining minute of our time together sour. ”
The look on his face is doing just as much work as the words coming out of his mouth, the most unguarded I’ve seen him.
“They approved the purchase and renovation of 8A, that was true. In exchange, your apartment was going to be put up for sale, since you no longer needed it. I couldn’t let that happen, so I bought it instead. For you.”
“So now you’ve been married to me for nothing?” His terms for this agreement were so he could buy that apartment for himself, not be my landlord. And now, it feels like a wash. I get (almost) everything I’ve wanted, and he’s just left with… me?
“It’s not been nothing, not for me. You see, the reason I couldn’t let it happen—” He stops. “I couldn’t let you leave, not if it wasn’t your choice.”
“But you signed the divorce papers.”
“Because the longer we spent together, I knew I wouldn’t be able to when the time came.” He looks resigned, willing to accept whatever comes next. Whether it’s a shove to the chest, a knee to the groin, or a kiss. But I just give him honesty.
“You were supposed to be the one thing I couldn’t mess up,” I say.
“Because you already hated me, so there was nothing to lose.” Saying it now feels like a bastardization of the truth, as he’s laying himself bare in a way I’ve never imagined.
“But then you stopped hating me and I had everything to lose and I—” I stop, grasping for straws of my emotions.
“I looked at those letters and I chose the worst possible explanation because it was safer than any alternative.”
“Louisa—” he says with certainty that comforts me. “This is on me, all of it.” His voice is rough at the edges. “I kept waiting for the right moment and what I actually did was run out of time.”
This isn’t the place I thought we would have it out finally. Surrounded by people going about their lives having no idea about anything going on around them.
“Letting you pretend to get to know me,” Hudson says, taking steps closer to me, bringing our bodies inches apart so I have to look up and see the sincerity on his face as he speaks. “That was real.” His hand curls up my neck, holding here, maybe the only thing keeping my head upright now.
“It was all real. And if you come home with me, I can prove it.”
We get back to the apartment, his, not mine. Though I guess, both are technically his. It’s as I left it, quiet in the ways I’ve come to expect, familiar in the ways I never did.
He takes my hand, I allow it, and we walk through the entry hall, into the main rooms, cut across the living room, walk down the hallway past his office, where all the papers of our lives are thrown about, but he ignores the open door and the mess.
“Did you ever notice anything about your bedroom?” We take steps down the hall as we walk closer to his. The question isn’t the one I thought he’d start with. But alright, here we go…
“It’s beautiful, it doesn’t look like you,” I begin with the most obvious.
“Ouch,” he says, with feigned offense. But I roll my eyes in response. Because, it matter of factly doesn’t, and that was the point.
“Okay, fine, but how about your bathroom,” he prompts again. Opening the door to his bathroom. A normal-enough looking one, in the hallway accessible for either his bedroom or office.
“Well, it doesn’t have a shower window like my apartment, but it’s got a great tub,” I say, not sure where we’re going with this.
“Sure, and the counter space, that’s pretty good, right?”
“Yeah,” I say, skeptical.
“My bathroom has terrible counter space,” he says, as if this is a totally normal conversation. As he pulls me a few more steps down the hall to his bedroom door. Opening that and stepping us both inside.
“What about this room, what do you notice?”
“Hudson, I don’t get it, you have great, boring taste. My room is so much nicer, and I appreciate it, but I’m not sure what dissecting your interior-decorating skills, and poor counter space, is supposed to prove.”
“Hmm.” He makes the sound, and it does something to me, and I know he’s about to pull back a curtain on something I’ve missed. “Did you know I bought this apartment and moved in four years ago?”
“Yeah, I saw the paperwork,” I say with sarcasm, having spent the morning elbow-deep in paperwork that hurt my feelings.
“I moved into this room, last year.” He says it like it's supposed to mean something to. “This is a nice room,” he continues. Deadpan, but leading to a point.
“Sure,” I agree.
“It’s a decent-enough size.” He takes steps, walking the length of it. “Would be better if it had an ensuite,” he says. “Your room, now that’s got a great ensuite. And what would you say, maybe twenty percent bigger than this one?”
My eyes narrow, following him around the room, until he comes to stand in front of me again. “Why would I do that? Why would I move to this room, Louisa?”
I bring my hand to my mouth with the realization as he continues.
“I’ve slept in here, pretty much since you moved in, because the first night I heard you, it became all I wanted, and not hearing your voice, no matter how distorted through drywall, was an unbearable silence.
” I look around the room with new eyes, taking in what I somehow never registered before.
It’s not a small room by any objective measure, but it is undeniably the smaller of the two.
The light is different in here, less generous, the bathroom is in the hallway.
It doesn’t make sense, except for the fact that it does. For Hudson, of course it does.
“You slept in here, and then intentionally tormented me for months, just so we would have a reason to interact?”
A very small, very controlled pull at the corner of his mouth. “Sure,” he says, and it’s almost said through a smile he’s afraid to let out too soon. “That sounds like a reasonable summary.”
“I thought you hated me,” I say.
“Never, not really. I hated that you made it impossible for me to be indifferent to you. I had built a life that required very little of me emotionally. I avoided loving someone in any way that they could really know me, feeling like that was the ultimate liability.” He laughs at the word now.
“And then you moved in next door and I couldn't find the end of what I wanted from you. It kept getting larger and larger, this thing I had to feed within myself. I kept thinking if I argued with you enough I’d get there. At some point, you’d stop being interesting to me, I’d stop thinking about you in every voice, in every silence, in every waking fucking moment, imagining you. ”
“Did it work?”
“Spectacularly not.” He drags his hands through his hair.
“I hated not having you, I hated knowing that you loved people so freely, except me. I hated myself, but you? I’ve loved, I love you.
” His voice cracks. And it’s a sound I could imagine in the greatest of love proclamations, and I’ve heard a few of them. This? Him? He puts them all to shame.
“When it finally seemed like we were in a place I could tell you, the full truth, I fucked it up. Because I was too afraid to lose you. So I bought your apartment for you. I signed divorce papers for you. If you wanted, I knew it would be worse than any of the others. You’d be leaving, knowing me completely.
And while I’ve spent my life avoiding letting anyone close enough to do that?
I told myself that if the time we had was all we would get, then so be it. That’s got to be enough.”
“What if that’s not what I want?” I ask. He goes very still, a man I’ve never seen nervous appears so now.
“What do you want, Louisa?” And there it is, my name attached to the question underneath every thing we’ve ever asked each other, finally out loud, with nowhere to hide. He’s rationing each breath, waiting for my reply.