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“Foley.” His tone was so low, so hazardous to her continued mental stability. “If all you want to do is have me lay at your feet so you can walk over me, you only have to tell me where you want me to stretch out, and how long you want me to lay there.”
He couldn’t say things like that. She’d virtually begged him to stay. This lying at her feet caper was a piece of crap. “You’re unbelievable.”
“I believe in you. I believe in us.”
“There’s no us.” Oh, he was just delusional. And she was a madwoman. She’d just yelled at him in the street outside the council chambers on her first legitimate day as general manager. “Why would I take you on again, to have you walk away when it got too difficult?”
That blow landed. It showed on his face. He lowered his chin. “It’ll never be that hard again. I’ll never make those same mistakes.” He looked up and straight into her eyes. “You can call me Drum or Trick or Patrick. They’re all me and I won’t ever try to battle things beyond me alone again. But I understand how you feel. I sucked,” he smiled gently, “and still you cared for me with everything you had.”
“I loved you.” She said that with bitterness; a slavish devotion to the past tense of it, the over and done, lost and gone of it.
“I love you still.” He said it as though it was the science of futurism, the secret of life everlasting, the untold wealth of conquered frontiers. He had no right to make promises he couldn’t keep.
“No you don’t, you can’t. You want to overwhelm me, buy me, dangle me off your arm, like one of your model girlfriends.” She put a hand to her throat, her anger was throttling her. “Fuck you, buying me a car. I can buy my own car. If you loved me you’d get that. You’d have done anything to come back to me sooner, no matter what state your head was in. We could’ve worked it out together.”
“Ah Foley. I couldn’t risk that. You’d have drowned in my despair. The only way I could come home to you is if I knew I wouldn’t hurt you again. If I knew I was strong enough for you.”
“Newsflash. You’re hurting me now. It’s life. No one can avoid it.” She took a step away from him, he lifted his foot to follow and she put her hand up to stop him.
“All this macho stuff about being strong.” She took another step. Her weight was on the pressure mat that operated the automatic doors. “I was strong enough for both of us.” The doors shushed open. “But here’s a new headline,” she took another step and now she was inside the building and the doors were closing and he couldn’t make her risk loving him again.
“I’m not anymore.”
36: Consolation
The sliding doors closed on Foley and she turned her back on Drum and fled into the council chambers. He slapped his palm over his mouth. That was the most spectacular collision with stupid he’d ever undertaken, and that included trying to talk his own board out of making money.
But he’d taken one look at her in her tailored work suit with the tiny stud in her nose and rational thought took a holiday. All the things he’d meant to say: how he’d missed her, how he craved her, how he’d find forever too short a time to make up for what he’d put her through, never elbowed past the fantasy of holding her in his arms again.
He looked at the key and winced. She was bang on. He’d hurt her, he’d denied her, he’d made decisions for her, and then tried to seek forgiveness and win her back by surprising her and shoving his privilege at her. He was nothing but extremes in her life from cave to car and he should’ve understood that.
Fuck. It was hard to think of a worse way to have handled that.
He wanted to follow her through the glass doors and track her to wherever she’d gone. He’d go to his knees and beg for another chance, but if he got anywhere near her right now, she’d take his head off. And that wasn’t the manner he’d figured on meeting his end.
He needed Plan B. He’d have to find a less lame-arse, insulting way to prove he knew how to complete her puzzle. He pocketed the key and brushed his hand over his side, a phantom itch on the mark he might yet come to regret, like she did. It would forever illustrate what he was missing. If she never saw it, he’d only have himself to blame because he’d taught her hesitancy, doubt and abandonment.
And Plan B had better be inspired because after seeing Foley again and that red flare of passion that lit her up from inside, flushing her cheeks and making her eyes shine, there was no way he was going to settle for friendship. They’d gone too deep, too far with each other to go back to tense yearning, the absence of touch, and the distance of separate lives.
He drove to the new house. He’d spent a week camped out in it with a mattress on the floor and a couple of folding chairs. The bare bones kitchen was stocked though. He had a full fridge and food in the old walk-in pantry, but he was essentially still living in a tent, or a very sophisticated cave with boarded-up windows that rattled in the wind and a hot water system that creaked and whistled like an ancient steam train. It would take a lot to make the house a home, and repairs and internal renovations weren’t the problem.
None of his properties were ever home-like. They were investments he’d turned over, filled with designer furniture picked from catalogues sight unseen, or professionally sweated over by the girlfriend of the moment. They’d been showpieces, beautiful in their symmetry and occasional softening whimsy, but he’d treated them like hotel rooms, never caring one way or another what they looked like or how they made him feel.
So what the hell made him think he could set up a home, that Foley would want him to have this house she’d sweated over?
Fuck. What made him think he could win her back?
He’d been a paranoid hermit squatter and now he was a recovering delusional fool.
He changed out of his suit into a pair of shorts that fit and a shirt that had all its buttons. He wandered around and did a few odd jobs, and the more he tinkered, the more he knew he was sunk. Foley was an all or nothing proposition, and he had nothing. There was no Plan B. It wasn’t about real estate, furniture or finishes, colours and patterns. He would always be homeless no matter where he lived, how he lived, if he was without her.
He’d come all this way from inconsolable towards reclaiming a useful life and the one thing he most wanted to use it for—loving Foley—was beyond him. That was an unalterably depressing thought.
He took it out of the house. He’d walk it off. It was just on sunset and balmy. He’d get his fill of the salt air and the blue on blue that was his religion and maybe inspiration would strike. Because he wasn’t giving up and this was only the beginning. If it took the rest of his new life to convince Foley to walk on the beach with him, he’d consider that a triumph in the face of all he could lose.
It was a conscious
decision to walk towards the cave, but he felt no compunction to visit it. The thought of standing on that rock edge made him feel faintly nauseas. He’d thoroughly replaced that danger and discomfort with solid, everyday objectives to make him feel worthy of being alive.
