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“I miss you,” he said after a while. “I miss everything about you.”
“Travis. I miss my fifth-grade teacher, but that doesn’t mean I want to have a relationship with her.”
“I hope not. Mr. Rebuk might have a problem with that.” He smiled, but she didn’t return it, and then he decided to be completely honest. “Look, I still have feelings for you, and I’m pretty sure you do too.”
“You still have feelings,” she sputtered as she pulled away. Travis let her go, watching closely as she inched along the bed until there was some space between them. “When exactly did you figure that out? Two weeks ago when you realized that I’d moved on and had a life and was finally happy again? Did you see Chance and bang your damn chest like Tarzan and think you could walk back into my life and claim me like I’m some kind of animal?”
“Chance was an idiot. No way could he handle you.”
“That’s so not the point, Travis.” Her eyes flashed. “But you’d like to think that, wouldn’t you?” She smiled then, but it was the kind of smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “For your information, he handled me just fine. Better than you, in fact.”
Something dark and dangerous sparked inside him. His nostrils flared. His chest expanded. Truth be told, Tarzan was all wrong—at least he was evolved. Travis felt like a fucking Neanderthal. He wanted to grab hold of Ruby and make her forget she’d ever laid eyes on Chance McDougal.
“Ruby,” he managed to get out before she shut him down.
“No. You don’t get to talk right now.”
Anger infused her skin. It filled her body and radiated heat. He saw it clear as day, and the Ruby he’d known, the one who used to drive him mad, was back. She was primed and ready to go, and nothing was going to stop whatever the hell was brewing inside her.
She slid from the bed and paced the small room, hands fisted at her side, head bowed. She pa
used in front of the door, and for a second, her hand rested on the handle. But then she pulled away and turned to him.
“I was happy, Travis. At least, as happy as I’m ever going to get. You might not like hearing that, but I was. You have no idea what it took to get to that place. A place where I didn’t need you to make me happy. A place where I didn’t think of you every day. Wonder about you. A place where I didn’t hate you.” Her voice shook. “Because I hated you.” She fixed him with a pointed look. “God, I hated you.” She exhaled a shaky breath. “I hated you as much as I loved you. And that was a lot.”
She made no effort to hide her pain, and her words crushed Travis. He wanted to grab her up and hold her and make it all go away. All that pain. Pain that he’d caused.
She wrapped her arms around her body, and when she spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper.
“Those last few weeks before Nathan was born were so hard. You were on the road with the Red Wings, and I’d never felt so alone. I kept telling myself everything was going to be okay. That once the baby came, you’d forget about everything except us.” She was silent for a few moments and met his gaze unflinchingly.
“You’re right, you know. I stopped taking my pills. I wanted to get pregnant. I wanted to have a piece of you, a little human who was part of both of us, because I think even then I knew you were falling away from me. Falling away from us. And I was too young and too naïve to know that you didn’t have to be my whole world. But back then? You were everything. I couldn’t leave Crystal Lake because Dad was so sick and Ryder was mess. And you were in Chicago and on the road. You stopped coming home when you could and…”
Her voice caught, and it took everything in Travis to stay on the damn massage bed. He ached to hold her, but he knew if touched her right now, she would run. She might take a swipe at him. Maybe break his nose. But she’d run, and it would be over.
“Nathan was my miracle. My hope. He was this perfect little boy that I grew inside me, and he was everything.” Tears slipped down her cheeks, but she made no move to wipe them away. “He had thick dark hair and blue eyes. He had ten perfect little toes and ten perfect little fingers. I kissed each and every one of them even as the doctors were telling me something was wrong. Even then.” Her voice faded a bit, but only for a moment, and Travis got the feeling she was back there, in that hospital room, alone. With no one to lean on.
“How could a child that looked so perfect be damaged? How could he not survive? I remember thinking that I couldn’t wait for you to meet him. For you to hold him and listen to him breathe. Because you would fall in love with him, and we would be a family. He was that perfect.” She pounded her chest. “To me, he was that perfect. To me, he was exactly the way he was supposed to be.
“But it wasn’t true. He wasn’t perfect. He was broken. His heart…” She blew out a long breath, and when she spoke again, her voice was low and shaky. “When he died, something inside me broke, and I don’t think it will ever be fixed. Sometimes I don’t think I want it to, because it’s the only link I have to Nathan. Our shared pain.”
She swiped at her eyes. “I could have fallen completely apart. I could have withered and died, and then there would be no more pain. But I’m not wired that way. I couldn’t let the darkness win. I learned to live with it.”
Throat tight, Travis could only nod. She’d always been a fighter.
“I decided to remove the things from my life that hurt the most. The things I couldn’t control. The things that made me want to curl up and hide.” She pinned him with a look that made him go cold. “You were number one on that list, Travis. But unlike me, you didn’t fight to save the marriage. You were relieved that it was over, and you didn’t try to hide it. You could go on with your life and live your dream without us dragging you down. You signed those papers, gave me a lot of money, and that was it. Done.”
“It wasn’t that cut and dry.” Not to his recollection, anyway. “You’re making me out to be a coldhearted bastard.”
“Weren’t you?”
He was silent, not wanting to touch all the shit in their past. But would there be a better time? Wasn’t this what he’d come here for?
“You’re wrong. I was a scared kid who was in deep, and I didn’t have the tools to dig myself out. It was easier for me to let it ride. To convince myself that I was better off on my own. That I wouldn’t be any good for you. And you know what? You made that easy. You didn’t tell me you were in the hospital, Ruby. I had no clue you’d gone into early labor. No clue that you’d had Nathan.” Pain hit him in the gut, and it clogged his throat so badly, he had to take a moment. “I would have been there for you. I know you don’t believe it’s true, but I know I would have been there.”
“I don’t believe that. You hadn’t been home in weeks.”
Travis drew in a ragged breath and ran his hand through the hair at his nape. “I didn’t know anything until you called and told me the baby died.” He looked her straight in the eye. “You didn’t give me the chance to do the right thing. You took that away from me, and for a long time, I lived with that anger. I resented the hell out of you. And yeah, I backed away. It was how I dealt with it all. When you served those divorce papers, I thought the easiest way to make the pain stop was to sign them.”
