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‘Now it’s both.’
She exhaled again. Even deeper this time, and more forcefully.
‘If this really were a movie, Kaspar, you wouldn’t be shutting me out.’
He really didn’t like the way his blood suddenly rushed through his body at her accusation.
‘I haven’t shut you out,’ he managed, although even on his lips the words sounded hollow. ‘I opened up to you.’
‘One conversation? One night?’ She was incredulous. ‘That’s your idea of opening up? You cracked the portcullis a fraction and then the next morning you’d not only slammed it back down but you’d dug a moat, filled it and set me squarely on the other side.’
His jaw locked so tightly he thought his bones might crack, but he couldn’t refute her accusation. More to the point, why did he find he even wanted to?
‘What did you expect me to do?’ he demanded. ‘Rage and roar and gnash my teeth? That isn’t who I am, Archie. I thought you knew that.’
She flinched, just as he’d expected she would. But then she rallied. Quickly.
‘I didn’t expect you to treat me like the enemy because you regretted even that tiny show of vulnerability from yourself. I didn’t expect you to push me even further away. I didn’t expect you to shoot down any conversations that involved anything real.’
‘You saw a bike with stabilisers in a shop and asked what colour we would for buy our baby,’ he stated in disbelief. ‘The baby isn’t even born yet.’
‘It was hypothetical. And it wasn’t just that. It was about getting an opinion from you on anything at all. You know exactly what I mean. Every conversation. Every time.’
He shot her a deliberately disparaging look.
‘I don’t know anything of the sort. You’re being overly dramatic.’
He did know, though. That was the issue. For a moment she didn’t answer, but when she did it wasn’t to say what he might have expected.
‘Please, Kaspar. I know you do understand.’
Her soft plea scraped away inside him. Raw. Guilt-inducing. He tried to ignore it. Turned his head to watch the LA landscape as it sped past the window, the sights and smells as clear to him as if he’d been able to taste then, feel them, without the thick glass and metal in the way.
Abruptly he hit the intercom, instructing his driver to change direction.
‘What’s Hector’s?’ Archie asked, despite herself, and, incredibly, a smile began toying with his lips.
How did she change the mood so easily? Bring him around when he’d thought things too dour?
‘You’ll see,’ he replied, only half-surprised when the hint of teasing didn’t satisfy her. ‘Fine, it’s a crazy golf course. I used to go there all the time when we first moved out here and I was sixteen.’
She eyed him, a little too knowingly.
‘Do you remember the course we used to sneak onto as kids? When it wa
s closed for the day and the guy who ran it knew we didn’t have enough pocket money to pay full price but he let us give him whatever money we could scrape together?’
‘And then he’d leave us whatever pastries hadn’t been sold that day and were going to get chucked out anyway?’ Kaspar added.
Archie laughed, her face flushing with pleasure.
‘You were really good at crazy golf. Robbie used to hate it because sometimes you’d hit the shots backwards just to give him a chance.’
‘Considering how co-ordinated he was at other sports, he really was remarkably bad at the game. So were you, for that matter. The athletic Coates kids, foiled by a crazy golf course.’
‘I wasn’t that bad,’ she objected.
‘You weren’t that good either.’
