AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Yes, we had sex.’
It seemed both so simple and so cold to say those four words. They didn’t come anywhere close to describing what they had shared. But revealing even that much was going much further than he had ever wanted.
What was he meant to say? Yes, we had sex. I loved you, but you never came to me. You broke my heart, and me. And now I’m dangerous and no good for you and I’m not going to risk hurting you by telling you all this.
But of course he couldn’t.
Knowing now that it wasn’t her fault that she had never come to Australia didn’t matter. He didn’t hold that against her, wasn’t angry. How could he possibly be, in the circumstances? But, even though it hadn’t been intentional, the damage had still been done. He had made the decisions that he had made, and someone had died. He couldn’t undo that. Would never be free of the responsibility or the guilt. The wound to his heart had turned him into someone who hurt the people he tried to love.
If only he had been there. If he had managed to curb his drinking enough to actually make it out of his apartment and to the nightclub, he could have stopped his girlfriend, Charlotte, taking those pills. He would have noticed that she needed help. He would have called an ambulance before she collapsed and everything would have been different. She would have been alive and he wouldn’t have been a monster. But that hadn’t happened. Instead he had downed beer after beer and then a bottle of whisky, trying to drown his memories and numb himself enough to get out of the house and face the people he called his friends.
He wasn’t making that mistake again.
After Charlotte had died he’d stopped the partying. Stopped the drinking. Had concentrated on growing his business. But he could never forget what had happened. And he had no doubt in his mind that if he and Meena started a relationship again one of them, or both of them, would get very badly hurt, and he had no interest in either outcome.
Guy tried to read the expression on Meena’s face as she took in what he had said. The shock at his straight answer came first; that one was clear. But it mellowed into something subtler. Something he was less sure of.
‘Just once?’ she asked eventually.
He huffed in a deep breath. He could lie. But he’d had enough of lying. He would answer her questions truthfully. But that didn’t mean he had to volunteer anything more than she asked for.
‘No. More than once.’
‘But then you left.’ She narrowed
her eyes at him, taking a step closer. He could feel her scrutiny on his face. In his heart.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’ Her arms remained crossed, her expression unreadable now. Not quite hurt. Not quite curious. Somewhere between the two, perhaps.
‘Because the summer was over.’
He caught the huff and the eye roll that let him know she didn’t believe him. It wasn’t the whole truth. But it wasn’t a lie. ‘And you never knew about my accident?’
‘No,’ he said softly. ‘I swear I never did. Not until you told me yourself.’ It was important that she believed him on that. Whatever else had happened between them, he didn’t want her to think he was the sort of man who would have left her to cope with that alone, not if he had known what she’d been going through.
‘And why did you decide not to tell me about all this?’ This question was forced out through gritted teeth, and he understood for the first time what a risk he had taken by keeping the truth from her until now. He had to make Meena see that he had only ever acted in what he’d thought were her best interests, even if it didn’t seem that way now. He had only ever wanted to save her from the hurt that he felt every time he remembered what they had once been to each other. But, again, that was more than Meena needed to know. He wasn’t lying to her any longer.
‘It didn’t seem relevant...any more.’
‘It didn’t seem relevant to our current working relationship that we used to have sex with each other?’
He shook his head, firm in his resolve to protect himself. To protect Meena. He would give her the facts that she needed to fill in the blanks in her memories. But she had no claim on knowing his emotions. Those were his and his alone.
‘No,’ he said bluntly.
Unforgivably bluntly.
‘Why not?’ she asked, clearly determined not to let him off the hook so easily.
‘Because it’s in the past.’ He uncrossed his arms and rubbed his hands through his hair, wondering how long this Q&A was going to last. The longer it went on, the harder it was to conceal what his feelings for her had once been. And if that came out then, yes, this would get complicated. ‘I thought if you couldn’t remember it, it was less complicated not to tell you,’ he said with complete honesty.
‘So you lied to me.’ Her brow creased together in a way that made him uncomfortably aware that she was not going to take his answers at face value. Of course she wasn’t. When had she ever? She was too smart not to have figured this out. Not to keep probing at his feelings until he had revealed everything. But he was on his guard, and he wasn’t going to let her do that. ‘Even though I told you how hard it was, living with these holes in my memory.’
‘I tried not to lie,’ Guy said.
Though in truth he hadn’t really tried that hard. He should have told her sooner. He saw that now. But he had been trying to protect her. He winced a bit at that thought. That wasn’t entirely honest, he acknowledged. She wasn’t the only one he was trying to protect.
