AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He placed his hands on her shoulders, ran his thumbs across her collarbones. His face was a mask of so many conflicting emotions—confusion, frustration, pain.
‘Then I’m sorry for that, too. It was never your fault. And I swear, it had nothing to do with you. You’ve got to believe me. It was me. It was what I came from. It just all became too much, OK?’
‘No, it’s not OK.’ She shook her head, folding her arms around her midriff, the black hole still huge in her belly. ‘What was so horrific you couldn’t tell me about it? I loved you, Luke, and you abandoned me. If it really wasn’t me, or Lizzie, or even another woman, then what was it?’
Panic clawed at Luke’s throat. She didn’t look angry or bitter or even resentful. That he could have handled. And deflected and ignored. She simply looked devastated.
And that he couldn’t ignore. Not any more. Because unlike all the other women whom he’d slept with but had been so careful never to get too clos
e to, with Halle the sadness mattered.
He thought he’d healed himself. He thought he’d picked up the pieces and remade himself from the ground up. And finally become a man, ready to own up to his responsibilities, instead of a terrified kid.
But how could he have? When he’d never been able to own up to how much pain he’d caused her?
Time to man up, Best. Because you’ll never stop running until you do.
He strode away from her to slump down on the bed, his body rigid with tension and shame. He couldn’t look at her and say what he had to say.
‘I guess the reason why is pretty simple really. My parents were both chronic alcoholics,’ he said. ‘She mostly drank to escape. But he was a mean drunk who couldn’t control his temper any more than he could control his drinking.’
‘He hit you?’
‘Occasionally.’ He shrugged, remembering the backhanded slaps across the face, those nasty little jabs to the belly that would leave you retching, the mean pinches, the vicious kicks. The parade of everyday abuse that he had lived in fear of as a child but had eventually become as accustomed to as breathing. ‘Generally, he pounded my youngest brother, Curt, though,’ he said. ‘Curt was small for his age and weedy, the runt of the litter. Plus, he had a real knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He pretty much used to wet himself every time Brian …’ He stopped, amazed that he still couldn’t call the guy by anything but his given name. ‘Every time my old man was in the same room. Which would probably explain why Curt was forever pinching my clean underwear.’
Bloody hell, how could it still be so tough to talk about? Even after all these years and the thousands of euros’ worth of therapy? Why did the old ghosts still have the power to make his palms sweat and his head hurt?
But then she sat down beside him, the mattress tilting, and placed her hand on his thigh. Warm through the damp towelling. ‘Why didn’t social services intervene?’ she said.
‘They didn’t know.’ He thrust shaking fingers through his hair. ‘The therapist said, when you come from that, you learn not to tell. You learn to keep secrets, because that’s your normal, your reality. And you convince yourself your thoughts, your feelings, don’t matter, because they fucking didn’t. The place was always a tip. Soiled nappies everywhere. Rotting food on the plates piled in the sink. The smell of cigarette butts and stale Special Brew still makes me gag to this day. They didn’t hug us, or care about us, or look after us. And a part of me always believed it was our fault, not theirs.’
‘I had no idea it was as bad as that.’
His thigh muscles bunched beneath her palm, and guilt rolled through her at the stark, grim picture he was painting. He’d said it wasn’t her fault, but maybe it had been. A little bit.
It had been so easy for her to romanticise and exploit the few things she knew about Luke’s home life as a teenager. He’d been the quintessential bad boy. Wounded and wanting, someone who could love her just for her. Unlike her parents, who had always set limits and conditions on their affection.
Leaving home at seventeen, shacking up with Luke, having Lizzie a year later had been an easy way to liberate herself from the weight of those expectations. But all the time it had been the opposite of romantic for him.
‘Of course you didn’t know.’ He focused on her, the haunted look she remembered shadowing his eyes. ‘Why would I ever tell you? You were my escape from all that. Being around you was like having this force field that protected me from them.’ He covered her hand on his leg, circled the skin with his thumb. ‘The first time we made love, you held me afterwards. You said all sorts of cheesy things about being in love with me.’ He chuckled. ‘You were such a starry-eyed romantic. But it felt so good to have you hug me like that. To have you hold me like you cared. You made it better, at least for a while.’
‘And then I got pregnant with Lizzie. And you were trapped again.’ Even if she couldn’t have made the connection then, she could see it clearly now. She’d been playing at being a grown-up, while he’d been looking for a way out.
How young and naive she’d been. Because as much as she’d wanted to nurture him in their early days, she’d abandoned the quest as soon as she had Lizzie to focus on. Lizzie, her beautiful baby girl, who had been tiny and new and needy, and had none of the frustrating complexities, the unbreachable defences of her father.
And how ironic, that it had been those dark unknowable qualities in Luke—his moods, his secrets, his inability to share and discuss—that she had blamed him for later on, that had made him so wildly attractive to her in the first place.
She blew out a breath.
God, what a mess we made, both of us.
‘We should have waited,’ she said. ‘We were far too young to have a baby.’
‘Well, thank God we didn’t wait.’ He hooked a tendril of hair behind her ear. ‘Or we wouldn’t have Lizzie now.’
‘I know, but even so, you weren’t ready for that kind of responsibility.’
The tightness in her chest loosened. The tightness she had refused to acknowledge for years but had always been there, crouching under her heart, ready to pounce out of the shadows if she didn’t keep it ruthlessly controlled.
