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“When you told me you loved me, I panicked.” Clark’s words make me pause, holding a ladle full of hot chocolate above the pan.
“I didn’t know what to do with it. I… I didn’t know how to be loved. I was pretty certain I’d fuck up loving you back. And… I admit, I didn’t know if I could be…” His inhale is audible. I start to ladle the hot chocolate into two mugs. “I was afraid of how I felt about you. It was like everything hurt when I wasn’t with you, and when I was. I knew, or I thought, you would be the rest of my life, and I was foolish enough to think I wasn’t ready for that. I had a ridiculous seed of doubt that grew and… I listened to people I shouldn’t have.”
His words sting, and yet they give me that light feeling in my chest I used to get around him — the sickly sweet drop of my abdomen, like I’m free-falling from a plane, terrified but high on adrenaline, on him. It wasn’t all in my head; what we had was real. I loved him so much I’d have moved heaven and earth for him, done anything for him, been whatever he needed. Now he’s telling me he listened to other people. He walked away instead of talking to me. He didn’t fall as hard as I did. But he felt something. Something strong enough to scare him.
I stir the hot chocolate in the mugs until the glaze disappears from my eyes, then I hand a mug to Clark. “That took you four years.”
He takes the mug. “A regret to put all others in its shadow.”
I wrap my hands around my drink and move to the sofa by the fire. I unfasten the straps around my ankles, take off my shoes and lift my legs up to the sofa. Clark comes to join me, lifting one knee onto the cushion and facing me, his mug in one hand, his opposite arm propped on the back of the sofa.
“I don’t want to make excuses, but I want you to understand that me leaving wasn’t about you. It was my failing. You were everything. You did and said everything right. I wasn’t ready for you then. I didn’t deserve you.”
I don’t know whether to be grateful for the sentiment or insulted that he thought I’d blame myself. “And you think you deserve me now?”
“I couldn’t presume to deserve you, Dayna. That’s your call. But you changed me. It took me a long time to realise it and even longer to actually do things differently. But you were the catalyst. Nothing was the same after you. Fun wasn’t quite as fun. Jokes weren’t as funny without your laugh. And… women, sex… they didn’t compare to you.”
I wince at the mention and thought of him being with other women, but I know the feeling. Being with someone else after Clark was robotic; it was necessary fuel but never an indulgence that I felt through my veins or rushing to my head. I don’t tell him that. Instead, I do what Doctor Holland does to me; I leave a silence for him to fill. He’s talking, really talking, and I want to hear it, I think.
“I was angry, too. Really fucking angry. I’d always been a commodity to my family… my parents at least. I was something they had to do — a legacy, nothing more. I wasn’t loved like you were. I wasn’t even loved the way Kathryn and Spencer are. God, if I ever have a family of my own, I’ll do everything in my power to show them how much they mean to me. It wasn’t like that for me. I was just something to be moulded into what my father needed. I didn’t know how to love or be loved, how to really appreciate something. And I listened to them. I took their crap on board.”
He sips his hot chocolate. A tactical pause before he tells me more that I have a feeling I won’t want to hear but that I need to understand.
“My mother and father didn’t approve of the Cross name. They still don’t. My father’s prejudice is from oil, I think.” He glances up at me sheepishly. I know exactly what the industry thinks of Roger “cost-cutting” Cross. “My mother’s dislike is fuelled by my father, or that you aren’t second-in-line to the throne.”
I actually laugh. “The female oil mogul who didn’t go to the nation’s best private school, who swears and who comes from a split family. No, I can imagine that wouldn’t sit too well in discussion over lunch in Knightsbridge.”
His lips curve slightly in a sad smile. “I realised too late that I shouldn’t take orders from my dysfunctional parents. But I did realise.”
“But you never came back.”
He looks at me over the rim of his mug. “No. I wanted to. More than once. Then my father had a heart attack.”
I watch my fingers turning my mug in my lap, ashamed. “I know. What the industry didn’t tell me, Teddy did. I asked him about it, but I never called you or came to visit.”
“Don’t you dare apologise to me. I did a lot worse. It’s a wonder you even cared enough to ask Ted.”
I look up at him. “I never stopped caring, Clark.”
“Neither did I.” He lifts his knee an inch higher so it’s touching mine, and he turns the ends of my hair in his fingertips. “My father has a heart condition. The risk of him having another heart attack was too high.”
“That’s why you got made up to CEO so quickly.”
His blue eyes are troubled. It could be from talking about us, but I suspect I’ve also hit a nerve and the real motive behind him wanting the Persian Gulf well. “The board of directors went with it, despite my age, because they knew he would be behind me, in my ear for every big decision. With the exception of Ted, they’re still my father’s board, not mine.”
“Is that why you want the well? To do something that’s yours?”
He smiles. “You see me. You always did. You saw through all my bullshit like nobody else could.”
“Maybe there’s something under all that bullshit you don’t realise is there.”
“Only you would try to see something good in me after everything. You’re the only person who’s ever had faith in me. What a mess I made.” He shakes his head and swirls what’s left of his drink in his mug. “When I got made CEO, my father said things had to change. I had to settle down, start behaving like a man, forget what dreams I had and do what was right by the family name. That night, at the dinner eighteen months ago, when we slept together, I was already set to take Connie out the next day. She was apparently what I needed. Our families have known each other for years. Jay, you remember him? He’s one of… was one of my best friends. He’s also Connie’s brother.” Clark pulls his hand away from my hair and takes a gulp of hot chocolate. “I’m not trying to twist things. I did want to take her out, but that was before… Connie, you know, she’s a good woman. A man would be lucky to have her.”
“But not you?”
“At the dinner, you were upset. I shouldn’t have slept with you. I mean, I wanted to, God did I want to, but I shouldn’t have taken advantage of you like that.”
“You didn’t do anything I didn’t ask you to.”
