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“You’re not wearing your ring now.” I noticed as soon as I walked in and have only just got the courage to ask.
“We split up months ago,” he says, indifferent. “And I demanded a DNA test after the birth. Not mine. I’d known it all along, somehow. My judgement was clouded, stuck in that vicious cycle working for Chrissy.”
I’m truly shocked and he sees that I am, leaning down to kiss my hand again.
“It’s been a dark time, Mirabelle.” He stares off into the distance. “It’s been a period of reflection and change. Such great change. I know that when I’m finally on the other side of this, it’ll be proven that everything happens for a reason. Doesn’t it?”
He waits to hear what I have to say, looking so hopeful.
“I used to believe that, Miles. I want to again.”
He searches my face and guesses, “You saw him this weekend, didn’t you? It was in the papers this morning that Flawless are splitting up and he’s going solo.”
I laugh sarcastically. “I didn’t know that until you just told me, but I’m not surprised. Let’s just say, the signs were there.”
Miles swallows and his lip quirks. Speaking of that man isn’t something he enjoys. “What has he said or done to you this time?”
“He, uh, apologised for what he did to me.” I feel the back of my throat close up and have to pause to gather myself. “We didn’t kiss or even hug. It wasn’t anything like that.” The relief in his eyes is barely masked even though he’s avoiding my eye. “It was sort of a goodbye. But he still wouldn’t give me details as to why he dropped me so suddenly. Except to say he thought he was saving me.”
“Fucking cunt,” he growls under his breath.
“I could tell you things I did for him and the band, things that would make even you—working in PR, covering up the most heinous actions oftentimes—wince like never before. Suffice to say, as I told him on Friday night, I prostituted my soul to stay in that job so I could be close to him. Because that’s how in love with him I was.”
I use Miles’s hanky again to dab my face. Yep, I shouldn’t have worn makeup today, but the red rings around my eyes looked bad enough that I thought I needed it—and here I am—crying it off again.
“He knew it, as well… he knew exactly what he was doing. He knew it, all along. How I was worth more than what I was doing for them. So much more.”
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” he agrees.
I stare him right in the eye, chew my lip, and admit without shame, “All I want right now is to take you home with me, get lost inside your arms and forget myself and everything else. There’s nothing I want more.”
He presses his lips together and covers his mouth, his next words muffled. “There’s a but.”
“It’s just not the right…”
“…time,” he says, finishing the sentence for me.
We both know it, but I just needed to say it out loud. If it were the right time, I’d have him buried so deep inside me, I wouldn’t be here crying about another man. I’d only be screaming his name and never another’s, not for as long as I live.
That’s what I realised during Albie’s visit: the person I used to be loved Albie.
The old me loved the pain, the unrequitedness, the romance of it… the forbidden. She was a girl whose understanding of it all was naïve, mistaken and misguided.
The person I am now found something very different and much more special with Miles. Something real and imperfect, utterly flawed and outrageously inconvenient.
Something that stops you in your tracks and changes you. End of.
But things that are based on a trauma bond never last. I realised that when I saw those pictures of my mother and father. It’s because he told me he scared her, but was once, what did he say? A vigilante of sorts, but also the type of man people wouldn’t expect to win in a fight.
A deceptive, dark horse… a hidden little psycho.
He won her, in the beginning, because he saved her from something… didn’t he?
“I can’t wait to see what you become,” he says, biting the tip of his thumb.
“Be careful what you ask for,” I laugh, lifting his hand and holding it with both of mine, then pressing it to my cheek, my eyes closed. I breathe deeply and close my eyes, then turn my face and kiss the centre of his palm, smiling because he smells of the sandalwood bodywash he uses. Divine.
I let him have his hand back and he smells it since I just had it pressed against my cheek. He grins happily and tucks his arms into himself, the draughtiness in here a little chilly at times.
