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He stirred the cocoa quickly and left the dirty spoon in the sink, and then he made his way back to the lounge. She was still sitting on the couch, shivering beneath her blanket, and she thanked him quietly when he passed her the drink. He sat down beside her, saying nothing for a long while and hoping she would be the one to break the silence. Eventually, though, it became too much to bear.
“It’s nice to see you again,” he said softly.
Her hand twitched, and for a moment, it appeared as though she planned to reach for him, but she then tightened her grip on the mug as she sighed.
“I couldn’t keep lying to myself,” she said. “Or to you. None of it was fair to you, and you deserve to know the whole truth. When you do… well, feel free to send me back out into the rain, and I’ll understand. But I can’t keep living like this.”
“Rose, what are you talking about?” Luke frowned, watching her carefully. With each word she spoke, she seemed to be holding back a thousand more.
“I mean with Alex.”
Luke’s jaw tightened. He hadn’t expected the name of the man who’d once been his best friend to enter the air so soon. Rose seemed to sense this, as she hurried onward.
“Because I don’t love him.”
Luke’s pulse had begun to accelerate, and he allowed himself a moment’s pause before questioning her. He couldn’t appear too eager for a particular answer—he’d nearly come to accept things as they were, and he couldn’t allow the walls he’d put in place to shield himself from this particular brand of pain to fall too quickly. “You don’t?”
“No. I thought I did, but… Luke, I never stopped loving you.”
For a long moment, he expected to wake up and find that this entire experience had been a strange, beautiful dream, like the ones he’d had before in which she’d said the same words. But the scene in front of him showed no sign of changing, and the room and the couch and the fire’s warmth and her warmth were no closer to fading.
“Then why did you leave?” he asked. He wondered after he’d spoken whether the question was too direct, but he couldn’t rescind it, and regardless, he needed to understand.
Rose stared at the mug in her hand, and her shoulders lifted and fell with a deep breath. “I was pregnant.”
Luke opened his mouth, but no words would form. His throat was suddenly dry.
“I was going to tell you,” Rose went on quickly, “but I didn’t know how. I was so scared, Luke. After what my parents did to Morgan, I didn’t know what to do.”
Luke remembered that Rose’s sister had gotten pregnant in high school and had had to move in with her boyfriend’s family—the Mercers had been too embarrassed to keep her under their roof. But Rose had been in college when that had happened and when she’d left Luke; they had both been less than a semester away from graduation. What could her parents have done to her at that point?
“I’d been trying to figure out how to tell you for a week, since I’d found out. But after that night at the bar, I—” She paused, closing her eyes.
The night in question attempted to flood Luke’s mind, but he shut it out. He refused to think about it right now, when he could almost convince himself that the damage it had caused would be undone.
After a moment had passed, Rose opened her eyes, and the first tear slipped down her cheek. “I was completely terrified,” she said. “I couldn’t handle what my life was turning into, and I needed to get away and clear my head for a while. I didn’t think I would stay gone, Luke. And I didn’t know if you wanted to be a father yet, and I… well, before I managed to convince myself to tell anyone at all, I… I lost the baby. And I was alone with that, with knowing that I’d failed at something as simple as keeping that child alive when I should’ve been able to. I’d failed them, and I’d failed you, too. And I didn’t know how to tell you that—to tell you that I wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t handle that every time I saw you in the hallway or your name came up on my phone, I wanted to tell you. I wanted you to know that I was dying inside, but it was so selfish of me to think about sharing that pain when you were already going through so much. I thought it would hurt you less to stay away. That might’ve been stupid and I—I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry for what I put you through. I never wanted to hurt you, and I had to go and wreck everything, and—”
As she spoke, her tears began in earnest, and by the time she’d lost the ability to continue, her trembling had begun once again. Luke listened to every word, every crack in her voice, and as the pieces clicked into place, he felt as though one enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders only to be replaced by another. He’d lost a child he hadn’t known existed. He’d almost been a father. He could’ve had a son or a daughter with the woman he’d loved more than anything else in the world.
His chest ached, and the pain worked its way up his throat. He reached out to shift the mug gently from her hand to the table and pulled her into his arms. She rested her head against his shoulder as she wept.
Minutes passed slowly as he stroked her hair and she clung to his shirt. He felt her warmth against him, felt the curves of her body pressed to him, and the familiarity of having her so close sent a shiver through him that he couldn’t stop. His anger wasn’t completely gone; he didn’t believe that her pregnancy was the only reason she’d been scared enough to leave him. What had happened at the bar had certainly played a part in it, though he wasn’t about to press that angle at the moment.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he breathed. “You did not fail, and there was nothing you could’ve done to prevent what happened to the baby.” He tightened his arms around her and pressed a kiss to her hair, breathing in as he did so the combination of vanilla and cinnamon he’d come to associate with her.
“I don’t love him, Luke. I think I was trying to—trying to get back what I had with you. That was impossible. I could never feel for anyone else the way I feel about you.”
Luke stared into the slowly dying fire as his hand unconsciously resumed the stroking of Rose’s hair. He’d lost one chance at having her, and part of him didn’t want to allow that chance to slip away again.
But another part of him wanted to laugh. To close the door on this chapter of his life and the pain it had already caused him. She could hurt him like no one else could, and he wasn’t convinced that she wouldn’t do so a second time. How could he trust her not to run? If he got too attached—if he let himself love her again—losing her twice might kill him.
“I need some time,” he said quietly. “I need to think.”
She nodded, wiping the moisture from her cheeks. “I understand. I’m so sorry to dump all this on you at once. When I left him, I didn’t know where else to go. I’m planning to stay at my sister’s, but she lives in Missouri, and I can’t exactly get there before—”
“You can stay here tonight,” he said. “We’ll talk more in the morning, and we’ll go from there. We’ll… figure something out.”
Maybe he could keep her nearby long enough to determine whether she really planned on staying this time.
