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“You’re too much for me.”
Ah. Here it was. And that was a polite way of saying she didn’t want to get too close.
“I need to tell you why.”
“Am I going to like it?” He should shut up and let her get it over with. The sooner the disappointment gut punched him, the sooner he’d straighten up.
“It’s not a question of like.”
There wasn’t much else to say. He put a hand to his head, combed his fingers through sweat and gel that’d lost its hold. “If it’s about the dress, we can return it.”
“It’s not about the dress.”
Her little finger against his, the lightest pressure. What did it mean if she kept the dress? It wasn’t supposed to mean anything. He’d spent the morning convincing her of that, so he couldn’t pretend it meant anything now. Except it did. If she didn’t confess to being a mass murderer fresh out on parole, or say she couldn’t date him unless he tried some crackpot miracle cure, part seaweed, part meteor, he might get to take that sheath of gossamer off her warm body.
She moved her hand away. He was left with just her voice. “I told you my husband, Hamish, was injured and our marriage wasn’t good. You know we’re getting a divo
rce.”
He tucked his chin down, not sure he could keep his expression neutral, wanting to hide it from her. She was going to tell him having one disabled guy in her life was her quota and she wanted to be friends. He couldn’t fault the logic, though it scraped him raw.
“I used to be different.”
Five words, not what he expected. All he heard was regret. She was going to tell him something that mattered deeply.
“I was hurt in the same accident that put gave Hamish a brain injury.”
Fuck. He jerked his head up and around to face her.
“You can’t see my scars, but they’re there all the same. I don’t. I can’t. This is hard.”
Her distress fluttered, wings of pain beating her breath. She didn’t need to do this. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I’m supposed to talk about it. Talking about it helps to normalise it. And I have to tell you because it might change how you feel about me.”
He needed more than her voice, because her grief was an arrow point in his chest. “Sit closer, please.”
“No. I have to finish this.”
He could move, slide across to her, but she clearly didn’t want that. She sucked air in stages. It ratcheted into her throat like a reverse sob. She was building her defences.
“We were going to be the next Coldplay, the next Oasis. Hamish and Rafe, Don, Freddy and Clive. Hamish would write the songs, Rafe would arrange them and I was going to give them the kind of sound that would make us all rich and famous. That was the dream. We wanted to give the world new music to dance to.”
“You didn’t get the chance.”
She shifted in the silence and all he read was despair.
“There was a student in a bunch of my classes called Jeffrey Sealstrom. He was brilliant. Topped the year, hardly ever bothered to open a book. He was one of those people who could make you nervous. Partly it was his intelligence; mostly it was his temper. He would menace the lecturers if he thought they were wrong. If you got in his way, or he thought you were wasting his time, he could get physical. He’d smash things, knock things over. Most people tried to stay out of his way. They were the sensible ones.” Her voice, matter-of-fact until now, wavered. “I tried to help him.”
Damon moved; he needed his hands on her. He got the flat of her palm on his shoulder holding him off.
“Don’t.” She shuffled further around the curved seat away from him, taking his equilibrium with her.
“The only reason Hamish got hurt was because he was trying to protect me from Jeffrey.”
“Jesus.”
“I told you I wanted to be an audio engineer because sound doesn’t lie. You asked me who’d lied to me. No one did. It was just that I failed to see clearly. I thought Jeffrey was this quirky genius, a freak who was misunderstood. I liked him. I knew he wasn’t normal, but I didn’t judge him. We became friends. I was a naïve fool.”
