“Aidan—”
“And I’ll be changing the locks to the flat and to the building.”
Another sob. “Aidan, I’m so sorry.”
“Aye, I know. I can see that. But I still believe you’re only sorry you got caught. You’re not sorry you did what you did, Laine, and until you are, our friendship ceases to exist.”
There was silence, followed by the soft sounds of footsteps, then the door to the flat opened and closed.
Feeling sick for Aidan that he’d had to have such a confrontation, I hurried out to find him sitting on the couch, staring out the window. I took the couch opposite him. “Are you okay? Can I get you anything?”
He looked at me, his handsome face bathed in the glow of the morning sun, his green eyes so bright with the sunlight dancing in them. My breath caught. Not at how attracted to him I was because I knew I might never get used to that.
No, I gasped at his expression. It was open, bare, like he wore his soul upon his face for me to see. And all I saw was love and anguish.
“Tell me. Explain to me exactly why we can’t have a proper relationship. Explain it again. Make me understand.”
My chest felt heavy, like something was pressing down on it, and I could hear my shallow breaths. I knew that something was happening here. Something that was going to decide our fate together in that very moment. Moreover, after hearing Laine and Aidan’s brief encounter, I knew this man was owed honesty.
“I don’t know how to explain without seeming as selfish as Laine.”
“I want the truth, no matter how it sounds.”
“It’s like I told you before. The truth is that I like my life now, Aidan. I’m in school, and I have the play, and it’s everything I dreamed of having. You and I are messy and complicated, and we hurt. It’s all too much with us, and I don’t want to go back to the girl who was afraid of losing you. She wasn’t strong. She was in pain. And that was mostly because I didn’t like her very much. But I like myself now. I’m not the girl who used to think she wasn’t good enough for you. I don’t need you to bolster my self-esteem. I like myself,” I repeated.
He frowned. “I’m glad, Pixie. I really am. But did you ever think that maybe I’m the one who doesn’t like themselves very much?”
No. I hadn’t. “Why wouldn’t you like yourself?”
“Because I resented my sister for dying. And just when I thought maybe I wasn’t such a bad guy, the kid I loved was ripped out of my arms and I couldn’t do a fucking thing to stop it.” His voice broke. “She doesn’t look at me the same way, Pixie. Ever since … I’m not her hero anymore.”
Tears filled my eyes, remembering the way Sylvie loved him. I hadn’t asked him about her enough. I hadn’t wanted to cause him pain, but maybe he needed to talk about it. “I don’t believe that for a second.”
He looked away, but not before I saw the wet in his eyes. “Aye, well, you weren’t there to see Sylvie when she saw me for the first time after their move over there.”
I knew if he felt that way that there wasn’t anything I could say or do to make it better. Only time would handle those feelings. However, I needed him to understand something too. “Us being in a real relationship won’t bring her back, if that’s where this conversation is going.”
He jerked like I’d hit him. “I don’t fucking think that.”
“Well, do you think being with me will miraculously make you like yourself better, because I can tell you from experience, Aidan, it won’t. Only time can give you that.”
“Aye, no doubt you’re right,” he said, eyes blazing. “But in the meantime, I don’t want to lose the one thing in my life that makes every other thing in it worthwhile. You’re everything to me, Nora. Every bloody thing. I never knew happiness like it until I met you. And maybe that scares the shit out of you, but news fucking flash: it scares the shit out of me too. I don’t know if it’s fear holding you back or if what you really need right now is to be alone. All I know is that I won’t love you selfishly. I was going to keep you in this fucked-up arrangement you suggested, hoping that somehow loving you, even if only through sex, would bring you back to me.”
He stood abruptly, looking down at me with that love and anguish that made me shiver in my seat. “But I can’t do it, Nora. I can’t take what you don’t really want to give me. If you’re to be mine, I need all of you to be mine, because all of me is yours.”
Tears spilled down my cheeks, and I couldn’t speak for the lump thick in my throat.
Crushing disappointment strained his expression and he looked at the floor. His voice was hard as he said, “I’ve been offered a job producing a studio album in New York. I’m going to take it. I’ll most likely get a flight out on Monday. Concerning you and me? Once I’m gone, I’m gone for good. I won’t stay on this roller coaster.”
Leaving me?
Aidan gone?
I couldn’t process that properly.
NO!
I’d already lost him and now I was going to lose him again.
This time … my fault.
“I’m going for a walk, and when I come back, I’m sure you’ll be gone.” He strode toward the door, bending down to put on shoes that didn’t match his sweat pants. He didn’t even seem to see them. As he stood, the scream inside of me threatened to burst out, and I felt the sound coming as he opened the door.
But before it could, before he left, he turned back to me. “If you figure out that everyone changes, bit by bit, day by day, Nora, while somehow staying the same, then come find me. If you figure out that we’ve got nothing to fear from the people we were yesterday, and that you certainly don’t, that I know who you are and I love you, then come find me. Just because it takes more than falling in love to find yourself doesn’t mean that losing yourself in another person can’t be fucking beautiful. I promise you, Pixie, being lost in each other for the rest of our lives will be the best thing to have ever happened to either of us.
“And if you figure that out in time, come find me before I leave.”
To say I was lost in a fog of confusion over the next few days was an understatement. I felt an itch inside me, a constant reminder that Aidan was walking out of my life. It didn’t seem real to me that Thursday morning in his apartment could be the last time I’d ever see him.
It didn’t have to be.
Aidan loved me.
Loved me.
Loved me.
Just me. Not the ghosts between us or all those reasons we were drawn together in the first place.
Just me.
Like I loved him.
So why couldn’t I shed my fear that by being with him, I’d become someone broken and lost?
“Because that’s who you were when you first met him?” Seonaid said when I finally got up the courage to ask her.
It was Saturday night, I’d blown through a terrible rehearsal with the rest of my cast members, and Seonaid had come over after I’d called to explain the countdown to Monday.
She brought beer.
“Thanks.”
“Well, you were. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, Nora. You lost a lot as a child, and then you left your family to be with a man who didn’t really get you, loved you, but by God, he didn’t understand you, and,” she sucked in a teary breath, “he died. Too much to lose and all it did was fill your head with guilt that didn’t belong to you. You were broken and lost. Finding Aidan made you feel less alone when you needed it most. He mended you, babe, whether you want to admit it or not. Finding him gave you faith that this world is filled with good. And then you lost him. You thought he walked away. And it broke what was left of you.
“But this time, you knew you had to put yourself together. And you did. You became a survivor and a fighter, and you went after all the things you wanted in life. That’s who you are now. So why on earth would you run from this thing you want in life? Because we both know you want Aidan Lennox more than you want anything. He’s consumed you from the moment you met him.”
That word, though: consume. That didn’t sound very healthy. Not at all.
“Does Roddy consume you, Seonaid?”
She smiled, lowering her eyes to the glass of beer in her hand. “I know to everyone else it looks like the bugger bewitches and bothers and bewilders me. But when we’re alone, he’s someone else. He gives me a piece of him that belongs to only me. And aye, he consumes me with it.” She looked at me. “If that’s madness, Nora, then I gladly give myself over to it.”
I envied her, her clarity of mind. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Talk to Jim,” Seonaid said.
“What?”
“Visit Jim. I like to believe he’s not really gone.” Tears wet her eyes. “And I talk to him, liking the idea that he understands us all now better than he ever did when he was alive. So talk to him. Maybe everything that has happened will start to make sense, and all the pieces will make a path that’ll lead you to the right decision.”
I took a swallow of my beer to avoid bursting into tears. And when I thought I could speak without crying, I said, “You’re the wisest, dearest friend I’ve ever known, Seonaid McAlister.”
The pressure of her smile caused her tears to spill over.
Sun dapple from the leaves on the tree above Jim’s grave caused patterns to dance across the dark gray of his headstone. I hadn’t been to visit since before I left for Indiana, afraid of seeing it in the same way I was afraid of returning to Aidan.
“I’m sorry, Jim.” I placed a hand on the top of the stone. “It’s about time I stopped evading the things that scare me.”
I studied the gold lettering on his stone.
James Stuart McAlister
June 12, 1990 to July 15, 2014
His life a beautiful memory, his absence a silent grief.
I didn’t remember discussing Jim’s epitaph. I know Angie wouldn’t have gone ahead with something without my approval, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember discussing it. She’d chosen beautifully.
I hadn’t been in love with Jim.
But he’d been my closest friend for a number of years, and I loved and missed my friend.
The memories of our life together flooded me as if Jim were pumping them up into the hand I’d placed on his headstone. The nervous excitement of running away together, his patient gentleness the night we made love for the first time. How scared I’d been. How it took weeks for me to feel comfortable enough around him to start enjoying sex with him. How when we were together like that, I used to stare into his eyes, wishing that the connection I sought would somehow magically appear between us. I’d get lost in his lovemaking because Jim was good at it, and he was not a selfish lover, but afterward when we were finished, I’d feel more alone than ever.
As alone as I’d felt in that small, cramped room back in that unhappy house in Indiana.
Jim wasn’t the reason I’d lost myself.
I lost myself the moment my dad stopped loving me and started hating the world. Or maybe that wasn’t right, either. Maybe I was too young then to have even have found myself. Maybe Dad had thrown me off course. And Jim’s waves had buffeted me to the wrong shore.
And losing Aidan had forced me to get up and keep moving until I found what I was looking for. I found me.
I knew I’d never have found myself with Jim by my side. That I would’ve walked away from him. Hadn’t I already made up my mind to do so before he died? I could’ve done it too, because he never made me feel like Aidan does. I cared about Jim, but it wasn’t unselfish affection. I would have hurt him to walk away. And the sad truth is that as badly as I’d have felt doing it, it wouldn’t have broken me.
But walking away from Aidan, hurting Aidan, was going to break me.
There was no denying I was unequivocally in love with Aidan Lennox.
And by choosing my fears over him, I was loving him selfishly.
Wasn’t it time to trust him? To believe him when he said that he would love me for who I was now?
“Thank you, Jim, for bringing me here,” I bent down to whisper against the stone. “I did love you. In my own way.”
I straightened and walked swiftly away, making a vow that I would visit Jim more often. It was unwise to sweep the pieces of my past behind me simply because some of those pieces were jagged and painful. Each was a piece of a jigsaw, and I was the puzzle. I wasn’t complete without them. Jim deserved to be remembered, and I needed to embrace the memories of the old me too.
Because Aidan was right.
I was still that Nora. I was also eight-year-old Nora and twelve-year-old Nora, and I was Nora today. I couldn’t be who I was now without them all.
And if I liked myself as much as I proclaimed to, then why was I desperate to forget them, as if ashamed they’d ever been me? There were going to be days, hopefully few and far between, when I didn’t love myself very much for whatever reason, because I was human and no one liked themselves every day. Trying to protect myself from that was futile, and pushing away Aidan to protect myself from that was sightless and thoughtless. Totally unwise. That was a diplomatic way of saying I’d been a blind fool!
I sighed, feeling the pressure that had been on my chest since Thursday morning lift. I breathed deep but not easy. There was a man out there, after all, who I needed to convince to stay.
To forgive me.
To love me, even on the days I didn’t love myself.
A neighbor was coming out of Aidan’s building as I approached, and I hurried toward him. “Hold the door.”
The man, perhaps in his fifties, startled and stopped, the poodle on the lead in his hand tugging forward. The door started to shut, and I launched into it, accidentally knocking the man out of the way.
“I’m so sorry.” I rushed past him.
“I hope you know someone—” His words were abruptly cut off by the building door slamming shut.
Palms slick, my underarms in much the same condition, I hit the elevator door button and bounced on my feet as it opened.
The ascent to Aidan’s floor seemed to take five million times longer than usual. I blew out an agitated breath between my lips, praying he was home.
The elevator binged, and I swear my heart stopped as those doors rolled up. Aidan’s door stood beyond, aloof and solid.
There was a giant possibility my future was on the other side.
“Don’t be sick, Nora,” I whispered to myself as I stepped off the elevator. “Not sexy.”
It took me a moment, staring at the brass number on his door, to gather the courage to lift my arm. Another moment to curl my hand into a fist.
And a few after that to knock.
The quiet behind it only increased my pulse until there was so much blood rushing in my ears, I wondered if I was imagining the footsteps on the other side of the door.
Suddenly, I was flooded with light as the door opened.
Aidan looked down at me.
Waiting.
Expectant.
“I love you too,” I said.
I gasped for breath, falling back on the bed, naked and covered in sweat.
Aidan collapsed next to me, his breathing also shallow as he tried to catch it.
“I take it that means I’m forgiven for being a drama queen and that you love me too?” I asked the ceiling.
The mattress shook beside me with his laughter. “I love you too, Pixie.”
Joy suffused me, and I turned my head, my hair rustling on the pillow, to meet his gaze.
His reaction to my confession had been gratifyingly fast and demonstrative. One second I was on the other side of the door, and the next I was in his bed and we were tearing each other’s clothes off.
I didn’t see much as he dragged me like a caveman to his room, but what I did see was no evidence of his departure tomorrow for the States. “When is your flight supposed to leave?”
“What flight?” He frowned.
“Your flight. To New York.”
“Ready to be shot of
me already?”
I smacked him playfully. “Of course not.”
“I didn’t really take the job.”
Confused, and feeling outrage building, I sat up. “What?”
He sat up too, his expression placating. “Look, I would lose my good name if I agreed to a job and then backed out at the last minute, which we both know I would’ve done when you came back to me. I was only going to accept the job if you didn’t come to me.”
Yes, definitely outraged. “So you lied to me? You manipulative ass!” I attempted to lunge off the bed but his strong arms wrapped around my waist, hauling me back down onto it. Then he pinned me to the mattress with his hands wrapped tight around my wrists.
“What? No. Off. Now, Aidan.”
“I love it when you’re bossy,” he growled playfully against my lips.
“Aidan!”
He rolled his eyes and pulled back, but I could see that amusement still dancing in his eyes. “I told a wee white lie. A little story … for my storyteller.”
“Oh, don’t get cute. You lied.”
“I played with the truth a wee bit. But just a bit.” Aidan let go of my arms, but he didn’t get off me. His expression changed. “I didn’t know what else to do. When you left the first time, you know it had a massive impact on me. I hoped that the idea of me leaving you would provide you with perspective—a real chance to work out whether you loved me without it dragging on for ages. You know I’m not a patient man, Nora.”
“It wasn’t about whether or not I loved you, Aidan. That was never in question. I’ve loved you since that day on Portobello Beach. I was afraid of myself and the past.” I sat up, curling a hand around the nape of his neck and drawing him close to me. “But I love you more than anything else. I’m done telling everyone that I’ve moved on; now I’m actually going to live like I’ve moved on. With you by my side.”
He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against mine. “And I’ll never leave your side, Pixie. I’m yours.”
“And I’m yours.”
He lifted his head but only to draw me tighter against his chest. His hands caressed my naked back, his eyes filled with desire and tenderness.