“For work,” she repeats, looking confused. “Church, we fucked for a year before the wedding. I wasn’t even your student that semester. If you were really worried about work, then why propose? Why go through the whole song and dance of helping me find a venue? Paying for my dress?”
“You would have been my student again,” I point out, even though it doesn’t matter now. But with our department the way it was and with Charlotte as clever and driven as she was—and with me as possessive as I was—it would have been inevitable. In the classroom or on a dig—she would have been mine again. And I would have made sure it was so, because I never did trust anyone else with the jewel that is my Charlotte’s mind. “But that you had been, that you were still enrolled at the university, that was damning enough. And I didn’t realize it until the director told me.”
Her brows pull together. “The director?”
“He came to my flat the morning of the wedding. You may remember that he was dating my sister at the time—and it was my sister who took the liberty of calling my guests and telling them the wedding was off before I knew anything about it.”
Her eyes close for a moment. “So that’s why none of your guests were there.”
“Yes. And he persuaded me that it would be the end of my career in every meaningful sense if I married a student—not to mention it would have ended your career too, before it had ever started.”
The furrow between her brow hasn’t gone away, and I kiss it because I can’t help myself. “I don’t see how my career would have been affected.”
“Can you not? How many people would’ve assumed that you’d fucked your way to prominence instead of earning it on your own merit? We’d know differently, but that hardly matters when the doubt would’ve pervaded every space you worked in. I couldn’t lose my work, Charlotte, but just as much, I refused to lose yours. I couldn’t bear the thought of stamping out your future just so I could stamp my name on your legal existence.” But my hold on her tightens as I consider that none of it mattered anyway. She still lost her future.
“Then why didn’t you answer my calls? Why didn’t you show up to tell me this? Why didn’t you face the aborted ceremony with me? Why didn’t you find me that night? Why didn’t you find me the next day?”
This. I’m ashamed of this almost more than the decision not to show up to my own wedding. I owed her everything, and I especially owed her the truth. “It took me two or three hours to persuade the director not to make our engagement known, even after I decided not to go the wedding. We’ve never gotten along, him and me, and he was torn between finally having some kind of political leverage over me or being tainted by association, since he was fucking my sister. By the time I’d convinced him not to poison my career and yours, the wedding was long over—it was why I’d sent the car, you understand. Not to be high-handed or dismissive, although I admit I’m often that, but because I was determined to save the future before I fixed the present, and I wouldn’t leave him until I had his word he wouldn’t tarnish our names.”
She searches my face. “I don’t forgive you.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“You did it as much as for yourself as you did it for me.”
“I did.” I bend my head down so I can smell her neck, her hair, nuzzle my cheek against hers. “I’m sorry, Charlotte. It was selfish and hollow and arrogant of me. I thought if I gave up my chase for God, I’d be giving up myself. But of course, I lost myself the minute I gave you up, and it didn’t matter. I damned myself that day, and for nothing.”
I can feel her breathing underneath me—the fast, panting swell of her ribcage against mine, the thrum of her pulse against my nose as I run it along the column of her neck.
“And that night, I—” I spare telling her the whole truth, the truth of what I became and what I did to my own house as the horror of what I’d done unfolded inside me. I’m still finding shards of glass four years later. “I wasn’t fit to come to you. And when I was more composed, I felt you were owed an explanation beyond a phone call. So I came to your flat to find you the next day.”
“I went to the library to use the public computers to look for a job,” she says. “I wasn’t home.”
“I waited for a while, but I was—I’m afraid I still wasn’t in the right frame of mind.” I’d been like a wounded animal that day, snarling and snapping at everything, and I’d dimly recognized in my hurt and anger that I was likely to shred something between us that couldn’t be stitched back together. So like an animal in truth, I’d followed my instincts to the water. I watched night blacken the Thames into a slick of oil, reflecting as much light as it swallowed, and I imagined that cold oil as my shame, coating everything inside of me until it was ready to be lit on fire. Charred to oblivion because everything already felt charred without Charlotte in my arms. Worse than charred.
A world without my little one was a world too dead to burn.
“And I came to find you the next day,” she recalls, and I think of a memory colder than that night by the Thames.
“Yes, you did.”
At the time, I’d been still too raw, still too arrogant to consider that it was truly the end. She’d walked into my office and set the engagement ring on my desk, and a desperation like I’ve never known clawed hold of me.
“You can put that ring anywhere you’d like, but you’re still mine.”
“I believed that until two days ago, Church. I don’t think I believe anything right now, especially since you won’t tell me why.”
Panic. Terror. Shame.
If I told her why, she’d leave. She’d leave and she’d never come back.
Fear boiled in my veins as I tried to convince her and deflect from the terrible truth at the same time.
“We don’t need a wedding, Charlotte, nor a marriage nor a mortgage together to prove what we have.”
“We don’t have anything. Not anymore.”
I’d kissed her then, getting to my feet and hauling her into my arms, feeling her shiver and cling to me just as she always did. Feeling her mouth open to mine and accept me. “I acknowledge I’ve fucked up, little one, but you can’t lie to yourself about what we have or don’t have. I still need you in my bed and you still need to be there. The rest we can figure out in time.”
“I won’t go to another church alone,” she said against my lips.
The mere mention of what she suffered at my hands made my bones ache and my body throb. “Maybe churches aren’t for us. But my bed is. But this is.”
I pulled her back to my mouth and she let me. She let me take a deep, lingering kiss.
Because it was her kiss goodbye.
“I came by for more than giving back the ring,” she said, breaking our kiss. “I’m leaving.”
I tightened my arms around her. “We’ll leave together. Go to my flat. We can work things out there.”
“Not leaving your office,” she clarified. “Leaving London. Leaving the UK. I’m going back home.”
“Home?” I asked, agitated. “Explain yourself, Charlotte, because your home is with me.”
She pushed away from me. “There’s nothing to explain. I’m going to America and I’m never going to see you again.”
I think even then I still hadn’t truly believed her, not really. But within a week her flat was empty and she was unenrolled from UCL. She was gone. And the only comfort I had was that somewhere across the ocean, she was fulfilling the promise of that brilliant mind. A promise that was at least undimmed by a connection with me. If nothing else, I spared her that.
“So now you know,” I tell her. “I didn’t want to tell you, then or last night, because it was so incredibly foolish of me. Selfish, and unforgivably so. But you deserved the truth as much as you deserved my shame, and I didn’t give it to you. I’m so sorry, little one. I owed it to you, just as I owe you so much else.”
All at once, all the fight seems to leave her. She closes her eyes, her body going still beneath mine. “Now I know,” s
he murmurs, as if to herself. “Now I know.”
I drop my forehead to her cheek, and for a moment, we just breathe. Joined together in this wound I gave her.
I know it can’t last. We’re cold and sticky and tangled, and I haven’t forgotten that she needs to get back to work, but the very idea of separating from her again has me miserable. I curl my fingers in her cheap work shirt and root through her curls to bury my nose in her scent. She smells clean and floral, like she’s just removed a crown of flowers from her hair, and I can’t get enough of it.
“I have to go,” she says.
“You didn’t even murder me. Would you still like to?”
She sighs, and it’s not a happy sigh or an amused sigh—or any kind of good sigh. It’s the sigh of someone so hurt and so tired that each breath feels like work.
“No, Church,” she says wearily. “I don’t want to murder you.”
I raise up so I can look down at her. A tiny flame of hope curls in my chest. “You don’t?”
“That doesn’t mean I forgive you,” she says pointedly. “And I would like very much never to see you again after this.”
I stare down into her perfect face—pert and freckled and stubborn. Can I give her my absence? Now that I know she’s here in London? That she’s been suffering?
Was I ever capable of it?
Am I a moral man?
Can I be for her?
“Is that what you want from me? Is that the only thing you want from me?”
Fuck, this feels worse than bleeding out, than burning, than emptiness and ashes. This is bleeding in, this is growing something brand new, just for her. And it hurts. It hurts worse than anything, because before I had no choice, but now I’m agreeing. I’m agreeing to lose her once again.
She hesitates, then the stubbornness reasserts itself in the pull of her mouth and the jut of her chin. “Yes.”
“Then you have my word.”
She narrows her eyes up at me. “Nothing’s ever this easy with you.”
Jesus Christ. Easy? She thinks this is going to be easy? I push up to my feet, wrapping my hands around her elbows and setting her on her own feet in the process. “There’s nothing easy about this, Charlotte,” I tell her in a sharp voice. “If I had my way, you’d be over my fucking shoulder right now, and I’d be hauling you to my bed where you belong. I’d have you trussed up and so thoroughly fucked that the only thing you would want to do next is nestle into my arms and sleep. I’d be with you when you woke up—then and every day after—and you would go back to the things that made you smile, and you’d stop all this nonsense.” I nod at her uniform shirt.
Her face, which had been rapt during my little speech, now grows mulish.
“It’s my nonsense, Church. And you’re not going to have it your way. Even gods have to acknowledge free will,” she says, yanking out of my touch.
“Am I still your god then?”
“I don’t belong to you anymore, dickhead. There’s your answer.”
The laugh that leaves my lips is broken and dry. “That may be true, but don’t you see it doesn’t matter? I belong to you, sweet genius. You’ve made me your own, and your body feels it even now. Or are those nipples still hard for someone else?”
Spots of color rouge up her cheeks as she starts setting herself to rights. It’s hard to say if she’s angry with my observation or flushing in response to my heavy cock, which is semi-erect even as I zip my trousers closed. Her eyes follow the movement with unmistakable hunger, but her voice shakes with emotion when she says, “This can’t happen again. This won’t happen again.”
I take a long moment to answer, smoothing my clothes and then tucking her curls back behind her ears. She wants to bat me away, I can see, but the minute my fingertips touch her face, her eyes close and her lips part. Drugged like an initiate into esoteric mysteries. Power flowing from me into her, and then back into me again.
“I am your temple no matter what. Your god, your own. When you need me, I’ll be there.”
A slow shiver moves through her, a dimpling in her chin like she might cry—something I feel like seven thousand arrows—and then she tugs herself away.
“Goodbye, Church.”
“Wait.”
I have no right to this, I know, and I know more than anything she wants me gone. And I’ll go and stay gone, even though I know exactly what ash-dusted tomb I’m consigning myself to—but before I do, I have to know.
“How did this happen, Charlotte?” I ask. “Did you need help finding a job after you graduated?” The thought is actually painful, that she needed help I could have so easily given, and she didn’t ask it of me. “Do you still need help? I know you don’t want to see me, but I can still—”
She jerks her head to the side, silencing me. “I don’t need help,” she says tightly. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not.” It’s shitty and over-familiar of me, maybe. But it’s one thing to have work you choose and another thing entirely to have your choices taken away. And everything about her vibrates with the pain of having her choices stripped from her.
She glares again, but she doesn’t contradict me.
“I won’t apologize for having the audacity to be right, little one.”
Her gaze flares to a molten silver and I think for a moment that she’s going to shove right past me without answering, that she’s going to leave without dignifying my intrusion with a response—but all at once, the anger goes out of her and her shoulders slump. Her eyes drop to the floor and she takes in a long breath that seems to do nothing to make her feel better.
If I thought she looked tired before—hurt, fatigued, alone—then I see it clearly now. The toll her life has taken on her. It’s like dying all over again to see it, but of course that’s nothing compared to hearing what she says next.
“I didn’t need help finding a job after I graduated because I didn’t graduate. I couldn’t—I couldn’t even finish the semester. I came back from what was supposed to be our wedding to discover that my father—” she grits out the word with a lifetime of bitterness behind it “—had stolen everything we had and left. Just . . . left. Me and my brother and our flat and everything.”
Rage—clean and pure—whitens my vision until I force myself to take a breath. “He abandoned you?”
Simply left his children? One, a college student who was still finding her equilibrium after he’d uprooted the family from America to come back to his own country, and the other, a literal child who had years left of school?
Charlotte cuts a look at me. “Sound familiar? Seems to be a theme with the men in my life.”
I wish I could say that shame erases the rage, that I’m humble enough to accept that I can’t stand in judgement of others given my own past—but alas. I still want to fling her father into the river.
“I haven’t talked to him since then, and I have no idea where he is. I managed to get legal custody of Jax and tried to keep things normal for him, but . . .” She looks down again. “I couldn’t afford to stay in school and pay for the rent and food and everything else. I have to work two jobs as it is, just to scrape by, and to have to manage tuition on top of that? And even without tuition, whatever’s left of my time belongs to Jax. Helping him with school, making sure he’s ready for his exams, taking him to art studio and his flute lessons and keeping an eye on his group of friends . . .”
She puffs out a breath. “Maybe my father thought because I was marrying someone, we didn’t need him around anymore. Or maybe I’m giving him too much credit by imagining he thought about us at all. But the upshot is that I was completely and utterly alone. I had nothing, and I had no one, and yeah, it fucking sucks that I couldn’t finish school and follow the path I wanted. But you know what? I’m fucking here. My brother is here. We’re sheltered and fed and safe, and that’s because of me. That’s because of what I gave up and what I worked for, and I refuse to let you make me feel like shit about it, okay? I’m better than that. My efforts are bette
r than that.”
She is. They are.
And I am nothing. Nothing in the shape of a man.
“Goodbye, Church,” she says again, and this time I don’t stop her.
This time I let her go.
Chapter Five
Charley
Undefended and alone, now the girl must make a nest of pillows and blankets to protect herself. Tomorrow, the harsh London wilderness will be waiting. But tonight the girl must retreat and recoup. And cry.
I know things have to be bad if I’m Attenboroughing myself. Dazed and dizzy from three solid hours of sobbing, I manage to fake my way through dinner and homework with Jax, and then I collapse into a fitful sleep. Tomorrow is a double shift at Tesco, and the day after will be Tesco plus a catering gig, and I don’t have time for Church to be in my thoughts like this. For his words to be swimming through my veins and crawling inside of my heart.
Since the day I met you, you’ve been it for me.
Do I believe that? Does it matter even if I do?
I am your temple no matter what.
When you need me, I’ll be there.
Liar. He’s a liar. He wasn’t there when I needed him, he wasn’t there when he said he would be.
Except you never gave him a chance to be after the day of the wedding, a voice reminds me. You made sure he thought you were gone—you made sure he couldn’t be there for you at all.
Well, I refuse to feel bad about that. He did the worst thing, and when someone does the worst thing, they don’t get second chances. Especially when that worst thing was to save their career.
And yours, the voice says. Which makes me scowl. My career was lost anyway, and besides, I’m not interested in forgiving him for choosing anything over me. Not when there were seventeen thousand other ways he could have handled things. Number one of which was to have told the director to fuck off and then shown up to our goddamn wedding.
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