by T. L. Haddix
“Of course not.” He rattled off the number, and she wrote it down.
“And your address?” Byrdie asked. “Just in case.”
Ben squirmed under the look she leveled at him, then told her the address, as well.
Ainsley stepped over to her and hugged her. “I might not be back tonight,” she murmured. “So don’t worry, okay?”
Byrdie frowned, but she didn’t protest. “Just be careful.”
“I will.”
Ainsley squeezed Jonah’s hand, and then she and Ben left. When she saw the car parked in the driveway, Jonah’s words from earlier made sense.
“Where’s your truck?”
“At John’s. I can’t drive it with this.” He lifted his right hand. “Emma’s too close to her due date to be driving right now, so she let me borrow her car for a little while.”
“When’s she due?” The question was hard for Ainsley to ask, but she pushed her discomfort aside.
“Officially, not for three weeks. Unofficially? Any day now.” He started the car and glanced over at her. “Is it okay to talk about? I don’t want to pour salt in your wounds.”
“I’ve not been around anyone who was pregnant since I miscarried. But I need to learn to deal with that.” If they were going to have a relationship, she’d better get used to being around babies and small children. But she didn’t want to count her chickens too soon.
He drove competently, the injured hand notwithstanding, and within a few minutes they were parking behind the old hotel. “It’s not what you’re used to,” he said softly, “but it’s functional.”
Ainsley rested her head against the headrest. “Do you really think I care about that?”
After a few seconds, his mouth curved in a gentle smile. “No. I wouldn’t have brought you here if I thought that. Come on.”
They held hands as they walked to the building’s rear entrance, and Ainsley tried to absorb every moment, preserving it in her memory for later. She hoped that by the end of the night they would come to an agreement to go forward, but she wanted to store the evening away, just in case.
Chapter Thirty
Ben was nervous. While he hadn’t remained celibate after he and Ainsley had broken up, he hadn’t been with that many women, either. Even if there had been ten or twenty, he didn’t think he would be able to shove aside his nerves and act with aplomb. Once they reached his door, he fumbled with his keys. He stopped and took a deep breath, then tried again.
“Here we are. Home sweet home, at least for a little while longer.” He stepped inside and flipped a light switch, then stood back so she could enter. He watched her face closely as she took in the apartment with wide eyes.
“I’ve wondered about this for so long. I can hardly believe I’m here,” she said in a voice so soft that he almost missed what she said. She sat her purse on the coffee table. “I didn’t know how to picture your apartment.” She walked around the room slowly, touching a stack of books on the end table, then a picture of his nephews that sat on the TV.
“That’s the family.” He crossed the room to stand beside her as she studied the portrait Emma had done of everyone at the first of summer.
“Which sister is which? This is Emma, I’m assuming.” She pointed to Emma’s pregnant form.
Ben smiled. “That’s Trouble, yes. The blonde is Amelia, and the other brunette is Rachel. She’s in school at UK, finishing up a degree in Appalachian history. Amelia’s going to be a junior in high school this year.”
“You’re all close.”
“We are. I know it’s not done these days, liking your own family, but I do.” He touched her shoulders, placing a kiss on her hair. “Do you want anything to drink?”
“Maybe some ice water?”
“Okay.” While he prepared the drink, she wandered on into the bedroom. Ben followed, glass in hand.
“You’re much neater than I expected,” she confessed when she saw him standing in the doorway. She came to take the water. “Men don’t have great reputations as far as housekeeping goes, you know. Thanks.”
Ben crossed his arms over his chest. “Mom and Dad raised us all to be responsible, pick up after ourselves. The concept of men’s work versus women’s was a foreign concept to them. Although some of us take to it more naturally than others,” he admitted. “And as far as this being a novelty for you? It is for me, as well. I never believed you’d be standing in my bedroom someday.”
“Me, either.” She looked down at her feet. “So what now?”
“Let’s go to the living room, sit down. Having you this close to my bed is too tempting.”
They each took a seat on the couch, sitting side by side, with a few inches between them. Ainsley reached into her purse and pulled out the box.
“Do you want to start here?”
Ben took the box and picked at a ragged edge. “I don’t know. There’s no going back once we start this conversation. And I’m afraid, Ainsley. Afraid of what will come out.”
“Don’t you think it’s already too late to go back?” she asked softly.
He looked at her then, really looked at her. She was beautiful, but signs of the difficulty of the last few days were etched on her face. Ben would almost swear she’d lost weight, and she had faint circles under her eyes. They weren’t kids anymore. This conversation was going to be the first time they’d discussed their relationship seriously, with the full knowledge that they might not go forward together.
“I guess it is. It always has been, hasn’t it?”
She nodded. “I think so. What’s in the box?”
With a quick, silent prayer for courage, he opened it. A folded piece of paper was on top of the shredded file contents. He handed her the box, minus the folded paper.
“That’s what’s left of the letters your mother wrote.”
Ainsley stared down at the box as though it contained a snake. She gently sat it on the table, then dusted her hands against her pants. “You destroyed it. I’m glad.”
“It needed to be destroyed.” He tapped the folded paper on his knee, then handed it to her. “So does this.”
He watched as she unfolded the letter she’d written him five years ago. When she realized what it was, she flinched away from it, her mouth pulling down at the corners in distress. He was only bothered a little by what the presence of the tear stains on the paper would tell her.
“Why did you write that? Why did you marry him?” Ben kept his voice as level and non-accusatory as he could.
Ainsley dropped the note onto the table and crossed her arms. “You know that my mother was going to use those letters to destroy you all if I didn’t marry Doug, right?”
“Yes.”
“After I saw you with Zanny, I knew that we weren’t going to be together permanently, no matter what my mother did. But I still had to protect you. Despite how hurt I was, I still loved you.”
Ben was scowling. “Wait. What? After you saw me with Zanny where?”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Ainsley grimaced. “When Mother first told me that she knew about us and that she was going to use that to make me marry Doug, I stood up to her. And she told me that you were dating someone else. I didn’t believe her. But she described this other woman to me, down to her curly hair, and told me that if I didn’t think you were cheating on me, I should go meet you for lunch. So I did.”
She paused to take a sip of water, and Ben saw the flush that spread across her cheeks. “I wasn’t spying on you. I swear, I wasn’t. I was trying to figure out how to approach you, what to say, and when I got ready to get out of the car, I looked up and saw you and Zanny in the rearview mirror. It looked like you were flirting with her—and you were, she told me. Because that’s w
hat you do with Zanny. But I didn’t know that. It was the worst day of my life, and it just kept getting worse. Between what she told me and what I’d seen, I didn’t know what to do. Mother took advantage of that.”
Ben was stunned. He wasn’t sure if he was more angry at her for not trusting him, himself for creating a situation where she could think he was involved with Zanny, or her mother for using the essence of who they were against them.
“You never flirted with me, not really, the whole time we were together. And when I met Zanny a couple of weeks ago, that came up. She could hardly believe it, because you apparently are—how did she put it? Mr. Personality, I think. She said you never flirted because you couldn’t, because I meant too much. I had figured all along that you never flirted because I wasn’t worth the effort.”
“Ainsley, no.”
She shrugged. “We’re baring our souls here, right?”
“Right.” He held out his hand, palm up, and after a minute, she placed her palm next to his. Their fingers closed around each other’s, and Ben brought her hand to his mouth. He kissed the back lightly. “Zanny was right. I tried to flirt with you, and my usual charm failed me. Every time I opened my mouth, I felt like a blathering idiot.”
“I never thought you were an idiot. I thought you were endearing,” she told him softly. She leaned into him and bumped his shoulder.
Ben leaned back, returning the bump. “So tell me what happened? As much as I do love you, I have a lot of anger and pain built up thanks to that letter.”
“I know. And I’m sorry for it.” She let out a shuddering breath. “When I agreed to marry Doug, Mother knew she had to do something drastic to keep me from reaching out to you. She told me that I would have to make you hate me in order to uphold my end of the bargain. And she gave me a few hours to come up with that letter.”
“It was effective,” he admitted. “But the part of the revelation that clinched it for me was the wedding announcement. It was a good picture of you. You looked happy.” That picture bothered him still.
“That stupid picture. It was taken months earlier, when we first met. We were goofing off, and he snuck up behind me and hugged me. His mom happened to have a camera at hand and took the picture. Doug’s parents knew then what Mother was planning. And he was just that kind of person. He’d give spontaneous hugs.” Her smile was sad, and she wiped away a tear. “I couldn’t bear to look at that picture, not after my mother used it for the announcement.”
“Whose idea was it to use our differences in social standing in the letter?”
“Mine,” she confessed. “I knew that bothered you a little, even though you insisted it didn’t. And if I was going to stick the knife in, I needed to stick it well. To be honest, I wanted to hurt you a little. Not like I did, but a little. I believed, all these years, that you had been dating Zanny, too. That I’d just been a summer fling. I figured you’d be relieved to be done with me after you heard the news.”
That belief infuriated Ben. He gently disentangled their hands and stood, going to stare out his favorite window into the dusky twilight beyond. “How could you think so little of me?”
“It wasn’t you. It was me.” She sighed. “And maybe it was a little bit you.”
Ben remembered the conversation he’d had with John and Rick earlier in the year, about how Zanny didn’t believe in herself and, therefore, had a hard time believing in John’s love for her. He suspected that sort of psychology had been at work with Ainsley, as well.
“Do you still think that?”
She came to stand next to him, and Ben watched her closely. She was considering the question.
“No. I think I ripped your heart out with what I did. And if I’d known that when I did it, I probably couldn’t have gone through with things.”
“Mom seems to believe that no matter what, your mother would have used the letters. Even if we’d eloped.”
Ainsley nodded. “She would have. She took any shred of happiness I achieved as a personal slight. Always did. And she was determined that I was going to suffer for having been born. I caused her paralysis, you know.”
“That’s ridiculous.” He skimmed his hand over her hair and sighed. They’d gotten to the part of the discussion he was least interested in hearing about. “Tell me about Doug.”
Her smile was soft. “He was a good man.” She grimaced when he scowled. “That’s probably not what you want to hear, but he was. He was one of the kindest people I ever met. But he wasn’t perfect.”
“Elliot said he was gay.”
Ainsley’s head jerked up, her eyes narrowing. “It was him! I knew it. That son of a bitch. He’s the one who told you about the baby, about it being yours, isn’t he?”
“He was.”
She paced away from him, her hands clenched into fists. “If I could get my hands on him, I’d castrate him. There was no need for you to know, not unless we ended up together. There was no need to hurt you.” Her anger was very real, of that Ben had no doubt. That it was on his behalf touched him, but he wasn’t happy that she’d not planned to tell him the truth.
“I had the right to know you were pregnant with my child.”
“I know that. I’ve never disputed that. But at what point should I have told you? When I was half-dead from losing that child? When I was falling down drunk? Or maybe after my husband was diagnosed with AIDS. How about then?”
Ben’s breath was sucked from his body. “Doug had AIDS? Elliot didn’t make that up?”
“No, that was accurate. That’s why I insisted on using condoms every time we were together. If he’d been more careful, he wouldn’t have died.”
They exchanged a look, both remembering that they hadn’t used a condom earlier that evening.
“I don’t know how to ask this politely, so I’ll just ask it,” he muttered. “Were you and he ever intimate?”
She was shaking her head before the words finished leaving his mouth. “He was gay. One hundred percent. Not bisexual. And that’s something I’ll be eternally grateful for, as far as it pertains to my marriage.”
He could tell she was still angry, but the ire was fading. “What about Jonah? Is he okay?”
Ainsley tipped her head to the side, a slight frown furrowing her brow. “How did you know?”
“It wasn’t hard to figure out. Jonah’s gay. Your husband left him a piece of this farm the two of you seemed to have chosen as your dream home. It just fits.”
She shook her head, astonished. “You wouldn’t believe how many people who knew them their whole lives still don’t know about them. And Jonah’s fine. Doug wasn’t infected until after they stopped seeing each other.”
Ben sat back down on the couch, and after a few seconds, she joined him. “Did you know Doug was gay when you married him?”
“No. I didn’t find out until I discovered I was pregnant. Everything came out then.” She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her purse and withdrew one. She held it without lighting it. “People Doug’s family associated with were starting to talk. Doug and Jonah are twelve years older than me. They were roommates in college, then Doug bought a townhouse they shared after that. They’d date every now and then, women I mean, and that staved off most of the questions. But people started wondering. Doug’s family is from here, and his father knew my mother.”
She glanced at him, and Ben nodded encouragement. “Mother could touch someone, or something they’d touched, and if the person had a secret, she’d be able to read it. It didn’t always work, but enough that she was able to use it to her advantage.”
He frowned. “Was that something she was born with?”
“No. She was hit by lightning when she was seventeen. She said it started after that. It’s how she snagged Daddy when she was just nineteen. He was in his mid-thirties. Do you mind if I light this
?”
In answer, Ben opened a drawer on the table and pulled out an ashtray. She lit the cigarette and after taking a long draw, she continued.
“Mother found out about Doug, and she saw her chance. Made a pact with his father. I found out about the arrangement when she told me I could marry him or ruin you.”
“I don’t think I like your mother very much,” he said when she inhaled a puff of tobacco smoke.
Ainsley gave a short laugh. “Neither do I. In any event, once Jonah learned about the upcoming nuptials—Doug’s family knew about it a few weeks before I did—he moved out of the townhouse. He has a very strict code when it comes to certain things, and while he wasn’t able to withdraw completely from Doug’s life, they were never intimate again after we got married. Jonah said he couldn’t do that to me, even though I wouldn’t have known.”
“He seems like a solid guy. Very reliable.”
She nodded. “He is.”
“So if he’s clean, where did the AIDS come from?”
“As much as Doug loved Jonah, and as much as he loved me platonically, he was driven by some pretty dark demons. And one of the only ways he had of silencing them was through sex. After I miscarried, he went to a very dark place mentally. And he wasn’t as careful as he should have been. That just about broke Jonah, watching him go to other men. They didn’t speak to each other for over a year after we came back from Mexico, except to take care of me.”
He could tell the pain was still fresh for her, from the way her mouth tightened.
“I imagine it was very difficult for all of you.”
“It isn’t a period of time that I like to dwell on.”
Ben hesitated, but he was curious about something. “You were raised very conservatively. So was I. How is it that you’re comfortable with Jonah’s sexuality? Not that I’m condemning him, or Doug, as that isn’t my right. But it can’t have been easy for you.”