by Amy Brent
“Laurie, please,” I held my hand up, ripping my gaze away from her. It was too painful to see the earnestness in her eyes and to begin to believe her. I wanted to believe her, more than anything in the world.
“Please,” she repeated the word, and she reached up to touch my face, to draw my gaze down to her once more. Her skin on mine was more than I could handle, and yet I didn’t have it anywhere in me to brush her off, even though I knew I should have. She leaned up and planted a soft kiss on my mouth, just lightly, brushing her lips across mine in a way that she knew drove me crazy. When she pulled back, her eyes had softened, and I knew what was coming next.
“The baby,” she breathed, the words tantalising on the tip of her tongue. “Think about the baby, Cormac, all of this…”
“I know, I know,” I slipped my arms around her waist, almost on instinct, and then swiftly removed them, turning away from her and facing the wall. It was still so dark in here, but that seemed about right – I felt as though flicking a light on in these circumstances would only serve to make it seem real. I could hide here in the darkness, hide from what I knew I had to do. I could still feel her lips on mine, and I brushed my fingers across my mouth to remind myself how recently they’d been there, how good they had felt.
She moved towards me again, following me, not letting me get away from her that easily; this time, she planted her hand on my chest, right over my heart, as though I needed a reminder of how deeply embedded she already was in there.
“Remember today?” She reminded me softly, her voice gentle. “Remember when we saw the baby?”
“Laurie, don’t do this-” This time it was my turn to beg her to hold back, but she cut me off and kept talking.
“You remember how it felt, right?” She prompted me. “When you saw it for the first time?”
“Of course I do,” I murmured. I would never forget that moment, as it happened. It had made everything so real, thrown into such sharp focus what was happening with all three of us. I had felt tears prick my eyes briefly, though I swallowed them down at once. Seeing my child for the first time was more than I ever thought it was going to be, more intense. I had no idea how I thought it would be, but seeing that creature in there had really brought it home for me that this was all I wanted in my life right now. Her, that baby, the three of us hidden up in that cabin so far from the rest of the world and living our lives out intertwined together.
“I saw the way you looked at our baby,” she ran her hands over her stomach again. “I know…I know you felt what I did. We can’t just go back to pretending this is some kind of contract, Cormac, you know that. After everything that’s happened…”
“It’s only been a few months,” I protested weakly, but I knew that wasn’t going to be good enough to get her to give up on this. Yeah, it had only been a few months, but what had kindled between us was impossible to ignore, to escape. I knew if I cast her out of this cabin now and never looked back, that I would never forget her, that everyone who came afterwards would be matched up to her and would fall short. She bit her lip, and the tears fell down her cheeks at last; she angrily dashed them away with the back of her hand, as though pissed that she had shown that kind of weakness.
“What were you going to say to me, at the restaurant?” She asked, her eyes shining in the darkness. “What were you going to tell me?”
“It’s not important now,” I lowered my gaze, remembering so vividly how excited and nervous I’d been at the start of the day to tell her how I truly felt about her, how certain and secure I had been in that belief. That those feelings were still there now, just as sure as they had been before, but now I couldn’t bear the thought of saying them to her.
“Yes, it is,” she implored me. “Cormac, I…I know what you were going to say, and I have to, I know that now isn’t, but I have to-”
“Don’t say it,” I tried to stop her, but it was too late. Laurie had always been a woman of her own mind, and even now, she wasn’t going to forget that.
“I love you,” She finally spoke the words, and they seemed to hang in the air between us – like a gunshot, the sound of them ringing out dangerously. I felt as though they had punched a hole in me. I couldn’t believe this was the first time she’d said them to me, and that I wouldn’t be able to say them back, even though every fibre in my body was screaming at me to just forget all of this and pull her into my arms and carry her to bed and kiss every inch of her body until both of us had forgotten anything that had gone done. Lock those doors, never leave the house again, just the two of us in this place together, and then the three of us. In love. A family. The image rotated around and around my head, taunting me, teasing me.
She stood there, her face clear, as though there was nothing more she knew she could say to me. And there wasn’t. She had laid herself, raw and open, for me to see, and there was nothing I could do or say in response to the words that had just come out of her mouth. I wanted to say it back. I wanted to take her face in my hands and look her dead in the eyes and repeat the words back to her, and then have her say them again to me, and then turn them on her again, until we’d heard them so many times in a row that they’d lost all meaning.
But I couldn’t.
“I love you,” she repeated, as though she wasn’t sure that I’d heard her the first time. I shook my head. I didn’t have the words to say what I needed to.
Her face dropped with horror, and she planted a hand on the counter next to her, as though to keep from collapsing to the floor right there and then. Her eyes scanned my face, for some kind of reaction, some kind of promise that I wasn’t going to be this cold to her.
“Plase don’t turn your back on us,” She murmured, and her voice cracked on the last word and I felt my heart literally ache for her. How could she do this to me? It was the first time she had ever referred to the baby and her as an us, I supposed before because the “us” had been the three of us. But now there was a removal, a severing – I was at arm’s length, taken out of the situation.
“I’m not going to leave you,” I promised her, and she misunderstood and for a second relief passed over her face – but I had to shut it down, even though I didn’t want to.
“I’m not going to abandon you,” I corrected myself, and then reached out to touch her stomach, feeling the tiny outward bump that had begun to form beneath the sweater she was wearing. I closed my eyes for a moment and remembered that at least this little thing was healthy, at least that part of the deal was still standing up.
“I’ll support you and the baby through the pregnancy but that’s it,” I shook my head. “You’ll get the money and then…then you’ll go.”
Even the thought of her leaving this place, leaving this cabin and me and everything behind, it hurt. I hadn’t considered what raising a baby alone would be like until that moment, but it suddenly came into sharp focus: living in this cabin, calling up my mom for help all the time, hoping to God that the little thing never thought to ask about it’s mother or where she was or what had happened between us…
“Cormac,” The tears welled and burst now, running down her cheeks, and it took everything I had in me not to pull her into my arms and rest my head against hers and tell her that this was all going to be alright, that she should forget everything I’d just said in favour of whatever she wanted to hear.
“Cormac, you can’t do this to me,” She demanded desperately, as though she had much of a choice. “You can’t – our future, all of us together, I don’t want to-”
She was gasping for breath now through the tears, scrambling for something that was going to get me to change my mind and coming up blank. I hated this. I hated seeing her suffering. I hated knowing that the same pain, the pain that I had dulled with anger before, would rise up inside me and take me over soon enough.
“Laurie, I’m sorry, but I can’t do this,” I turned away from her once more, feeling like the biggest monster in the universe for walking away from her like this. “It’s over betw
een us. It’s done. We’ll see out the rest of the contract, and then you’ll go. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” She gasped, and then inhaled sharply; I glanced over my shoulder to see her sinking to the floor, face crumpled and contorted from what had just happened. The way she looked – bent over in the darkness, tears coursing down her face and dripping from her chin on to the floor, her body wracked with sobs – was a perfect reflection of how I felt and it pained me in ways I would never be able to put into words to see her in that state. Despite it all, I still wanted to go to her and take her up in my arms and carry her to bed, but I knew if I laid so much as a finger on her now it might be taken as a confirmation that she should forget everything I’d told her and that we could be together again at last. By her and by me. I knew I was on the brink of wavering, giving in, giving her what she wanted so badly. What I wanted, too.
But I pulled open the bedroom door and stepped inside, closing it behind me, and staring out the window above the bed and at the cold, callous light of the moon pooling on the floor in front of me.
Chapter Fifteen
I wasn’t sure how long I sat on the floor of the cabin, tears wracking my body. It could have been hours – the night seemed to stretch out in front of me, endless and hopeless and lonely, as soon as he closed the door to his room and left me out there all by myself.
I could never have imagined in a million years that he could treat me this way. I felt as though…I felt as though I’d known him, known him at least well enough to be sure that he wouldn’t end things as soon as I made the smallest mistake. And okay, maybe that hadn’t been the smallest mistake, but it wasn’t enough for this, surely?
I made deals with myself inside my head, that I would get up and go into his room and talk with him more, try to get him to see my side of things if he didn’t come out in ten breaths, twenty breaths, fifty, one hundred. I was sure that door was going to open, and I stared at it all night long, listening to every single creak that came from inside, every movement, every hint that things were going to be alright. There was no way that the man I loved so much could just walk away from me like that. There was no way.
Eventually, the tears stopped – not because I felt better, but because there was nothing left in my body to cry out. I forced myself to stand up, and drank a glass of water, leaning on the sink like I was scared it might give out from underneath me at any moment. I wasn’t doing this for me – some part of me just wanted to sit there on the floor and cry until I was nothing but a shrivelled-up old husk of the person I used to be – but for the baby. I placed a hand on my stomach and looked down at the tiny bump that was just visible under the big sweater I was wearing, and felt the tears come once more. I had to grip hold of the counter just to stay upright this time, the thought of that tiny thing inside of me that needed my help to stay alive. I could remember, still so vividly, the look on his face when we’d first seen it moving inside of me. He had wanted me so much then, wanted this, wanted everything that came with it, and now he was there, in his bedroom, not giving a shit about me or the agony that I was suffering through because of what he had done.
What I had done. I had to remember that. He had given me the rules and I had been the one to break them, not him. It was only fair that he…that he…
I felt the tears rise and take over me once more, and I found myself sinking to my knees in the kitchen as a wail burst forth from my mouth. I would have worried about waking him up, but there was no way that he could have been asleep in there, not if he had ever felt anything for me. Not if I knew him at all.
I had told him that I loved him. I had said the words twice, to make sure that he hadn’t missed them the first time. I had been so sure that was what I had needed to fix things between us; how could it not be? Yes, I had messed up, but I had committed to him more deeply than I had ever committed to anyone in my life. The moment before I said the words, I had realized that I had never meant them before in my life. I had said them because they were expected of me, not because they actually represented the way I truly felt. But for Cormac, they seemed to flow into the emotion I felt for him perfectly, fitting together as though that was how they’d always meant to come out of me. They felt like poetry on my lips, the truth that I had been hiding for so long – and then they just fell flat, with a clunk between us. He didn’t say them back. He didn’t say them back. He didn’t say them back.
I sat there on the floor thinking about that for a long time, long enough that by the time I was done the light had started to seep in through some of the windows and remind me that what had happened had happened in the real world and not just some nightmare vision of what could have been. I pulled myself to my feet, every bone in my body feeling as though it was cracking and clicking with every move that I made, and dragged myself through to my own bedroom.
I hadn’t slept there properly since the first night – I still kept a lot of my stuff in there, but I had slept every single evening since the first time we’d hooked up in Cormac’s bed next to him. And it had felt so right, every single morning, so wake up next to the man that I was pregnant by, or to hear him in the kitchen making us both some breakfast, or to know that he was just out for a walk or to gather some wood. There was a comfort in it, a safety that I had never felt before with anyone. And now that he had torn it away from me, I felt as though I was spinning out of control through open space, impossible to catch, impossible to stop. I lay on the bed and knew logically it was beneath me, but I couldn’t connect with the feeling of the pillow beneath my head or the covers tugged up and over my body. I felt distant from myself, as though my brain was trying to escape from what had happened already, trying to protect me from the horror of what had gone down over the course of the last twenty-four hours.
I pricked my ears every time I heard a moment from his room, but I knew most of them were nothing; if he was going to come in and comfort me, he would have done it by now. But no – he had chosen to leave me out here, all alone, the cold of the mountains finally seeping deep into my bones and reminding me just how alone I was in the world.
How the fuck was I going to get by now that what had happened had happened? If he really did want to stick to this break-up, and for the time being at least it seemed as though he did, then what were the two of us going to do? Just live here, in this cabin, in this place, pretending that we had never felt what we had felt for one another? It would be ridiculous. I couldn’t just switch off my feelings for him and I knew that he couldn’t do the same for me, or else he’d have cast me out of this place already.
What would I do if he changed his mind about all of it? I doubted that was going to happen, he seemed too good of a man for that, but what if he did? He had more power over me than I did over him, and I hadn’t read that contract back to front, and there might have been a clause in there that let him call things off if something happened that he didn’t like. I pulled the covers tight around me, as though I could pin myself to this bed and never let go.
I tried to hold on tight to the image of him in my head, but it was flickering in and out of reality. The smell of him, the taste of him, like it was in a dream that I was already forgetting. Would he make me breakfast and bring it in to me? Would we talk this out, or would we leave all of it unspoken?
I closed my eyes tight and buried my face in the pillow, and tried to ignore the fact that it smelled so strongly of him. This whole house did. Maybe I would have been able to escape the thought of him, the pressure and the weight of all that had happened between us, if I hadn’t been trapped in this place for the next few months, but I had signed a contract that meant I had to stay up here or lose out on all the money that he had already given me and the rest that I was due. And what would I do? Go back to the city, try to raise this baby by myself, and do my best to avoid Richie and that entire side of my life? Like Cormac would let me go that easily. He would chase me down with every resource he had access to, and that wasn’t going to stop just because I had tried to
leave him.
Besides, the thought of starting all over again scared the fucking shit out of me. I couldn’t keep running away from things when they didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to. I had to stand up and own the decisions I’d made, good or bad. Look at what had happened last time I’d tried to flee from what happened in the city – it had wound up destroying the life I’d managed to build for myself here. And where would I go? Would I just keep running across the country until something stuck, hiding from the truth of the past I was doing my best to leave behind?
I ran my hands over my bump, and the feel of it grounded me, bringing me something close to comfort, the nearest thing to peace that I’d had since he had done what he had done. He couldn’t take this away from me. I didn’t know if he would let me stay a part of the child’s life after it was born, but I was pretty certain that he would want me to be there to some extent. And I was already getting attached to this thing, so if he thought that he was getting rid of me that easily he had another thing coming. I didn’t know whether I would have a girl or a boy, but I knew that I would be it’s mother and that I was going to be part of it’s life, same as Cormac. There was nothing in the contract about him being able to boot me out of his life just like that, and I was sure there was some kind of legal route I could go down…
My heart sank again, and I felt this wave of exhaustion flooding over me. I couldn’t believe I was having to thin about the lawyers I might have to hire to make sure that Cormac didn’t cut me out of his life. Up until a few hours before, I had been thinking about the future we might have, the two of us together, the romance of all. And now, here I was, lying in this cold bed alone and wondering how much I would have to sue him for to get him to take notice of me and let me be a part of this kid’s life.