by Heidi Betts
He was thinking about rolling over, kissing her from brow to ankle and back again, though he wasn’t quite sure where he was supposed to get the energy.
Jenna shifted slightly, her breath warming him as she sighed.
“Gage?”
“Hmm?” he responded without opening his eyes, his arm tightening automatically at her waist.
“You never answered my question.”
“What question?” he asked after a second. He tried to think back, but his brain was apparently so sex-zapped he had no recollection of a question left unanswered or a conversation left unfinished.
“From earlier, in the car,” she continued softly.
It came back to him with all the subtlety of a baby grand falling on his head from twenty stories above. The car. Her tears. Her watery voice asking why he gave up on them so easily, why he hadn’t fought to keep their marriage together.
The pain he’d felt then, seeing and hearing her pain, clutched him again, raking across the inside of his gut like razor blades, leaving him raw and bleeding.
How could it still hurt this much, for both of them, so long after the fact? The old adage that time heals all wounds was apparently a load of crap.
Time certainly hadn’t healed anything for him. He’d missed Jenna every day since the split. Wished things could have been different every day since she’d asked for a divorce. Hated and came close to strangling every other man he’d seen with or even near her since.
He suspected the same was true for Jenna, otherwise she wouldn’t have brought it up, wouldn’t be pressing for an answer that had the potential to be even more distressing than the question itself.
And suddenly, he was tired. So fucking tired of it all.
Gage would give his life to protect her, but if she needed to know… They might have silently agreed to spend the week rolling around like ferrets on Ecstasy, but they’d also made it clear to each other that there was no going back.
This wasn’t the beginning of a reconciliation. They weren’t taking a stab at patching things up, only enjoying each other’s company in and out of bed while they waited to find out whether or not she was pregnant.
So nothing he told her now was going to impact their relationship one iota. She might cut him off, get her panties in a bunch and impose a no-more-sex rule. But that only meant they would go back to the way things had been that first day-he’d still stick around until she either got her period… or didn’t… and she’d go about her business, ignoring him and making it clear he was an unwelcome addition to the house-and alpaca-sitting stint she was pulling for her aunt.
In the end, though, they would still be divorced, still go their separate ways. Well, give or take, depending on how the daily over-the-counter pregnancy test thing turned out.
With both sides of the tell her/don’t tell her arguments warring in his head, he released an audible sigh, then heard himself ask in a low voice, “What does it matter now?”
Pushing away from his chest, she propped herself up on one arm to stare down at him. Her eyes glowed emerald-green even in the dim light of the bedroom, expressive as ever and telling him exactly how serious she was about this.
“It matters,” she said barely above a whisper.
“I never meant to hurt you,” he told her, wanting to be sure she understood that first and foremost.
Rather than nodding and simply accepting his statement as fact and a partial apology, she arched a brow. “Really?” was her equally arch response. “Because you did. Long before you moved out, you shut down on me, started pulling away. You made decisions about our life together without consulting me and wouldn’t budge, simply expecting me to go along with them. When I tried to talk to you, you clammed up. You grew silent and brooding and… turned into someone I didn’t know anymore. What I want to know is why.”
The house was dark and quiet. He was drowsy and sated from hours of amazing, spine-tingling sex. For those reasons, or maybe a dozen others, his defenses were down at the moment and he found he didn’t have the energy to fight her need to know.
“Because I loved you.” Because I still love you, he thought, but kept that particular confession to himself. “And because I was trying to protect you.”
Purl 16
Jenna blinked, having the strange urge to stick a finger in her ear and wiggle it, then ask Gage to repeat himself so she could be sure she’d heard him correctly.
“Protect me?”
Tugging at the sheet that had covered them both a few minutes ago, she pulled it up and held it in place over her bare breasts. “Protect me from what?” she asked.
“Everything.”
It might have been only one word, spoken in little more than a whisper, but it hit her like a sledgehammer to the solar plexus. She tried to draw in a breath, to get oxygen to her deprived brain and other malfunctioning organs. But her lungs seemed frozen in her chest just as surely as her tongue was frozen behind her lips.
Pushing up into more of a sitting position against the headboard, Gage’s earnest brown gaze drilled into hers. “I want to protect you from every single thing out there that might cause you harm or pain.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, aware deep down of just what an understatement that was.
“You don’t know how bad it is out there, Jenna. You don’t know the kinds of things I’ve seen day in and day out since joining the vice squad.”
Her mouth parted slightly as things began to click. Oh, she still had six or eight million questions she was dying to pepper him with, but what he’d just said sank in and so much of what had passed between them before the divorce suddenly made sense.
She’d started to notice a change in him only after he’d started working undercover. Before that, things had been fine. More than fine; they’d been deliriously, almost sickeningly (at least according to her friends) happy.
The silent treatment and growing distance between them had come directly on the heels of the physical transformations he’d adopted in order to fit in to whatever group he happened to be infiltrating that week or month. She’d never put two and two together before, but looking back she could clearly see the timeline of events as they’d played out.
But she still didn’t understand why. What did one thing have to do with the other?
“I can imagine,” she offered carefully, some part of her afraid that if she said the wrong thing, he might clam up on her again and they’d never get to the bottom of this.
“No,” he told her firmly, the word whipcord sharp, “you can’t. And I never wanted you to. I did everything I could think of to shield you from that world.”
Jenna cocked her head, surprised by the vehemence in his tone, and as confused as ever by the direction this conversation was going.
“Why would I need to be protected from any of that?” she asked him. “I’m not a porcelain doll, Gage. I may live in a nice section of town and lead a nice, middle-class life, but I’m aware that not everyone is so lucky. I read the paper and watch the news. I know what some of the conditions are like in the seedier sections of town, even if I’m not intimately familiar with them.”
He regarded her in silence for a long, drawn-out minute before speaking. “It’s worse,” he said quietly, his eyes darkening and clouding over with something she couldn’t quite identify. “The things you read about in the paper or hear about on the evening news… They gloss over the gory details. They don’t show pictures of victims with needles stuck in their arms or lying in pools of their own blood. Children covered in bruises and living in drug dens so full of the stuff, you can get high off the fumes.”
Her stomach fluttered-and not in a good way. It was ironic that he proclaimed to want to spare her the knowledge of what that world was really like, yet had just painted a vividly disturbing picture of exactly that.
She didn’t think it wise to mention that fact, though. This was the most he’d talked about his job, about working undercover, in all the time she’d known him. Sh
e might not like what he was telling her, but she wanted to hear it all the same. Especially if it gave her some inkling of what had gone so wrong between them.
“I understand,” she said. “I may not have seen those things with my own eyes, and I’m sorry that they happened, but I do understand. I also understand that you’re one of the good guys. You’re a superhero, out there fighting the good fight, doing what you can to stop the bad guys and help the innocents. What I’m not clear on-and forgive me if I’m being dense-is what that has to do with us.”
Shifting on the bed, she brought her legs closer to her chest, resisting the urge to wrap her arms around her knees and show him just how vulnerable she was feeling. “You pulled away from me, stopped talking to me after you started working undercover. I see that now. But I don’t see what one has to do with the other, or how you think you were protecting me by ignoring me, changing your mind about wanting children, distancing yourself from me emotionally…”
She trailed off when her voice started to rise and both anger and sadness began to creep into every word. Because what she really wanted to do was throw up her hands and scream, What the hell does that have to do with anything? Why the hell did a handful of junkies and child-abusers cost me my husband and marriage?
“How can I bring a child into the world, knowing what’s out there? Knowing that every time he left the house, he’d be faced with drugs, alcohol, prostitution. Pedophiles and murderers. People who will do anything for a buck or their next fix, and have no compunction about using or abusing children to get them.”
Jenna heard what he was saying, but she wasn’t sure she comprehended it. Possibly because the words echoed in her ears, coming to her as though from the end of a very long tunnel. Her head buzzed, her vision clouded, and her heart pounded in her throat.
This had to be what high blood pressure felt like. Perhaps the early warning signs of a heart or panic attack.
“That’s why you don’t want a baby?” she demanded, surprised when her voice came out steady and not nearly as Taming of the Shrew as she felt. “Because of what might happen? Because of a dozen or so negative possibilities?”
Mouth a thin line of anguish, he said, “There’s some ugly stuff out there, Jenna.”
“Without a doubt. There’s ugly stuff everywhere, especially if you go looking for it. But you can’t live your life in fear of it touching you.”
Feeling as though she were about to crawl out of her skin, she pushed herself up and climbed over his legs to get off the bed. Giving the top sheet a mighty yank, she pulled it free of the bed and wrapped it around her so that it draped across the floor like a long-trained ball gown.
“What if none of that ever happened?” she turned to demand of him face-on. “What if we’d stayed married, had a child-children, even-and lived happily ever after? What if none of them ever got addicted to drugs or were molested or mugged on the street? It happens, you know,” she charged in a tone growing ever more uncontrolled. “People all across the country lead happy, healthy lives, with solid marriages and perfectly content children, who never get caught up in any of those bad things you’re so worried about.”
Gage remained still on the bed, staring at her like a statue. Was he even listening to her? Did anything she’d said have an impact on him?
“We both grew up that way. Nothing awful ever happened to us. I mean, we used to joke all the time about our families giving the Cleavers or Bradys a run for their money, and how we wanted to create the same sort of environment for our own kids.”
It wasn’t entirely true that they’d grown up like sitcom children, of course. No family was perfect, and everyone had their own personal issues or baggage from the past, but not everyone had horrible, traumatizing, oversized baggage.
Jenna’s parents happened to be stiff and stoic. Whenever the topic had come up, she’d described them as being the American Gothic version of the Cleavers. But she’d been well cared for, and no one had ever beaten, neglected, or molested her, and neither of her parents was an alcoholic, drug abuser, or even compulsive gambler.
And Gage had had an even more storybook childhood. His parents were fabulous. Jenna loved them to death, had been overjoyed to join their family-and had thankfully been welcomed with open arms by his mother, father, and siblings all-and had cried as much over losing such close contact with them as in losing Gage when she’d filed for divorce. Everything about his childhood had been perfect, from a mother who baked cookies and sewed Halloween costumes to a father who built him a treehouse and coached his Little League team.
Which only made it all the more difficult to wrap her mind around his current attitude about family and child-rearing.
“Things are different now,” he told her, still morose, still holding tight to his horribly skewed point of view. “The world is a much more dangerous place now than it used to be.”
“Maybe you’re too close to it,” she said, trying not to jump completely off the deep end. “You’ve worked undercover for so long and seen so much of the dark side of society that you can’t see there are still good people out there. We’re good people, Gage. We would love and protect our children, give them a warm home and a soft place to fall if anything ever did hurt them.”
He shook his head. Sadly, it seemed, as though he wished things could be different, but still clinging tightly to his belief that having a baby meant one day losing that child to something painful and ugly.
Lowering his eyes to his lap, now covered by the thin, quilted spread her aunt kept on the guest room bed, he threaded his fingers together and shook his head again. “It’s too risky,” he rasped. “I can’t take the chance.”
She waited a beat, breathing slowly in and out, letting his final decision sink in. Anger bubbled in her belly, while at the same time a chill of sorrow spread through her veins.
“So that’s it,” she replied woodenly. “I don’t get a say in the matter? You can’t stretch your mind to believe that we could instill enough self-esteem and strong moral principles in our children that they wouldn’t get mixed up in any of that stuff? You’re going to trust that nameless, faceless strangers would wield enough power to hurt our kids before they’re even born, but you can’t trust the two of us enough to know we’d keep them safe and raise them right?”
He lifted his head to meet her gaze and the answer was clear. His eyes were bleak, splintering her heart into a thousand tiny shards. There was no changing his mind; she understood that now, even though somewhere, in the very distant back of her mind, she’d hoped and thought maybe, just maybe there was a chance.
Until that moment, however, she hadn’t realized how much pain of his own Gage was carrying around-because of his job, because of the things his job had forced him to witness, and because of the decisions they’d driven him to make.
She’d thought she’d lost it all when he’d pulled away from her and she’d been forced to ask for a divorce. Now she knew that wasn’t true. She hadn’t lost it all; he had. Because she still believed that good could win out over evil and had faith in humanity, while he…
He’d apparently lost faith in everyone and everything. Including her.
Including himself.
Gage got out of bed just as the sun was rising on the distant horizon, casting the sky in soft pink and orange and purple.
Not that he’d gotten a wink of sleep after Jenna had pressed him with the hard questions… and hadn’t liked his answers.
He didn’t think she’d gotten much rest, either.
There at the end, she’d had such a look in her eyes. A look of sadness, disappointment, and loss. It had clutched at him, squeezed him from the inside out and made him want to reach out. To grab her up, tug her back into bed, and hold her, murmuring reassuring promises until the sorrow faded from her eyes.
But he couldn’t do that. He hadn’t been able to offer a single soothing word, because everything he’d had to say had already been said. There was no changing his mind-no changing hers, eithe
r, he knew-and nothing was going to soften that blow for her.
Or the blow for him, especially after she’d looked at him that way, then simply turned and walked out of the room. She hadn’t closed the door behind her, but she might as well have slammed it for the hollow, resounding heartache she left in her wake.
Gage straightened what was left of the covers before leaving the room and heading downstairs. He suspected Jenna had slept-or not slept, as was more likely the case-on the sofa after leaving him. He’d thought about following her, but what would have been the point?
So he’d stayed where he was and hoped she wasn’t completely miserable, even though he’d known wishing for that was like wishing rain would fall up instead of down.
The stairs of the old farm house creaked as he took them slowly one at a time. He stopped in the entrance of the living room, but there was no sign of Jenna. No sheet or pillow on the antique settee. Not even the big, white plastic needles and purple yarn he’d tossed aside last night when things had still been good between them.
Good, ha! Before the conversation to end all conversations, things hadn’t just been good, they’d been freaking fantastic. He could have gone on that way with her…
Yeah, well, if he’d been lucky, forever. But where Jenna was concerned, he didn’t seem to be walking around with a four-leaf clover in his pocket. More like a black cat, a handful of spilled salt, and an upside-down horseshoe. Maybe even the number thirteen tattooed on his ass.
Turning away from the living room, he headed for the kitchen, but didn’t find Jenna there, either. Her yellow VW was still in the drive, he noticed when he glanced out the window, so unless she’d taken off on foot, there was only one place left where she could be.
He considered going out to the barn after her, but was in no hurry for the confrontation he knew was coming. Silent treatment or screaming match, either way it wasn’t going to be pretty.
There was coffee in the pot on the counter, so he poured himself a cup, then sat at the table to await Jenna’s return. He tried not to think about last night’s argument, but flashes flitted through his head. The words, the hurt, the ultimate outcome.