Our Lives Entwined

by Lilliana Anderson

  “Hi yourself. Did you get the text from Natalie yesterday?”

  “Yeah… I did,” she almost whispered.

  “Well? Why didn’t you respond or call her or something? She’s trying here, Mi. She is doing everything she can to mend things between you, and your just sitting there pretending like none of this is happening. Well, like it or not, that woman is your mother too, and Natalie is your sister. Do you think you could just put your own feelings to the side for one moment and think about someone else?”

  Mia’s mouth fell open as her eyes filled with fresh tears. Put her own feelings aside? Think of someone else? Why did Mia always have to do the right thing? Why couldn’t she just once, work through her own hurt and disappointment without having to think about other people?

  “Well?” he said again, getting frustrated that she wasn’t giving him any answers.

  Pressing her lips together, Mia closed her eyes tightly, allowing the tears to fall down her face. Her breath hitched.

  “Are you crying?” Eric asked, his tone changing slightly as he realised how upset she must be.

  “I’m fine,” she forced out. But Eric knew her too well to believe those two words.

  “You’re not fine. What’s going on?”

  “I… I know her, Eric.”

  “Know who?”

  “Belle… Belinda. I know her.”

  “What do you mean you know her? How?”

  It was at that point that she spilt the entire story to Eric. She told him how she’d met Belle at the charity dinner and Belle had been a complete bitch to her. Then she told him how Belle had had a relationship of some sort with Cayd… “It’s all just a little too much for me to handle right now, Eric. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Maybe this is something that you and Natalie need to go through together. She’s really upset over meeting Belinda or Belle or whatever the hell her name is, as well. The woman was a complete bitch to her. Although hearing your story, I think she may have thought that Nat was you.”

  “She’s ‘Nat’ to you now is she?”

  “Yeah. She is.”

  A silence fell between them for a while as they both processed the information they’d gleaned from each other.

  “Listen, Mi. I get that this is a bit strange for you. I know you didn’t want any of this in your life, but it’s there whether you like it or not. Why don’t you come up to Sydney, deal with the fact that you have a sister and a less than ideal mother, and then maybe we can all work toward picking up the pieces of this mess and finding some way to live with it.”

  “I don’t know, Eric. I have work and…”

  “And you have Cayd.”

  “No. I don’t have Cayd right now. I need to deal with this first.”

  “I reckon you’re always going to have Cayd, Mia. But if you want to get past this, then I suggest you put in for some emergency family leave and come and deal with this. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to go through another year like the last one. I don’t want this mess to blow up and ruin our world again.”

  “You sound like you’re doing just fine up there with my twin, Eric.”

  He paused, clenching his teeth as he felt as though she just slapped him with her words.

  “Life isn’t the same without you too. Just think about coming up. You can stay with me if you like. We’re still like family, Mi. Nothing’s going to change that. Just come. Text me your flight details, and I’ll meet you at the airport.”

  Reluctantly agreeing to consider the trip, Mia disconnected the phone call, leaving Eric standing outside, looking at his phone while he wondered how they were all supposed to get through this new bump in the road.

  “Who was that?” Natalie asked from behind him, causing him to spin around and pocket his phone.

  “Just organising some stuff back home,” he told her, not wanting to get her hopes up by telling her Mia might come to Sydney. He pocketed his phone then reached out and took her in his arms. “How long have you been standing there? You’re freezing,” he said, rubbing his arms up and down her arms to create friction.

  “Not long,” she lied. She’d heard the majority of the conversation and wondered why he was lying to her. Did he still have feelings for Mia? “I just got out of the shower and wondered where you were.”

  Smiling down at her, Eric pressed his lips to her forehead before guiding her inside and offering to make her a hot drink to warm her up.

  Accepting, Natalie sat down on the lounge and watched him closely as he moved about the small kitchenette while her mind whirred. Why was he just talking to Mia? Why did he lie about it? The timing of the call and the secrecy led her to believe that perhaps making love had been a bad idea. What if it just made him realise that it was Mia that he loved after all?

  To her, the last night together had been soul satisfying. She had thought it must have felt the same for him too. But then, they had never mentioned anything about love. Perhaps she was the only one who felt it. Perhaps he didn’t love her at all…

  Chapter 16

  “CAN WE talk – please?” Cayd implored Mia, from the doorway of Louise and Josh’s townhouse that night.

  His voice was strained with pain, and worry had etched itself in his features. Mia stood in front of him, once again, worrying the ring around her finger as she looked up his beautiful unshaven face. He didn’t look like he’d slept at all without her. He looked more like he’d hit the bottle instead.

  “I don’t know. I told you – I need time, Cayd. This isn’t easy for me,” she said eventually.

  Swallowing hard, Cayd leant against the doorframe and nodded his dishevelled looking head. It had only been twenty-four hours since they had found out about Belle and her connection to Mia, and it had been the worst twenty-four hours of both of their lives. It wasn’t easy for either of them.

  “Please, Mia. Talk to me. Let me say my piece and then I’ll give you all the time you need.”

  The delusional part of Mia was urging her to pretend that none of this had ever happened, and just go back home with him to live their life as normal. The spontaneous part of her wanted to run in the other direction and never stop until she had reached a place where no one had heard of her before.

  But the rational part of her knew that it was time to deal with everything. She needed to hear him out and then she needed to take that trip to Sydney and face everything she’d been ignoring in her life. Only then would she be fully informed and feel safe enough to follow her heart. She just hoped that once she knew everything, her heart wouldn’t change its mind. She loved Cayd and she was frightened that discovering everything about him would be too much for her.

  “Ok,” she conceded, turning around to lead the way to the bedroom where they’d be able to talk privately. Louise had a habit of watching a conversation from afar to lip read, and Josh wasn’t much better. The moment she and Josh came into view, Mia noticed them move to pretend they weren’t eavesdropping (although, Josh signing to Louise that they were going to talk was pretty obvious, even though he tried to do it surreptitiously). “I think we might go for a walk instead,” she said, grabbing her coat from the back of a chair and sliding an arm inside one sleeve. Her eyes closed with longing as Cayd took a hold of the coat and helped her with the other sleeve. It was such a simple and caring gesture that made her want to forget everything. But she couldn’t. Not with a clear conscience anyway.

  With her hands stuffed into her pockets for warmth, she walked beside Cayd down the darkening street toward the sports ovals. For a while they were quiet, listening to the shouting that came with midweek football practise as players ran through their drills.

  “Is it too cold for you?” Cayd asked, as he rubbed his hands together for warmth.

  “I’m fine. You?” He was only wearing a t-shirt and a wool blazer – it wasn’t exactly warm enough for a Melbourne winter.

  “I’m fine,” he told her quietly.

  Mia could tell that he was trying to work out whe
re to start, and how he was going to plead his case without making anything worse.

  “How about you just start from the beginning?” she suggested.

  He glanced at her. “It’s not a place I wanted to revisit again. I don’t like who I was back then.”

  “Perhaps not. But it’s affecting our lives now. If I know everything, I can’t be blindsided again.”

  Bringing his brows together, Cayd nodded slightly then gestured toward a coffee shop that was up ahead. “Shall we?”

  “Sure.”

  After ordering their coffees and taking a seat in a booth in the quiet coffee shop, they sat across from each other. She looked at him expectantly as he ran his hand over his face and took a deep breath.

  “Ok. The beginning.” Their coffees were sat in front of them by a friendly Chinese waitress who nodded at them and told them to enjoy. Cayd stared into golden looking crema as it floated, velvet-like on top of the brown drink then placed his hands around the warm cup, feeling the heat seep into his cold fingers before he looked up into Mia’s eyes. It was time to come clean.

  “When my brother died, I was twenty-one. We weren’t close like young brothers are, but we were as close as we could be with a large age gap between us. His passing devastated me, because I loved him more than anyone. I’d cared for him when our parents were too busy to pay attention. I had covered for him when he’d snuck out at night and gotten in trouble with the police. But my loss, of course, was nothing compared to the devastation my parents went through losing a son. They were good parents, you see. They were just busy – but they always loved us.

  “I was still at university, and I was living at home, although I was able to come and go as I pleased. They had stopped trying to control me years before. And when Jeremy died, their grief was so intense. It was as if it was palpable and filled every inch of that house. It sounds terrible, but I couldn’t stand the crying, and I couldn’t stand the fighting, or the blaming, and the screaming that was going on in the house. Every time I was there, my parents were either yelling or they were crying and then all of a sudden – there was nothing.

  “I’d been out drinking with friends – it had become my go-to way of coping with my brother’s death, and my parent’s pain, and when I came home, there was this eerie silence that I can’t describe. It was like I sensed that something was wrong. I’d been heavily intoxicated when I walked through the door, but the moment my foot hit the staircase, I sobered. It was as if I knew, before I even got to her, I knew that silence was death. It had visited us again.”

  He lifted his cup slightly, his hands shaking as he brought it to his lips. His pain caused Mia to rethink her need for this information. Perhaps she could just let it go and they could go on without causing him this pain…

  “You don’t have to go on if this is too hard,” she told him, as she watched him carefully return his cup to its saucer. But it was as if he couldn’t hear her. The words were coming out of where he’d locked them away and vowed never to speak them again, and he couldn’t seem to stop them.

  “When I got to the top of the stairs, I knew I had to check on her. I felt it. I felt that something was wrong. And when I opened the door to her room it was filled with steam, and I could hear the shower running and see a light coming from the bathroom.

  “I didn’t want to go in there. I didn’t want to see what I could sense. But I forced myself, and that’s when I found her, hanging from the side of the shower cubicle with a shoelace tied around her neck. She was…she was just dangling there. Already gone.”

  For a moment he stared into his coffee again, his brows furrowed and his eyes unfocused as if he could see the scene in front of him. Then he shook his head, flinging the images from his mind before he went on.

  “My father blamed me. He said I should have been more responsible and been home instead of out with my friends. I told him that if he had been a better husband then our family wouldn’t be so destroyed by death. We stopped talking, and he stopped caring. We slowly became family that was only a family for show. For the most part, we were too caught up in our own grief to give a shit about each other.

  “I began partying harder – harder than I ever had before. I slept with woman after woman, trying to somehow find a way to feel something in the pit of hatred I felt for myself. Because I did blame myself. I should have stayed home. I should have been there to look after her. She’d lost her son. She should never have been left alone in her grief.

  “A year after my mother had taken her life, my father announced he was remarrying. I found this out via the newspaper – he hadn’t bothered to tell me himself. The woman was much younger than him and I’d spent some… time… with her before. I knew her to be a manipulative woman who was intent on marrying for a name and gaining more wealth and notoriety for her own family.

  “I refused to go to the wedding. I refused to have anything to do with them, and then one night, I was at a party, and I was out of my mind on god only knows what, and there she was acting as though she didn’t have a ring on her finger, and it made me angry.

  “I took her aside and I confronted her. We argued and things got crazy between us then next thing I knew, we were all over each other, and it wasn’t until it was over that it dawned on me what I’d done. I’d just slept with my father’s wife. Who the hell does that?” He shook his head, hating that he was speaking of something he was so ashamed of.

  “I walked away and vowed to change my life. That’s when I threw myself into my studies and quit using alcohol and women and drugs to blot out my life. I’m not that man anymore. I haven’t been that man for a long time.”

  Mia wiped at the tears that had fallen from her eyes and reached out to take his hand. “You could have told me this before. I would have understood.”

  “I never wanted a person who is as good as you, to learn about the things I’ve done. I’m not proud of the way I behaved.”

  Reaching across the table, Mia placed her hands around Cayd’s and looked into his eyes. “I would have understood,” she repeated.

  And she would have. Already, she knew that he had quite a reputation with women when he was younger, and she also knew about his family loss and his difficult relationship with his father. But those things were all things that the world could find out about Cayd Donnelly in a simple Google search. It meant a lot that Cayd had finally opened up to her now.

  “You’re more than I deserve,” he commented, moving his fingers against hers slowly, as if he wasn’t sure if he could really touch her.

  For a moment they sat there quietly, neither really knowing what to say next. It wasn’t that Mia couldn’t accept his past. It was that Mia couldn’t accept that she had once again unwittingly shared a man with a member of her family. Whether it made sense of not, it just felt wrong to her, and she still needed time to wrap her head around it.

  “I’m afraid of losing you because of this. I’m afraid that something I had no control over is going to be the thing that ruins our happiness,” he said finally.

  Mia withdrew her hands and wiped at the corner of her eye. “I don’t want it to,” she whispered. “But every time I think about it, it causes my stomach to clench and my chest to ache. And I know it was before me. I know you had no idea who she was and you hadn’t even met me yet. Hell, I was too young to be dating then. I know that. Logically, it shouldn’t matter. But it does, Cayd. I hate that it does but, it just does.”

  Taking a hold of her hands, Cayd lifted them and held them against his forehead as he bowed his head. “I wish it didn’t,” he whispered, before pressing his lips to her knuckles then letting her go. He withdrew his hands from the table and sat back, wiping his hand over his face and sniffing slightly to regain his composure.

  “I guess I should get you back,” he said suddenly, pushing his now cold coffee to the side of the table before he stood to leave.

  “I really am sorry, Cayd,” Mia said, from where she still sat looking up at him.

  “Aren�
��t we all?” His sad and tired hazel eyes met hers as he slid his hands into the pockets of his pants and waited patiently for her to rise and put her coat back on.

  As they walked back to the townhouse in silence, the football players were still yelling their way through their training session, completely oblivious to the couple whose relationship was struggling because of a mistake made years ago.

  “I still love you, you know. This is all just about time,” Mia said again, as they reached the front porch.

  Cayd nodded, the muscles in his jaw working as he clenched his teeth together in his distress. “Is this how it will always be between us, Mia? Whenever things get tough, will you leave me?” he growled suddenly.

  Taken aback at his outburst, Mia’s mouth dropped open but when she tried to answer him, she couldn’t find the right words. Suddenly, his arms wrapped around her, and he brought his mouth to hers, kissing her with such unbridled passion that she went limp in his arms.

  “I will give you time, Mia,” he whispered against her mouth as he pulled away and gazed into her eyes. “I’ll give you all the time you need. Just please, don’t take forever. I need you. Do you understand that? I need you.” His voice sounded small and pained and his body quivered as he slowly released her. “Good bye, Mia. You know where to find me.”

  Feeling dizzy from his breathtaking kiss, Mia stood on the porch and watched the man she loved with all her heart walk away from her. The entire time she fought the urge to run after him. It would be so easy to simply fall back into their comfortable and happy life and pretend that none of this had ever happened. But it was time for Mia to face the fact that she had a family.

  It was time she stopped trying to be untouchable. It wasn’t working. She needed to go to Sydney, and finally deal with the family she never wanted or knew she had. Ignoring them wasn’t making them go away, she was getting hurt regardless. It was time to face the facts – she had a twin sister and she had a mother, whether she wanted them or not.