Reprise (Ruby Riot #3)

by Lisa Swallow

  I huff as Riley holds a hushed conversation with her mum and stares at the floor. No wonder that Mitchell guy is all over her. Riley dresses smartly almost always. In Yorkshire, her natural look drew me in, but tonight she’s dressed to match her occasion. Not just the black and gold in her clothes, but the poise and attention. She again plays with her earring in the familiar way, and my heart tears that I could already have lost this amazing woman.

  38

  RILEY

  I end the call and look back to Nate, fighting the dizziness from my shallow breathing, and pray he doesn’t spot how freaked out I am by his approaching me. I want to be angry with him, but the emotion won’t come. Nate’s edgy, despite his cool demeanour, and although he’s friendly, I’m unsure how long this will last. One of us is bound to overstep and drag us into a fight.

  “Where can we talk?” he asks.

  This insistence worries me too. If Nate has something to say, and I put him off, he might not try again. But if Nate has come to me for support around his heartbreaking story of why he refuses to love, I can’t listen. Of course, I hurt for him over his situation six years ago, but I can’t be a friend to Nate. Not because I’m back to disliking the man, but because I want more than he’s prepared to give. I want all of him — body, heart and soul. But I don’t want to be rejected; I deserve better.

  “What is there to talk about? Have you changed your mind about something?” I ask.

  Nate stares at his shoes and runs a hand through his hair. “I’ve thought about this, us, over and over the last few days. I don’t know what to do, Riley. I’m not sure I can deal with Josh and that kind of pressure.” He glances up at me. “I thought, maybe we could… I can ignore the fact you have a kid as long as you still have time to spend with me.”

  The need to throw heavy words at Nate rises, to switch on the aggression in an attempt to hide the hurt. Does he want to dismiss my son as an optional extra?

  “Whoa. You want me to pretend Josh doesn’t exist and go back to screwing you on a random basis?”

  “Why not? You did before.”

  Anger bubbles beneath the surface. I close my eyes and count down the seconds before I explode. How dare Nate behave the way he did and then waltz in as if I’ll drop everything because I can’t live without him.

  “Shit. That came out wrong, Riley, I—”

  “The words were perfectly clear to me. No fucking way, Nate,” I growl. “Go back to your vapid girls and meaningless sex.” I ready myself to walk away, then pause. “Exactly how long have you thought that’s an option, Nate?”

  Nate screws his face up. “When I saw you tonight. Yeah, stupid idea.”

  I lower my voice. “I’ve found some peace around my life as a mother and I’m ready to move on. I am not having anybody in my life who’s toxic for me and my son.”

  Nate shifts uncomfortably but looks away.

  “I’m moving on from the secrets I should never have kept, and the fear I might fall in love again. Now, if I fall for somebody, it happens, but the somebody will not be you. I want a man in my life who’ll love and respect both me and Josh.”

  Nate snaps his head up. “You want someone to love you? Since when? I thought you only wanted casual?”

  “Isn’t love what normal people want? I’m willing to try with the right person. To try to have a normal life.”

  The old confusion is in Nate’s eyes as he studies me. Why can’t this man let go and be the one I glimpsed a month ago? “Yeah.”

  I press fingers to my forehead. “I wish you wouldn’t do that!”

  “What?”

  “Say ‘yeah’ when you have a hundred other words in your mind you could use instead.”

  Nate’s semi-smirk appears and he bites his lip. “Yeah.”

  “You infuriating man!” My words catch in my throat, the emotional maelstrom of the last week unleashes as the tears escape.

  Nate straightens, panic in his wide eyes. “Riley.”

  Weak, stupid… I turn from him and stumble to the nearby staff room, pissed off that my eyes blur. Thankful nobody else is in earshot, or in the room, I step inside. My attempt to shut the door on Nate fails, and he pushes past.

  I turn my back to him and attempt to hide tears I’m wiping away. I catch the edges of the security blanket in my mind and pull the comforting darkness back around me.

  But with Nate in the room, this doesn’t work.

  “Shit, Riley,” Nate says in a low voice. “I’m sorry.” The vehement words build, hurting my head as I try to contain them. “I didn’t mean to hurt you again tonight.”

  “It’s okay,” I tense as my voice cracks. “Please leave me alone.”

  “No. I care about you.”

  “You don’t care about anybody but yourself.”

  “I care about you,” he repeats. “Otherwise I wouldn’t’ve followed you in here.”

  I turn slowly, clinging to the edge of my clouding rationality. He has to go before I lose my temper. Or worse, collapse in tears. “I can’t do this anymore, Nate. You did the right thing walking away. Rejecting me when you found out about Josh was better than keeping this going. We should stay away from each other.” Proud of myself for hanging on to the professional calm I perfected years ago, I hold his gaze. “At least we’re civil now.”

  “Shit.” Nate’s voice hoarsens. “I can try, Riley. I want to try.”

  “Try what? Hook ups? Not happening.”

  “Try us.”

  I cross my arms against him, us, this. “Don’t. Don’t say that. There isn’t an us.”

  “There always was.” He rests against the edge of the table beneath the window and looks up at the ceiling. “Right from the start. The first night. On tour. Two years. The snow. We’ve always been something.”

  “No,” I whisper. “No, we haven’t.”

  He looks directly at me, looking through to the place I’m trying to hide from him. “We’ve always been Nate and Riley to everybody else and just never admitted it to each other. Nothing’s changed.”

  “Yes it has! Everything’s changed. This isn’t the same anymore.” Each moment, every word and my heart thumps louder; every second and the truth rises closer to the surface.

  “What? How?”

  “I didn’t always love you!” Holy crap. I slam a hand over my mouth, as I share his look of horror. Nate grips the edge of the table, and the small space of the room constricts. I’m on the verge of walking out, but my jelly legs won’t move.

  “What the hell?” he says, voice hardly audible. “Riley…”

  I lift my chin. “I fell in love with you. Well done. You won.”

  Nate’s expression softens. “This isn’t a game, Riley.”

  “It’s been one long, nasty, heartbreaking game, Nate. I need you to keep away now and let me deal with my stupidity.”

  Nate pulls himself away from the table, and the opposite of what I want happens, Nate steps closer. “Why? Why would you feel that?”

  “I don’t bloody know! How can I explain how much I suddenly want somebody else? All I know is that when I lost you this time, it hurt a hell of a lot more than before. Than anybody before.”

  This Nate I hate almost as much as the rude one. The one with a neutral, deep browed look that could disguise any number of the emotions he hides himself from. He doesn’t move any closer and each silent second passing intensifies the embarrassed regret.

  I told Nate I love him.

  In this room, together, the world blurs. What the hell, I may as well go all out here. “I know you feel something too, Nate. I don’t know what, but something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ohmigod!” I yell and push him in the chest once, twice.

  Nate catches my arms, the way he did in the bedroom in the pub and grips so I can’t attack him anymore. “Yeah, I feel something, Riley, and it fucking terrifies me.” We breathe heavily, in sync, and the secret this man keeps contained breaks across his face. “Shit! Why do you do this to me?”<
br />
  “Do what?”

  “Make me feel for you. I know you think I’m an immature, possessive jerk, but this is more than that. This is about you. All of this is about how I feel around you. The whole fucking world is on fire, Riley, and I’m suffocating. I don’t know what to do anymore!”

  “You make it sound like I’m deliberately hurting you by caring about you. That’s insane, Nate.”

  “Because you’re making me face shit I don’t want to, or lose you. That’s what hurts me.”

  Neither of us steps back or retreats from each other. Nate’s grip remains on my arms, his fingers digging into my bare skin. I swallow. “I think you need to free yourself, Nate. By hanging on, somebody from your past dictates how you feel. You need to let go of the control this person has over you.”

  Nate’s gaze pierces me and he slides his hands along my arms until he cups both my cheeks in his hands. “You. You burned through all that; now I feel freer than I have for years.”

  “No. You’re stuck.”

  “Because I’m fucking terrified. I’m in the middle of this crap raging around my head, and I know you can help because you showed me I was worth more. But that’s what scares me too. That’s what happened before. With her.”

  “You can’t cope with the fact I have Josh. There’s no point trying.”

  “No. I mean, yes. Crap. You’re not the same, but you’re still exactly the same.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Does any of this?” he says with a short laugh. “I watched you tonight and there’s something different about you. Maybe it’s because you’ve let go and are moving on like you said. I don’t know.” He pauses. “I want you, and I have to drop all this bullshit before someone else steps in.”

  I can’t move my face, and as he speaks, his warm breath caresses my face, drying the remaining tears. “I fell in love with that broken Nate because I thought he wanted me to fix him.”

  “One in a long line who’ve tried.”

  My heart lurches. Is he again telling me I’ll fail? “And me?”

  “Tried to stop you, over and over, but you always came back. Even when I didn’t see you for two years, you’d sneak back.” He chews a lip and gives a small smile. “It was like I had this stubborn little Riley camped in the corner of my heart who every now and then would stab to remind me she was there.”

  I laugh at his strange metaphor. “You’re an odd man, Nate.”

  “But you still understand me, even when I push you away.”

  I close my fingers over his and know I don’t need to tell him the next words. “Because we’re the same, aren’t we? Secrets stunting who we were. I finally get that now.”

  “But look at you. You’re a step ahead of me; you told people the secret that pulled you down.” The intensity moves to his fingers and he grips my cheeks.

  “Nate, can you stop holding my face so hard, please? It hurts.”

  Nate loosens his hands and hesitantly moves his face closer, and the charged moment remains until his mouth meets mine. The kiss is hesitant, like the first, but tells me more than a single word he’s said tonight. Nate’s gentle kiss drags me into the flames of the fire trapping us. With Nate, I’m prepared to risk walking through because I’m sure I can come out the other side with him.

  I wait for Nate’s hands to explore my body, for him to lift me onto the table and follow his usual pattern, but he doesn’t. When he pauses, I panic that the kiss was an end. A goodbye.

  “I don’t think you ever understood what kissing you means,” he says.

  “I do. You allow me a closeness you won’t with most people.” I touch his lips. “That’s why I knew we were lying about keeping things casual, Nate.”

  “No, you didn’t listen to what I told you every time I kissed you.”

  “That I’m different?”

  “That I think I love you.”

  The fear dragging me down since I saw him this evening lifts, and the world blurs further into the white from last month. “What?”

  He shakes his head at himself. “I think… Yeah.”

  I make an exasperated noise and he chews his mouth. “I do have a lot more words than yeah, but they’re jumbled up in my head. Just believe how much you mean, how much I want you, and that I will try and make this work.”

  “And Josh?”

  Nate closes his eyes. “I’ll get to know him.”

  But there are no guarantees. That’s the biggest decision I have here. But would there be guarantees with anybody?

  Nate wraps me in his arms, and something unexpected happens. I forget about the event happening outside the door; I don’t care what anybody needs from me because right now I’m in my safe place with Nate.

  The idea we’ve come together and created one isn’t a romantic notion about hearts finally meeting; but one of teaching each other the beauty of letting go, for swapping pain from the past to hope for the future. We met another person who recognised in the other something the same as ourselves and reached out. The risk of trusting people is shared; we’re equally vulnerable, and in this situation, nobody has the upper hand.

  Fear prevented us accepting this. The stage in our life we were at closed the door on our first attempt, but fate kept us on the edges of each other’s lives until we were ready to step into a different world together.

  I bury my face into Nate’s chest. How far into my world can he truly step, and how long will he stay there?

  39

  RILEY

  Josh refused to wear his jacket today and, dressed in a thin T-shirt, he charges through the spring cool across the lawn towards the small lake.

  “Josh!” I shout. “Wait for me!”

  He comes to an abrupt halt and flops onto his backside. Josh’s clothes plus muddy grass. Great. I take my tenth look around in as many minutes at the families with pushchairs and couples with dogs enjoying the rain-free Sunday. Spring is my favourite season, the crocuses and daffodils emerge in the beds beneath the trees, throwing colour back into the large park. Early buds appear on the tall trees and the canopies of leaves, which shelter the park visitors in the summer, will return soon. With this freshness in the air comes the relief winter is over for another year; stuck in the house with a miserable, energetic Josh at weekends drives me nuts. Bringing Josh here affords me peace as he has fun and tires himself out, although today I don’t feel very peaceful here.

  I asked Josh to wait with me on the narrow wooden bench at the edge of the path; but following five minutes whacking the grass with a stick he found, his attention switched.

  I fiddle with the knot on the bag of bread on my lap. Nate’s late; will he come? We’ve met a couple of times since the night we shared more than we wanted; and however hard we tried, the words were repeated as if reassuring each other. But Nate never mentioned Josh, and my heart increasingly lifted the guard back up. Until two days ago, when he announced he wanted to meet Josh.

  Here I am, sitting in the large park in walking distance from the house, a regular weekend haunt since Josh could toddle, with Josh and waiting for Nate. I promised Josh we’d feed the ducks and visit the ice cream van standing in the car park nearby. I suspect he wants the duck bread feeding done with as quickly as possible so he can move onto the Josh ice cream feeding.

  Josh stands again and moves closer to the water.

  “Josh!” I call, tone sterner, and stride across to him. He doesn’t look round and keeps walking. I grab his arm as the edge of his shoes touch the water. “I’ve told you not to go near water without me.”

  Big eyes look back to mine, as he shuffles from foot to impatient foot. “Can I have the bread now?” I raise my brow. “Please.”

  “In a minute, I’m waiting for a friend.”

  “Is Lauren coming? Is she bringing Poppy?”

  I feel bad for quashing his excitement. “No, one of Mummy’s friends is coming today.”

  Meeting Nate in the local park may not seem the best place to introduce Josh; a publ
ic scene if this is a disaster could ensue, but is there any place suitable for meeting a rock star and introducing him to your son? Following Nate and Josh’s abrupt meeting at the house, I want neutral.

  Josh splashes the water with his stick, harder and harder, and my stomach drops lower and lower into my boots as the minutes pass. The nearby ducks swim back and forth, anticipating the bread.

  “Okay.” I open the bag of bread and with a cheer Josh drags outs a huge crust.

  The ducks who’ve gathered closest are rewarded with a lump of bread bouncing off their heads.

  Somebody behind us laughs. “I think you’re supposed to break that into smaller pieces.”

  I turn to Nate, who offers me an apologetic look. He moves to stand next to me, hands in pockets as he and Josh make eye contact. Neither say hello and Josh returns to his missile attack on the ducks.

  “I didn’t think you were coming,” I tell him. “You’re almost half an hour late.”

  “Am I? Late night.” He rubs his reddened eyes. “Plus I got lost.”

  I smile and look at my boots, nerves over the situation silencing me. Nate wraps an arm around my shoulders and plants a kiss on the top of my head. I turn my face to his, desperate not to see wariness in his eyes, but it’s there.

  He doesn’t kiss me.

  “Josh. I want you to meet Nate,” I say.

  Josh turns and chews on his mouth as he studies Nate. “I met you once.”

  “Hello,” says Nate.

  “Who are you?”

  Josh’s abruptness with the unsure Nate amuses me, the ego-driven rock star silenced by my five-year-old. “I’m Nate.”

  Josh continues his uninterested study. “Mummy doesn’t have a lot of friends. Who are you?”

  “He’s a good friend, Josh, and he wanted to meet you.”

  Josh holds the bag out in Nate’s direction. “You can feed the ducks with me.”

  “Uh.” Nate looks at me for a help, but I repress a smile. He can deal with these things himself. “Maybe later.”

  Josh proceeds to ignore him, but splashes harder until the muddy water hits Nate’s jeans.

  Nate steps back. “Crap, Riley. I don’t know if this is a good idea.”