Running Rings

by Ruth G Juliano

  Verity smiled and a tear ran down from both eyes. “Me either, but it’s not meant to be, Adrian.”

  Chapter 43

  Verity finished her coffee and put the empty cup on the table. She had Marian sitting right in front of her and was debating whether or not to tell her about Brock. She decided that she should, and didn’t know what was going to happen when Marian found out that her boss was in love with her boyfriend.

  “This isn’t easy for me,” Verity said, “I really like you, Marian, and I think you’re a great worker and a lovely person. I’d like to talk to you about your boyfriend.”

  Marian looked over Verity’s shoulder with a big smile on her face. “Sure, let’s talk about him. He’s one of my favourite topics and he’s right here.”

  “Oh god,” Verity said.

  “What?” Marian replied.

  “Oh nothing, I just remembered I’m supposed to finish something at work. I’d better go back. Have a nice weekend.”

  “But you’ve never even met my boyfriend, Kate. I want you to meet him. He’s right here and it will only take a second.”

  Verity realised there was no way out of this and chastised herself not to blow it for Marian’s sake.

  “Hi,” a man said.

  Verity stood up, turned around, and instead of seeing a man who was a few inches taller than her she had to look down. “Oh, hi.”

  “We’ve met somewhere before,” he smiled.

  Verity realised where she’d seen him. “Yes, I accidentally ran into you at the Blue Bar.”

  “This is my boyfriend,” Marian said.

  “Huh?” Verity replied. She looked at the man and back at Marian. “This is your boyfriend?”

  “Don’t feel awkward because I’m in a wheelchair,” he said, “I don’t.”

  “Um, no, of course not, no, I don’t either. Hi, I’m Ver, Kate. I’m Kate, very pleased to meet you.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, Kate,” he replied, extending his hand, “I mean, a lot, like every day for what feels like an eternity, a lot. I’m Scott.”

  “Hi, Scott,” she replied, shaking his hand.

  “We were schoolyard sweethearts,” Marian said, “We still are.” She sat on his knee and he wrapped his arms around her. “I’ve been in love with him for a long time and I always will be. After we get married, we’re going to make a baby.”

  Scott laughed, “That’s the plan.”

  Verity was curious about his apparent paraplegia and how they were going to make a baby, but there was no doubt a way. She had a lot of thoughts running through her head apart from that one. Marian wasn’t Brock’s girlfriend, but they obviously knew each other. She’d spent months trying to avoid Marian’s boyfriend and now here he was. She’d seen him several times and didn’t realise that’s who he was. She felt stupid and now she wanted to know how they knew Brock. She didn’t want to ask right now. She’d have to think of a way to squeeze it into the conversation one day. Without an explanation, she said ‘goodbye’ and walked out of the café wondering what had just happened. Marian wasn’t with Brock? Had he broken up with her and she’d found someone else? No. She ran into the man in the wheelchair at the Blue Bar. He was there for Marian’s birthday. Or maybe they just met. No. They were schoolyard sweethearts. She didn’t understand what was going on.

  “Verity.”

  She looked up and Brock was standing in front of her. She turned and walked up the steps of the library.

  He followed her into the foyer. “No, Verity, stop. I’m not going to keep doing this. You think that I didn’t care and that I didn’t try to get in contact, but I did. I searched for you, I read phonebooks online and off trying to find you, I even hired a private investigator. I love you. I want to spend time with you. I want to make love to you, and make you laugh. I want to see you in track pants and reading glasses and I want to watch the lines on your face deepen. I want to grow old with you like I have since I was seventeen.”

  “I can’t do this.”

  “Yes, you can, you just don’t want to do it. You’re scared about what I’m going to say and that all the fears you’ve built up in your head for years are going to be right. They’re not. Please don’t run away from me anymore. We promised we could do this and I know we can. The reason I didn’t call you is because I didn’t have your number. I tried to remember it and find it and I even called the university. I tried. Let me tell you what happened.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “Yes you do. Verity, I can’t keep pursuing you. Every time you turn your back on me, it hurts. I mean it physically hurts. I feel like I’m losing you again every time you turn your back on me. Please. I never meant to turn my back on you. Please, just hear me out?”

  Verity turned and faced him. She nodded and folded her arms. Brock gestured her to the couches in the foyer of the library. “Okay,” Verity said, and sat down.

  Brock sat down opposite her and ran his hands through his hair. “That last time we saw each other, we were both crying like babies about being separated. You have to know how much I love you. Come on, we were texting constantly to check on each other.”

  “And then the texts stopped.”

  Brock nodded. “After I watched you drive away, I was picked up by Mum and Dad, and Larry and Bob came along for the drive. They’d been visiting my aunt and uncle.”

  “I know that. You sent pictures of yourself in the car. I still have them.” She had no idea when he was going to get to the point. He lost her number, blah, blah, blah. He’d tried to find her, blah, blah, blah. He’d fallen in love with someone else and it didn’t work out, blah, blah, blah. He was drafted to the armed services, blah, blah, blah. He had amnesia and only just remembered who she was, blah, blah, blah. This had better be good.

  “So the plan was to stop along the way at a little coastal town none of us had been to before, and make a trip of it. It sounded fine. I was missing you already, but I knew we’d be back together for graduation, and I was going to call you and Skype you and drive you crazy every day in between.”

  Verity shrugged, “Yep, but you just didn’t bother.”

  “I know you’re mad at me because you think I abandoned you, but you’re going to understand why in a moment. Could you hold back on the attitude a little, please? We worked on losing that attitude because it didn’t suit you, and you didn’t want to have it anymore. You must know how much it hurts to hear you being anything close to vituperative with me. I don’t deserve it. I really don’t.”

  Verity unfolded her arms and nodded, “Sorry. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay, it was getting late and we were going to turn off the highway and …”

  Verity tilted her head and looked at the change in Brock’s body language. She knew his body language. He was about to say something awful, she knew it. She dug her fingers into the material of the couch.

  “As the car turned across the highway, Mum yelled ‘look out’ and I looked to that side of the car just in time to see an eighteen wheeler that’d be driving with no lights on hit the passenger’s side of the car at full force.”

  Verity put her hand to her mouth as pins and needles covered her body. Tears stung her eyes and her head was shaking side to side slightly.

  “It was too late. Mum and Bob were gone straight away, instantly, they wouldn’t have even had time to feel it,” Brock blew out some air, “People stopped to try and help, and get us out of the car. I couldn’t walk, Larry couldn’t walk, and Dad was unconscious. We had to be cut out and it took time and I was in and out, but I remember when they brought Mum and Bob out and they looked so bad,” Brock shook his head and ran his hands through his hair, “So bad, Verity, and so did Larry. I don’t know how I looked, but I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even move.”

  “Oh, Brock,” Verity said, with tears in her eyes. She moved off the couch onto her knees and walked on her knees into his arms. He took her in his arms and rested his head on her head. Being in his arms
, feeling his pain, it was like all the years of misery dissolved into two broken hearts merging as one again.

  “The car was destroyed, the wreckage caused another accident despite the warnings and a Police Officer died in that. It was just so bad. I kept seeing their faces, and seeing how they looked when they came out of the wreckage and I cried sometimes without even knowing I was crying. You knew them, Verity; you knew my mum and Bob. That one Christmas I dragged you back to that little town I came from. I wanted you to be a part of my family, and for them to know you because I wanted you to be my wife. Even back then, that’s what I wanted, what I’ve always wanted. And I should have proposed to you before I left but I was going to do it at our graduation.”

  “But you didn’t make it to the graduation,” Verity whispered.

  Brock shook his head, “I was still in hospital and I couldn’t leave my brother and my dad anyway, even if I wasn’t injured. We were all shattered, physically, emotionally, just shattered, Verity.”

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t even think that might be a possibility. I thought it was about me, like you didn’t love me anymore or I wasn’t good enough. I always made it about me. I stopped doing that with your help, but I did it again. I’m so selfish and I’m so sorry.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you cry,” he said, rubbing her shoulders.

  “I can’t believe this. I didn’t know. No one mentioned that when I visited your dad.”

  “What? “ Brock asked, tilting Verity’s face towards him.

  “I saw your dad, I went to visit him.”

  “You saw him? Where and when?”

  “At the Garden Wall nursing home. He’d had a stroke. I sat with him for more than an hour trying to get as much information as I could about you.”

  “Really?” Brock asked with a smile, “And you understood him okay? Some of the nurses can’t, but I can.”

  Verity nodded, “I was so happy to hear from him that you’d gone to the city to make the big money. He told me how proud he was of you as his first born son. I felt closer to you when I was with him. Was the stroke from the accident?”

  Brock shook his head, “He wasn’t coping without my mum, and he couldn’t deal with the reality that Bob wasn’t going to grow up, and he struggled with everything that was going on. He blamed himself for our injuries and their deaths, but it wasn’t his fault. The truck was going over a hundred kilometres an hour with no lights on. We tried to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but he was so stressed and not looking after himself. He was drinking and smoking like a chimney and his body just couldn’t take it. He had a stroke and there was nothing anyone could do. I needed you so much, Verity. I was hoping that somehow someone would tell you I was in the hospital and you’d come and see me. I looked up every time someone came to the door, and it was never you. I had to learn to walk again, and to do lots of things again, and I needed you.”

  “I’m sorry, Brock. I thought you just didn’t love me, or you met someone else, I didn’t know what to think. I even wondered if you were still alive a few times.”

  “No, that wasn’t it. Never. I felt pretty dead for a while. I had so much to deal with and I needed you more than I have ever needed you before, but I couldn’t find you.”

  Verity moved her arms up around his shoulders and held him tight. She’d alternated between being annoyed with him and loving him for so long, but now all she felt was love for him and anger for herself for doubting his love for her. “I gave the nursing home my details and asked them to tell anyone who visited your dad to get in touch but no one ever called. I called every finance-related business in every major city in Australia asking if you worked there. I even made stupid social media accounts knowing that we said we would never use them.”

  His arms came around her and he gripped his forearm with his hand. “We both tried. This is meant to be, Verity. I can’t tell you how good it feels to hold you, really hold you. How is it that one person’s embrace can be so different from another’s?”

  Verity didn’t answer but she knew exactly what he meant. “Come home with me. We have so much to talk about.”

  “You’re finally going to talk to me, huh?”

  “I thought you were Marian’s boyfriend and I really like her. I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt.”

  Brock laughed, “Kiss me, you fool.”

  Verity smiled and kissed him gently on the lips. “When they called your name at graduation, I thought you were going to appear, like a surprise, maybe spring out from behind a pillar or something. But you didn’t.”

  “I pre-ordered the video, and I was so happy to pick it up from the post office months later. I watched you getting your degree and they moved your tassel aside. I was so proud of you. You looked beautiful but a little sad. I had to make new copies because I was wearing them out. I never, ever, meant to hurt you. I needed you more than ever and I had no way of finding you. All my letters came back as ‘not at this address’ and the university email addresses were closed.”

  Verity moved further into his arms. “My parents got a divorce and moved apart. They sold the house without telling me or even that they’d split up. My dad picked me up from the bus station and I decided to live with him until graduation when I was going to live with you. My mother isn’t biologically my mother and she hates me. And my father is dead and I didn’t get to go to his funeral. Something really horrible happened to me in that first February and I thought I was going to die. Ever since I saw you in the café I have wanted to hold you like this, to hold you properly, but I didn’t want to lose you again, or hurt someone else that I care about. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Brock.”

  “We haven’t had much luck without each other, have we? Do you think you can love me again?”

  “Can you love me again, Broccoli?”

  Brock laughed, “Yes, Variety, because I haven’t stopped loving you since I started.”

  “What if you don’t like me now? What if it’s not how it was? A lot has happened to me and things have definitely changed within me. I’m more confident now, and I worry less about stupid things, which is good, but sometimes I get scared inside. Sometimes my self-esteem is really low, and I’m not full of myself like I was when we met. I tried to learn all these things that would make me a better partner for you if you ever came back, but, what if we can’t be ‘Variety’ and ‘Broccoli’ anymore?”

  “What if it’s better?” Brock replied, moving her hair from her face, “What if we’ve learned a lot and we understand what we really want out of life and it’s better?”

  “I missed you. I missed you until I thought I couldn’t miss you anymore. That left a hole in my heart and a crease in my forehead that’s never going to go away.”

  Brock ran his thumb up Verity’s forehead from the top of her nose to her hairline. “See the wrinkles around my eyes. They’re from smiling every time I thought about you.”

  Verity touched his cheek, “You look scruffy.”

  “Say the word and it’s gone,” Brock said, rubbing his beard.

  “I want you however you come. I want to get to know you again and see if you’re everything I remember.”

  Brock leant forward and kissed her on the lips, “I love you, Verity.”

  “I love you, Brock Vale.”

  “Finally,” he laughed, squeezing her a little tighter.

  “I know I love you, and sometimes I didn’t want to love you. I was so mad at you for leaving me alone in the world and letting so many bad things happen to me.”

  “You were blaming me for everything that went wrong because I wasn’t there? Just like you always did. If you were late to class it was because I didn’t call you. If you lost your pen it was because I made you forget where it was. I’m sorry I wasn’t here for anything bad that might have happened to you, but I was always just here,” he said, and poked her in the forehead, “Or just here.” He poked her in the chest. “I want to hear all about everything you’ve been through and lick your wounds until they heal.�
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  Verity smiled, “Thank you. I’m so sorry about your family.”

  “Me too,” Brock said, “It doesn’t get any easier to lose someone. You just try to keep yourself busy so it’s not on your mind.”

  Verity stood up, “Come on, come back to my place, but before you do that, I have to know how you know Marian.”

  “We went to school together. She’s been my brother’s girlfriend since she was about nine.”

  “Scott is your brother?”

  “Larry, Scott is his middle name but he hates the name Larry, almost as much as Bob hated the middle name Jane.”

  Verity smiled, “I know, you’re all named after Australian racing car drivers.”

  “He’s lucky he got the middle name Scott instead of Perkins.”

  Verity touched his nose, “We all know Peter Brock was the best.”

  “That’s why I came first,” Brock said.

  Verity laughed, “You haven’t changed, have you? You’ve just gotten a little older.”

  “And wiser,” Brock said, “My heart belongs to you, and maybe I tried to put it in a few places it didn’t belong, but I’ve never been intimate with anyone else because I couldn’t physically do it.”

  Verity nodded and swallowed. Her heart sunk a little. She’d have to tell him what happened that first February, and about Adrian, and about Brad. She sighed. He’d never been with anyone but her. That was their plan.

  “Verity, whatever you’re thinking right now, stop it,” he said, taking her hand, “You know me. You know how I feel. Whatever you’re carrying, I’ll help you carry it.”

  She nodded and looked down to his hand as he took it in hers. She didn’t know why but right now it didn’t feel like any time had passed. “Do you really think we stand a chance?”

  “Yes, because it feels like I saw you driving away in that bus yesterday and I’ve just woken up and here you are. No one compares to you, Verity. In my heart, and in my mind, it’s you, always you.”

  “Why didn’t you have Marian talk to me about it? If she’d told me that you weren’t her boyfriend and that you’d been driving Scott crazy by talking about me all the time, it might have sped things up.”