by Helm, Nicole
He’d told her he might love her. He’d grabbed her and kissed her and been some kind of crazed version of himself and it wouldn’t do. It would not do.
He scrubbed his hands over his face, trying to scrub some reason or sense into his brain, but it didn’t work. Nothing worked. No amount of thinking, processing. No number of attempted plans he’d tried to work out over and over again lying in the twin bed in his old room at his parents’ last night.
There were no answers, there were no plans, there was only this bone-deep feeling of uncertainty and confusion and fear and...
Yeah, that love thing. He couldn’t get over the fact that he wanted to be here, with her. That, baby aside, he liked the man he became when he was with Meg. Even this one—the one who had no idea what he was doing.
Because it was real. A lot realer than he’d ever been. It took no masks and it took no swallowing his tongue. It took no careful words. He didn’t have to be perfect or responsible or the epitome of a businessman. He didn’t have to impress anyone, or prove that he’d made the right choices to anyone.
Yes, anyone probably meant most especially his father, which had then become something like showing Dell. He’d lived the majority of his life trying to prove something that...well, he’d never really had to prove.
Because Dell had taken the farm even against Dad’s wishes, and he’d built a life he was sickeningly happy with. So all the attempts to build the life someone else wanted of him had been wrong.
He’d been good at what he’d done, and there had been parts of it he’d enjoyed. But there had been an emptiness to it he’d ignored, because it didn’t fit the plan.
Now he had Meg. He had his family seeking his expertise. It felt like people knew him, understood him, and that had done a lot to fill up that emptiness or tear down that armor or whatever it was.
Love. He loved her. There was a chance here to have a real life, without a plan, without forcing himself into a hole he didn’t really fit in.
He stood in the doorway of Meg’s barn. He didn’t love milking goats or processing milk, and he didn’t love helping Dell with farm chores. He didn’t hate it, but it wasn’t as though farming had become a new passion.
But there was something to be said for building something that was your own. For being outside and seeing the sky.
Maybe, just maybe, there was something to be said for moving forward without a plan. That sounds idiotic. Because the reasonable part of his brain hadn’t simply rolled over and died, but it refused to give him a better alternative.
So he marched toward Meg’s cottage having no idea what he would do when he got there, only knowing he needed to move forward. He needed to move, and if there was no set of footsteps to follow, no concrete goal to reach, well, maybe that was just a life he’d been avoiding for as long as it could be avoided.
Now it was here.
He forced himself up the stairs of the stoop. He stepped into the cottage like he might have stepped into any potentially fraught business meeting.
And then winced at the comparison. But she stood with her back to the door, carefully pulling a piece of toast from the toaster and placing it on a paper plate.
“I did everything you normally do,” he offered, sounding like a robot.
“Thank you. Would you like some toast?” she asked, sounding far too polite.
“No, I wouldn’t.” He wanted answers and something to make sense, and maybe scariest of all, the thing he was really trying to avoid thinking about, he wanted her to have some inkling of return feelings for him.
But they only stood there, in uncomfortable silence, him by the door, her by the toaster. No words. No way to interrupt the droning quiet.
She stayed in the same place, staring down at the plain piece of toast she’d taken all of one bite of. She took a deep breath, let it out, and he was about ready to bail, because this wasn’t how it was supposed to go and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do and—
“It’s just...” She poked at the bread, frowning down at it as if it had done something wrong. “Love is a big scary thing,” she said carefully and quietly, slowly rotating the piece of toast on her plate.
“Yeah, it is.” A big fat scary-ass thing he’d rather do anything than deal with, but it wasn’t—apparently—something he could plan away or reason away or ignore. It sat there on his chest and he needed it to stop doing that.
She turned to face him, though it took a while for her to lift her gaze to his, and so many questions and so much uncertainty reflected in her eyes he didn’t know what to do with it all. Why it wasn’t working the way it was supposed to, why it was more of a question and a problem than the answer every stupid movie and book made it out to be.
“Do you really think...you could love me?”
There were a lot of ways he could take that sentence, but the inflection on me as if it was so insane, so crazy someone could love her...
He stepped forward. “Why do you say it like that? As if it’s some kind of surprise I could love you. Why would that be something you have a hard time believing?”
For a few painful moments she only stared at him, that wide-eyed way that never quite masked the hurt or fear. But didn’t face it either. How did he get her to face it?
“You know you have to tell me,” he said, not sure why it felt imperative. Like it was now or never. Like they had to move, talk, give. They had months before the baby was born, but he didn’t know how much longer he could keep trying to make sense of this and not find an answer.
She turned then, breaking that gaze, shutting herself off and away. “Tell you what?”
He could walk away. He could force himself to forget he’d ever uttered the words. He could move forward and keep her at arm’s length. He could do that, he had to believe he could do that.
But he could see clearly, in this moment, himself. The way he’d held himself apart, kept his problems inside. Every girlfriend who had said he was closed off or cold had been right, because he’d never known how to open himself up to that. Give himself like that.
He’d never known how to share his fears or his problems in any real way, not with his family, not with his friends. Never known how to ask to be a part of anything, to be thought of differently. He could see it so clearly as she did it to him. That she hadn’t opened up because of that fear, because of that certain lack of knowledge.
Unfortunately seeing it didn’t make this any easier, because she was the person who’d opened him up and changed him. She had offered him a way to give all those pieces of himself he’d never given.
But he wasn’t that for her.
Why not? He hadn’t fought for much in his life, not really. Things had been easy. He’d worked his ass off, but he’d never come up against a real complex obstacle.
Until now. He didn’t want to be the kind of man who backed down, over and over again, because he couldn’t fight. That wasn’t the kind of man or father he wanted to be.
Charlie Wainwright could damn well fight. “We can’t be at this point and you still think that it doesn’t matter, that you can beg me off. You have to give me this part of yourself, or nothing else will matter. What I feel, what you feel, whatever our future is going to look like. None of it will matter unless you can give me this.”
“So you love me because of all that stuff you said outside, and you need me to...do what, exactly?”
“Tell me what puts that look of terror on your face. Tell me why on earth you’re surprised I could love you. I get being surprised, I do, because nothing about this has been normal, but that isn’t what you said. Your tone made it sound like you’re some kind of unlovable creature. You think that. I see you think that, and I want to know why. Why and how you could possibly think it.”
“I try not to,” she said in a small voice.
Which was t
he teeny tiniest step forward, and he held his breath for the next move.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MEG FELT UNMOORED. Unglued. Un-something. It was such an unsettling feeling to have someone see through her enough to get it—that deep, insecure part of her—but not be able to understand it.
She didn’t want him to. Not at all. It was such a weakness, such an ugly thing. It was better hidden and dead.
Except it isn’t exactly dead if he can see it, is it?
He saw it, even if he didn’t understand it. He loved her, and no one had ever used that particular weapon against her. She didn’t know how to shield herself from love.
“I’ve told you my parents weren’t very nice people.” Because even if it was childish, she didn’t know how to start her story without beginning there.
“In very generic abstracts, and I’ve seen enough of that with my own eyes to know it’s probably true. What I want to know is how. I want to know the story. A beginning and a middle and some kind of end. A cause, an effect.”
“Life isn’t that linear, Charlie. Some things are messy and hard and they don’t have beginnings and endings and concrete causes and effects.” Some things lingered, no matter how clean you got, how much of a life you built. Some hurts never healed.
“Give it a shot,” he said, teeth clenched. No, not said—demanded, and in another lifetime the demand might have pissed her off, but all she could think was he thought he could love her. Really love her. She didn’t know how to do anything but be soft over that.
“I used to be pigeon-toed.”
“O-okay.”
“I don’t know if they call it that anymore, but I walked with my toes pointed inward. The pediatrician told my mother I’d grow out of it. She took me to five or six different doctors, demanding they put braces on me or something that would ‘fix’ me, but they all told her the same thing—it wasn’t a big deal. That, right there, is the metaphor for my childhood. They only ever saw me as something wrong, even when they were being told everything was fine. I was never what they wanted, and eventually they stopped trying to fix me. The appearance mattered more to them than anything else in the world, including me.”
“Did you ever talk to someone who... Did you ever have some...” He trailed off, looking immeasurably uncomfortable, and she was irritated enough by the fact that he’d been the one to push this, that she answered.
“Counseling? Therapy? Oh yes. Eventually I got tired of being told how wrong I was, so I set out to prove it. I wanted to make them angry, because a reaction was better than criticism. Yelling was better than the laundry list of things I’d tried so hard to do right only to fail. So first there were school counselors, middle school and high school. Then there were the psychiatrists my mother insisted I see—who also said I was fine, by the way. Normal teenage rebellion.”
Until it went beyond normal, because neither doctors nor psychiatrists could make her into a girl fit to be a Carmichael. She stared hard at the mangled piece of toast on her plate, trying to keep herself in the present.
She wasn’t in a psychiatrist’s office while her mother berated him for being a fool, and then her for being a disappointment. Defective. A stain.
“Of course you were fine.” Charlie’s voice was soft but certain, and it helped anchor her where she was—years removed from the toxic life of her youth.
“I do actually know I’m not defective.” She looked him straight in the eye, because it was true. She might have her insecurities, she might have a hard time trusting someone to see it, believe it. But she knew she was fine.
If he was going to demand she tell him, if she had to watch his opinion of her change, she definitely had to be certain of her own. She had to have her own foundation to stand on here. The belief that she wasn’t defective. She wouldn’t go back.
Oh, she might love Charlie, but he couldn’t ruin her life, this life she’d built, this child she’d helped create.
She trailed her fingers across her abdomen. Love. She loved him, and Seedling. She did. Wholeheartedly. And somehow, in the oddest of ways, that realization made it seem far more possible to tell him everything.
“Good, because that sounds horrible. Tragically horrible, Meg, to be treated that way as a child.”
She could tell he wanted to reach out and touch her, but everything about her stance was protective. She didn’t want to be touched or soothed. She needed to tell him first. She needed to stand in that power, that truth, before she could run the risk of falling a little bit apart.
“Well, I gave it back to them tenfold, all in all,” she said, doing her best to sound ambivalent. “Embarrassed them in front of their friends and business associates. Made sure I was the biggest disappointment I could be. My grandfather was sick at that time, Alzheimer’s, and my grandmother was his primary caretaker. She’d always been that...soft spot to land, but I barely saw her while she took care of him. She didn’t have the time or the emotional wherewithal. So things got ugly. In that house, in myself. I wasn’t always good. I wasn’t always right. So, while I know I’m not defective, while I know we all have our weaknesses, I just... I could see where someone like you might not see me in a positive light. Where someone good and right would have a hard time loving someone who’s done such ugly things.”
“Do you think I’ve been perfect?”
“Maybe?” She laughed, somewhere between amused and flustered. “I could see you being very, very perfect. You have that way about you. Determined to do the right thing. Always.”
“I...”
“See, you can’t even argue with me.”
“No, I can’t...not exactly.” He rested his hands on her shoulders, because he must have had some sense that she was turning in on herself, turning away. It was hard to believe she wasn’t a little defective in the face of his goodness. But he didn’t stop talking, stop explaining, stop giving.
“I’ve always had a very dedicated sense of right and wrong,” he continued, “and I followed that sense, yes. But you know, when I was sitting there with your father in that restaurant—”
When she tensed, he smoothed his hands up and down her arms, a slow, consistent comfort.
“—I could remember the games businessmen play. The way they treat people, look at them like objects, and I don’t know that I ever did anything truly wrong, but I wasn’t a particularly good person either. I wasn’t a particularly present person. I was detached from myself, and it was comfortable. But that didn’t make it right or good.”
“It isn’t the same.” A little detachment, a few business tactics. Please.
“What horrible things did you do that you’re so sure of that?”
She thrust out her tattooed arm. “Trust me, some days this was enough. A boyfriend on a motorcycle.” Pills. Vodka in water bottles. Stealing.
“Where was your father in all this?”
She waved a hand, trying to find that sense of calm where past hurts couldn’t touch her. “Business trips. Fancy dinners. Work. Whatever.” When he was home, managing to find whatever good parts of Meg Mom hadn’t squashed so he could poke at them, as well.
Every attempt Meg had made to embarrass them or hurt them had only ever backfired. “They didn’t love me. Not ever, I don’t think. The only person who ever did was my grandmother.”
Charlie touched gentle fingers to her temple and brushed hair behind her ear. He traced her jaw with the thumb of his other hand and she’d never felt so...seen. He didn’t stop at the surface, or look right through her, and it had been so rare. Even those friends she’d done stupid things with whom she’d thought understood her so well. No, it had been a figment of teenage drama and stupid substance abuse.
“I love you,” he said carefully, his gaze never leaving hers, as if he wouldn’t move, wouldn’t stop, until she saw it. Believed it.
It was so big, his certainty. That determined, simple deliverance of words. She wished she could build armor against it, because it was so much. She didn’t know how to accept it or give it. She wanted it, desperately, but she thought the fear of accepting it might be bigger than that want. “I don’t know what to do with that. I wish I did. I wish I knew how to...be loved.”
He kept touching her face, those gentle, easy caresses, and it was almost like being hypnotized. By the determination in his dark eyes, by the simple surety in those easy touches. By his voice, insisting again and again that love was possible.
“Our baby will love you.” His voice was low, but it didn’t diminish the power of that. Of his utter confidence. “Unconditionally. Not just because they won’t have a choice, but because I already know you’ll give them so much.”
“How? How do you know that? She...” She closed her eyes against the memory of Mom telling her she wasn’t fit to do this. Because she didn’t want that memory, she wanted Charlie’s surety.
“She what?” Those gentle fingers moved from her face, down her arms, to her hands, where he laced them with hers.
“She said I’d never be able to do it. The mom thing. And I know she’s wrong.” She straightened her shoulders, forced herself to be strong and look at him. “I absolutely know that, because I can’t be worse than her. I can’t be. I won’t be. But how can you be so sure?”
“I’ve watched you take care of your goats.”
“Oh my God. You’ve gone insane. You’re comparing goats to babies.”
He actually laughed and smiled, and she’d forgotten how easy it was to get that reaction out of him. How much she liked doing it.
“The thing is, you give your whole self to them. To Elsie. To everyone. I don’t think you realize that.”
She blinked at him. He had a point. He might not understand it, that it was easy to give to animals or people who needed something. The chance of rejection was so low, the reward so high.