Decline (Declan Reede: The Untold Story #1)

by Michelle Irwin

  I wanted to say that I was sorry again—over and over until everything was back to the way it should have been—but I didn’t want to stop her story. I needed to hear it all—even though every word was a dagger to my heart.

  “I named Phoebe for the moon. I’d always thought of her that way. From the first moment I knew I was pregnant. She helped give light to the empty night my life had become without you in it. Emmanuel’s sacrifice helped me to see that sometimes there’s a plan for things and even though that plan isn’t always what you think it should be, you need to have faith, so I named him for that faith. While he was trying to comfort me in the hospital, Flynn told me about Gemini and the legend of Castor and Pollux. They just seemed like the perfect middle names after what happened.”

  I pulled back into a kneeling position and was finally courageous enough to meet Alyssa’s gaze. Her eyes were brimming with tears, but surprisingly none fell. It was then that I remembered she’d been dealing with the heartache for almost three and a half years. Although it was clear she still ached and grieved, the wounds weren’t as raw for her as they were for me.

  In that instant, looking deep into her eyes, I saw the depth of the heartbreak she’d endured. At my hand.

  I didn’t break eye contact as I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  She broke.

  Then I did.

  I climbed onto the seat next to her and we both sat wrapped in each other’s arms.

  Each broken in our own way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: JUST A FACT

  I DIDN’T KNOW how it happened.

  I didn’t know who initiated it.

  I didn’t even really know why.

  All I knew was that one second Alyssa and I were in each other’s arms, sharing our sorrow over our joint loss, and the next our lips were pressed together. Our kiss was slow and soft. It was warm and welcoming. In some ways, it was like the first kiss we’d ever shared, with one exception: our shared tears wet our cheeks and coated our skin. She tasted of sorrow, heartbreak, and broken promises.

  She hummed against my mouth as her hands found their way into my hair. I reciprocated as best as I could with my bandaged hands, running them up the side of her face, cupping it and pulling it to mine. My eyes were closed as I felt my world become completely immersed in her.

  She made no move to stop the kiss, and neither did I.

  She made no move to take the kiss any further, and neither did I.

  Even though our lips dragged slowly across each other’s, our tongues didn’t meet. The kiss wasn’t passionate or fuelled by desire. It was just about comfort. About sharing with each other the love we both felt—that we always had felt and would always feel. It wasn’t about the fevered love shared between lovers, but the peaceful love shared between best friends—the type of love that distance, barriers, and problems couldn’t break. An innocent and pure love that reached between our souls, transcending all the crap that had gone on between us.

  The kiss was a perfect salve for my fucked-up soul and utterly unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.

  At some point, my mother must have returned from giving us our space to talk because I heard the audible gasp when she re-entered the room to offer me a drink. What had started as a question became an admonishment.

  “Declan!”

  I pulled back from the kiss to meet Alyssa’s gaze. The sorrow was still there and so was the fear. I closed my eyes and rested my forehead against hers. I didn’t want to move. Moving would mean talking, which would mean getting to the fucked-up part of the evening where the little progress we’d made would be wiped away with one wrong word. To the moment we would shout at each other, and hurl barbed insults, and would probably end with one of us walking out the door forever.

  Most likely me.

  In the imperfectly perfect moment we’d shared, I could feel the connection that ran between us. The same connection that had scared the shit out of me and sent me running when I was seventeen, but that I now wanted to cling to in order to pull myself out of the mire of my life. When I was with her, I could pass half of my pain and suffering on to her and take half of hers in return. Somehow that made it easier to deal with the agony.

  Alyssa’s hands fell away from me and she moved her body as far away from mine as she could in the armchair. I followed her lead and pulled farther away too, even though the action threatened to shatter me anew.

  Then Alyssa spoke. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go. I . . . I can’t do this. Not now. You need to deal with this yourself first.”

  I nodded and slumped forward under the weight of my own grief returning in full.

  “Kelly, thanks for the talk before.” I watched impassively as Alyssa walked across to my mother and pulled her into an embrace. “I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”

  Alyssa moved to the front door, opened it, and then she was gone. Out into the dark night.

  No! Fuck that shit! There was no way I was letting her just walk away from me again.

  I leapt from the chair and rushed to the front door and sprinted up behind her. “Alyssa, wait!”

  She stopped for a second and then took another step toward the car in the driveway that was obviously hers.

  “Please?”

  She turned slowly toward me. “Declan, I—”

  “Marry me,” I cut her off.

  Her jaw dropped and her face fell into a frown. It didn’t seem like the usual reaction to a marriage proposal, but who the fuck was I to know? I’d never done this shit before. Never planned on doing it either.

  “What?” she asked. Her voice held no joy or even sorrow, only indignation.

  “I want to fix this,” I explained. “I want to make it right.”

  “And you think getting married will somehow magically make everything better?” Her voice pitched higher and higher as she spoke.

  Taken aback, I retreated from her rage. “No, but it’s what I should have done four years ago. Instead of running, I should have married you.”

  She stared at me with her jaw slack and the same frown still marring her features. As I watched her, I could see her anger slowly melt away, leaving her with nothing but a pained expression. I wanted to do everything I could to wipe away her agony.

  “I love you, Lys.”

  She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths. When she opened her eyes again and spoke, it was as if she was explaining something simple to a three-year-old. “No, you don’t.”

  “Of course I do,” I argued. I’d discovered just how much when we were in London and I’d learned that apparently all she’d wanted was a casual fuck. “I always have. I know that now.”

  “You love who I was, maybe, but you don’t know me, Dec. Not anymore. I . . . I’m a different person now. And so are you.”

  I shook my head. Didn’t she feel the same way as I did? Didn’t she feel the thrill when we kissed? Didn’t her heart race from something as simple as holding hands with me?

  “We’ve both changed,” she continued. “Four years is a long time, and a lot has happened. To both of us.”

  Her refusal to even acknowledge the way I might feel was too much. “Then what the fuck do you want from me?”

  A tear slipped down her cheek. “Nothing. Remember you’re the one who came here, Declan. I haven’t turned up on your doorstep begging you for anything.”

  At the sight of her fresh tears, of the sorrow I was responsible for, my anger left me. I stepped closer to her, reaching out to caress her tear-soaked cheek. She jerked away from my touch.

  “I want to fix it,” I whispered. “What can I do to fix this?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.” Her voice was strained.

  “Tell me how to make this right,” I begged.

  “I don’t know how!” Her voice came as a shouted cry. “All right? If I knew how to make it right I would have done that by now. But nothing is going to change the fact that you left four years ago and nothing is going to change the fact that Emmie is dead. Tho
se are facts, Declan. Facts don’t change, but they do change people.”

  “Please, Lys, even if you don’t believe that I love you, you have to believe that I care about you. I don’t want to just leave it like this between us.”

  She sighed and stepped away from me, closer to her car. “We won’t. At least . . . well, what I mean is, it’s your choice. If you’re still here tomorrow, maybe we can talk again then.”

  I nodded. “Tomorrow it is then, Alyssa, because I’m not going anywhere. I’ll prove it to you.”

  Covering the distance between us, I went to pull her into an embrace, but she jerked backward at my touch once again. I dropped my arms and my head before turning and stalking back into the house without a second glance behind me. Her little leap away from me had torn out the last little part of me that had been left unharmed.

  MY MOTHER was waiting for me in the living room when I came back inside. “Declan, what are you doing here?”

  “I didn’t know where else to go.”

  “I don’t mean why are you here, because of course you’re always welcome home. I mean, why are you in Browns Plains in general? You’ve made your opinion of the town very clear in the past.”

  “Flynn. He left a copy of Phoebe’s birth certificate at my house. When I saw . . . I . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence, because a lump had spontaneously grown in my throat and I couldn’t manage to breathe around it.

  “You found out about Emmanuel?” Her voice was soft but not surprised.

  I nodded and fresh tears sprung to my eyes as the pain Alyssa had kept at bay came flooding back in.

  Mum patted the seat next to her on the couch. Without even thinking about it, I walked over and sat beside her. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d been close like this. We’d probably seen each other face to face two or three times since I’d left for Sydney, each time over coffee and each time discussing nothing but me and my career. Mum had been as reluctant to talk about Browns Plains as I always was, but I’d never really understood the reason until now. It wasn’t good enough though—she should have found a way to make me see the truth.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said in the most demanding voice I could muster, which honestly wasn’t very demanding. More . . . broken. Defeated.

  “I told you, it’s complicated.”

  I rolled my eyes at her. “This whole fucking situation is complicated, Mum. I know you said you promised Alyssa, and I get that, but it’s not the only reason is it? How could you not have told me I had two kids, for fuck’s sake?”

  Her brows pinched together as I swore at her, but I could also see her biting back on her desire to tell me off for it. She looked away from me and out the living room window. “You really don’t remember do you?”

  “Remember what?”

  “The phone call we had during the first Christmas you had in Sydney or the meeting that February?”

  I frowned as her words brought up nothing; I had no memory of either event. Then I froze. Both of the times she mentioned were during my troubled time. I scoffed at myself for using that term, as if I wasn’t still troubled. Shaking my head, I turned to follow her gaze out the window. I didn’t want her seeing the guilt in my eyes over what I’d done to myself—and to other innocent people—during that time.

  “On Christmas morning, I rang you and wished you a merry Christmas. You weren’t interested in talking, and when I tried to keep the conversation going, and steer it toward Alyssa—trying to hint that you should call her, because I knew she missed you so much—you told me you were getting your Christmas present as we spoke so you weren’t interested in talking to me anymore. You made it pretty clear there was a woman with you. Of course, none of us knew about the babies then.”

  There was so much I’d done wrong to everyone I loved, and I could sense from the growing tension in my mother’s body that whatever she said next was only going to be worse.

  “Then in the February, about a week before you were due to start your first season with the production cars, your father and I flew down to Sydney to surprise you. We knew you were settling into the team and everything, but we wanted to see you before you got really busy. Alyssa had been trying for months to get a hold of you. She even tried sending an email. The reply she got had her in tears for hours. I don’t know why though, because she never let anyone see it.”

  I tried to remember an email or the visit Mum was talking about. Honestly, I struggled to remember any fucking thing from those few months, but unless it involved the hours I spent at Sinclair Racing I had nothing. I drew a complete fucking mental blank—or maybe blur was the better word.

  “We stayed in a hotel in Sydney and arranged for a table at a restaurant nearby. That lovely girl, Eden, from your work arranged for you to meet us there. We didn’t want to spoil the surprise so she told you that you were meeting a couple of fans.”

  I turned back to look at her again because her voice was quiet. She was watching her hands and wringing them together.

  “When you arrived, you were already drunk. Instead of being happy or even surprised to see us, you were furious. You started yelling about how you thought we were going to be an easy score for you and how we’d ruined your plan for the evening. You just didn’t stop. You went on for ages, tearing the place apart. We were kicked out of the restaurant, and I was so worried for your safety and sanity. I was so close to taking you back home then and there.

  “Finally, your father managed to settle you down and we asked to meet up for breakfast the next morning to give you some time to calm down and sober up. You agreed. The next morning you turned up with a strange woman practically attached to your hip. You still seemed drunk or something.”

  Or something was right. I could have taken any number of drugs that night. Fuck knows what I’d been on.

  “You sent the girl on her way pretty quickly though and I thought that maybe we could have a talk. I tried to raise the issue of Alyssa. I wasn’t going to go back on my promise to her as such, but I just wanted to give you another gentle push to call her so that you would find out.”

  She had tears running down her face. I wanted to comfort her, but I was so disgusted with myself that I couldn’t.

  “When I mentioned Alyssa’s name you went crazy again. You threw every piece of furniture you could get hold of and told me that you were happy with your lifestyle of having, and I quote, a different chick on your dick every night, and that if I ever mentioned Alyssa’s name to you again, you would slit my throat.”

  She sobbed openly.

  “Mum, I am so sorry. I wasn’t myself those few months. I had a difficult time adjusting.”

  She held up her hand to stop me, she took a few steadying breaths and then continued. “That afternoon Eden called to find out how it went, and I couldn’t help it. I told her everything that had happened with you. I just wanted to help you, to take you home and save you from whatever was causing you to act like that.

  “Eden said that she would sort you out and because she had some distance you would be more likely to listen to her than to me. She promised that if she couldn’t help you, she would let me know. The next time I spoke to you after that you seemed better, but still anxious to get off the phone. I never knew whether it was safe to mention Alyssa or not. Not that I thought your threat was serious as such, but I’d just never seen you fly off the handle like that before. It terrified me.”

  “Did Eden know too then? About Alyssa?” Did the whole fucking world know but me?

  Mum shook her head. “I never told her that. Not even when we spoke afterward and she let me know of your progress. It didn’t seem right to tell her if you didn’t know.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me after . . .” I didn’t think I would be able to say the words. At least not yet. But I hoped she knew what I meant. There was only one after anymore, after all.

  After Emmanuel.

  “The day Alyssa gave birth, I tried calling you, but there was a meet on and you refused
to come to the phone because of a drivers’ meeting. I left messages for you to call me urgently. I tried to call you so many times that whole weekend, but I never got a single call back. After Emmie passed, it just became a blur of arranging birth certificates and death certificates, funeral arrangements and birth announcements. Everyone’s hearts were broken. There wasn’t any joy except when we were told that Phoebe had survived her surgery. We all wanted time to stop, to stand still so that we could grieve properly, but there was too much to do. Alyssa had piles of paperwork that needed to be signed by the father, including the two birth certificates. There were ways around it, but they would have all taken time—time we didn’t have and didn’t want to waste. Until everything was signed, we weren’t going to be able to bury Emmie.

  “She came over here and begged for permission to put Flynn as the father because she knew he would be around for them and would be willing to sign any paperwork she required. He helped her so much during her pregnancy. She cried with me for hours about how we both wished you would just call so we could explain.

  “Then days turned into weeks, turned into months and you still never showed any interest in Alyssa. Whenever I rang you and raised the topic of what was happening at home you’d change the subject or hang up. The problem was the more time that passed, the harder it was to just come out and say the words.”

  I nodded, unsure what to do with this information. I figured my brain was AWOL and I had no idea when it might decide to return. Until it did I just needed food, a shower, and a bed. “Thank you for telling me this.”

  “I’m sorry. I know you’ve been hurt by this too, but you isolated yourself from everything so effectively I just . . . I didn’t know how to get you back. Your father wouldn’t let me fly down by myself just in case you got violent again, and you know what his hours are like.”

  I nodded, but wasn’t willing to offer anything more. I knew I should apologise for my side of the issues, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even find it in my heart to tell her it was okay or that she was forgiven. I just didn’t know anything anymore. “I need to get my suitcase from the car.”