by Cara McKenna
***
They stopped for lunch at the six-mile mark. Merry dropped her pack with a grateful groan, revising her earlier assessment. Cloud my ass.
She looked to Rob, sitting on the grass and taking a deep drink of water. He was so unspeakably handsome, with those gray hairs silvery in the sunshine, blue eyes bright and restless.
“Yes?” he asked, smiling at her scrutiny.
She tossed him a bag of cashews. “Oh, it just makes me sad, to imagine you all alone out here.”
“That’s kind . . . but it’s what I want for myself. It’s what I need in my life, more than company. I don’t know how to explain it, but I know it’s true.”
“I believe you. But it still makes me sad. There must be some perfect woman for you out there somewhere.”
He scooted close, setting aside the cashews to reach for her hands. He covered them with his own, atop her knees, and spoke quietly. “I don’t want to talk about any other women, Merry.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“If there is a perfect one for me, I’m sitting with her now.”
She looked down, overcome by flattery and joy and sadness. She swallowed, throat aching.
“I wish I could claim to be her, but my real life’s thousands of miles away.” But I could cash in my dual citizenship. Moved away from everything I know and everyone I love, away from the bustle and warmth of California to make a new, strange life in these cold hills. Give all that up for one man’s company. Christ, what would her mother make of that?
“You’re still perfect,” he said. “These few days with you have meant more to me than years with any other woman ever could.”
She blinked, thrown by his words. How long had she waited for a man to voice something so loaded and grand and romantic to her? Half a lifetime, surely. She repeated them to herself, never wanting to forget.
“No one’s ever said anything like that to me.”
He held her gaze with shifting, cautious eyes. “That’s a shame.”
“I don’t think I was ever ready to hear it before. I was too bundled up in my own insecurities, probably.”
“Well, I’ve never been the type of man to say that sort of thing. Perhaps we make each other naked enough to manage such feats of earnestness,” he said grandly.
She nodded. “Feels that way.” Do you love me? She could never ask it. She couldn’t say it, either. She felt it, but they’d met too recently, gotten too thoroughly wasted on the intoxicating sex and the impossibility of it all. It couldn’t be trusted. But she felt it—she did. And it felt better than she’d ever imagined, a thousand times as wonderful as any connection she’d rounded up to good-enough, looking back at her small procession of lovers and boyfriends.
“You’re the most amazing man I’ve ever met,” she whispered, speaking to his hands.
He squeezed her fingers.
“I hope maybe I’ll see you again, someday,” she said. “But if I don’t, I hope another woman comes along who can make you feel all naked, the way we’ve done for each other.”
“No one could.”
She met his eyes. “I hope you’re wrong.”
Rob was silent for a long moment, eyes cast down as he considered his reply. “I can’t ever be what a woman needs,” he finally said. “The things I need, sexually . . . No woman could indulge that forever.”
She turned their hands and linked their fingers. “Anything’s possible. If we were able to find each other, all the way out here? Anything is possible. Maybe the universe doesn’t want you to be alone. Ever think of that?”
“I’m not really much for fate or higher powers. Though it’s a nice thought,” he added softly. After a pause, he said, “If you and I . . . If we’d met under normal circumstances, living in the same town, and stumbled into all this. Would this have been enough, to keep you with me? What I have to offer?”
“It’s hard to say . . . I won’t lie. I’m pretty infatuated with you.” Try in love. “But whether your fetish is a novelty to me, or a part of you I’d be satisfied to live with and cater to long-term . . . I couldn’t begin to guess. But I’d certainly be willing to find out.” She studied their hands before meeting his eyes squarely. “Can I ask you what I’m afraid might be a totally rude question?”
He smiled. “You ask me that so often. You should know by now, I always say yes.”
“I know the rope, like, gets you off, and the dynamics. But do you crave more from a woman? Like companionship, or affection, or love?” She knew the answer. She’d seen it and felt it, lying in bed with him the night before. All that need that lingered even after his lust had been so thoroughly quenched.
But she wanted to hear him say it.
He nodded faintly. “I do want those things, I think.”
“You think?”
Again he made her wait as he turned some thought around in his head. When he spoke, the words were heavy and brittle, winter branches draped in snow. “I was married, for a time.”
Married.
Well, he was thirty-six. No shock, really, if a little weird he’d not bothered to mention it. Whatever. She could roll with that. “For how long?”
“A little over three years. I wasn’t a good husband.”
A chill cooled her, subtle and passing as a breeze off the mountains. “No?”
He met her eyes for only a second before his blue ones fled again. “I never hit her, but I was cruel, and mean. Spiteful.”
Merry struggled to square this confession with the vulnerable, gentle man she’d come to know. “Okay.”
“I hurt her. I hurt her so much . . . Had she been my sister, getting treated the way she had with me, by a boyfriend or husband . . .” He shook his head, looking disturbed. “I’d have fucking killed the bastard. I literally would have strangled the life out of a man like that. Like me.”
She stroked his knuckles, unsure what to say. She could feel his anxiety, real as a vibration.
“I want to say I wasn’t myself . . . That I wasn’t the man you’ve met, out here. I had no control over my temper, and I’d stuffed so much down inside, all my rage and resentment and every ugly thing a man can feel . . . It got pushed to the surface. And I don’t know which man is the real me.”
He took a deep breath, seeming to calm. “But before all that, yes—I did want love. And affection. I wanted to feel bonded to a woman. But the way I became . . . I lost so much of that. And by the end, I knew I hadn’t been acting as a man worth loving. I was a monster. I shut those things off. I hadn’t even let myself register those needs after I moved here—affection and kindness and all that. Not until you showed up, offering them.”
She could see his pulse throbbing along his neck, and his brow was set in a tense line. These memories affected him the way a terrible scare or a physical threat might. It occurred to her then—Rob didn’t trust himself. Not his sexuality or his self-control, or even who he was. She couldn’t reconcile this with her own assumptions.
When they’d met, she’d thought he must be most self-assured man she’d ever come across. He might not be elegant in human interactions, but surely a man who’d chosen the life he had must know himself, inside out. He was who he was, and had no time for a world that didn’t offer a space for him in it. She’d thought his lifestyle was a sign of independent thinking, even an act of rebellion. She’d never have guessed it might be more akin to hiding.
But a monster . . . She couldn’t imagine Rob angry. She’d met only Dr. Jekyll. She couldn’t begin to picture Mr. Hyde.
“Your wife . . . did you try to explain your kink to her?”
His brow furrowed. “Not to explain it, exactly. Not explicitly. But we . . . we tried some things. Me being tied to the bed among them.”
“And it didn’t go over well?”
“No. She was disgusted
by the entire thing. She made that plain.”
“That’s a shame. It’s not such a crazy request.”
He shrugged. “I think she knew I wanted those things. Maybe she caught on, the way you did when you saw how I twisted the blanket around my hands. Or from a snoop round my computer. I don’t know for sure. But I know the way she shut things down . . . It was the truth of who I was, and what I wanted . . . Or the confirmation of what she’d already suspected. That’s what repulsed her.”
“Ouch.”
He shook his head. “She doesn’t deserve any scorn. She’s a good woman, and she put up with a lot. Including a husband who shut his eyes and went somewhere else in his head in order to stay hard for her.”
Merry flinched at that. She’d been insecure her entire adult life, even now, after the weight loss. She’d tortured herself plenty, theorizing about what went on between boyfriends’ ears when the lights went out.
“With hindsight,” Rob said, “I know that must have hurt. I doubt I ever once looked her in the eyes when I . . . you know. It must have felt so lonely, being with me. It couldn’t have been what she signed up for.”
Merry’s heart ached. For Rob, and for this mysterious wife-done-wrong. For herself.
Much as she yearned to be confident in this new body, that was her trigger, too—fear that any man she was with might be imagining a different sort of woman. A worthier one. Stupid, undermining anxieties, but she could name them. They were hers. They always had been.
But with Rob . . . those times she’d spoiled him, his eyes had been open. Wide and full of wonder, watching her realize his darkest fantasies. Oh, he hadn’t been thinking of anyone else, then. That gaze had burned with awe and worship, made her feel more powerful than she’d known possible. His wife could have had that, and counted herself a lucky woman.
Merry caught herself. She was being way too presumptuous, trying to put herself this stranger’s shoes. She needed more information, though it was arguably none of her business. Who was she, after all? Some random woman who’d stumbled into this man’s life and bed, and who’d be gone as quickly as she’d come. She asked as much as she dared.
“How did it end, between you two? She left you, you said?”
“She did. Probably three years later than she should have.”
“Dear John letter?”
“No, she . . . She met someone. He told me.”
“Oh, gosh. Was it ugly?”
“It didn’t have to be,” he said sadly, eyes on the horizon. “But I made it ugly. I made everything ugly in those days. He, um . . .”
She waited, feigning patience even as the curiosity ate her alive.
“It was my brother.” His gaze dropped to the ground between their legs. “She left me for my brother.”
Her heart wrenched. “How . . . Oh God, how awful for you. You said you were close with him when you were young.”
“I was.”
She squeezed his hands. “That must have been so painful.”
“It was. I hated them, at the time.”
“With good reason.”
But he shook his head. “It wasn’t an underhanded thing. And it was me that brought them together—their worrying about me. My depression, how self-destructive I’d become. Plus, in the end . . . I’d changed. A lot. If my brother or wife betrayed anyone, it wasn’t any man they’d ever claimed to love.”
She frowned, stymied both by the idea that he could have ever been anyone but the good man she’d met, and that he had such a capacity for forgiveness. His brother and his partner . . .
“I’m sure they spent a lot of time together,” he went on, “talking about how things were, what to do. Once the pain had faded . . . I know those two. And I know that what happened, it happened innocently. My wife may have hated me by the end of it all, but if anyone would go out of his way to keep from hurting me, it was my brother. What they found must have been real. And strong. More than I ever offered her. I hope I never see either of them ever again, but I wish them well. Sincerely.”
After a thoughtful silence, Merry said, “I can’t imagine you that way. Being a man who could drive a woman away like that. I’ve never seen even a glimmer of that temper, or callousness, or whatever it was.”
“I’m different out here. Pacified.”
“Still . . . Was it because of your sexual wiring?”
“There was always that. And like I said, I’d stuffed myself into this mold, shaped like the man I’d thought I wanted to be. I wound up bitter and resentful and . . . and mean. I drove everyone anyway. I felt . . .”
She waited as he found the right words.
“I felt angry. Really angry.”
“At?”
“At all these people who cared about me. Because they cared about that man I was pretending to be, whose shoes I never felt at home in. I resented my wife every time she begged me to get help so I could go back to being the man she’d married. Because that man had only ever been an act. She’d never even met the me you have, let alone loved him.”
Any trepidation Merry had begun to feel fled as he spoke those words. They came from a deep well of emotion, echoing audibly with truth. She’d felt those things, too, even if she’d never articulated it to herself. All those friends who’d turned to cheerful people-pleaser Merry in their darkest hours, but never returned the favor and asked to meet the mess she’d been so obviously burying in food all those years. Not even Lauren, who’d been doing the same thing to herself.
“I resented that,” Rob said, “because I knew they wouldn’t like the man I really was, if they met him.”
“Because of the fetish, or . . . ?”
“I just knew. I was a strange child, and teenager. Something about me just put people off. Like there was a rotten smell on me, something that told them, reflexively, Stay away. I didn’t come to recognize that until I was at university.”
“What happened then?”
He kept his eyes on the ground. “Change of scenery. Being away from home, and my mum. Learned to drink.”
“Ah, yes. I remember those days well.” The thrill of young adult freedom, the promise of reinvention spiked liberally with economy vodka. “Now I follow.”
Rob didn’t reply, except to let her hand go and reach for the cashews. Much had been said, and it seemed both of them could use some time to process it all. They ate in silence and replenished the water supply at a stream, then resumed the hike.
Merry was finally beginning to understand how Rob might’ve become the person who’d exiled himself. How he might’ve ever been anyone other than the man she’d come to . . . to love? Could you love a person, having only seen one facet of them? Only seen their “after” shot? She hoped so. Much as the old Merry had made her the woman she was now, she didn’t want to be seen as that person anymore. Some sad girl who’d settled for codependence and a dead-end romantic life, who’d lived so vicariously, for so long. Like her life was some unremarkable show flashing by on TV.
She took Rob’s hand. He looked surprised for a breath, then wrapped his fingers tightly around hers.
“Would you say I’ve met the real you?” she asked.
“I hope so . . . The ideal me, anyhow. The man I feel I am, under the right conditions.”
“Well, I don’t get a rotten smell from you at all. You were a bit prickly at first, but not repellant, certainly.”
“I’ve found some balance since I left England.”
“Maybe you could still go back and mend your bridges.”
His brows knitted, attention on the rocks and grass. “Even if I could . . . I’m meant to be here. In this life.”
She couldn’t argue with that . . . though she wanted to. She wanted to magically convince him he might like it in a small town. A town on a railway line, so she could visit him easily
. So she could spend time with him in restaurants and coffee shops and at concerts, or watching fireworks. Things that she enjoyed, much as she’d enjoyed this adventure. Everyday things.
This is his everyday, she reminded herself, taking in the forbidding landscape. He designed it himself, and he’s happy with it.
She was dumb to be trying to imagine a way to make this work. Dumb and lust-drunk, starry-eyed.
If ever she’d met a man who’d found his place, it was Rob. She was hoping for the very sorts of things that had made him miserable enough to abandon society—to change him into someone he wasn’t. Someone easier. Someone who fit.
Worse than that. Someone who fit into her idea of a happy life.
Selfish.
She forgave herself in the next breath. You’re in love with him. And a lightning-strike, illogical love at that. Go ahead and wish. She’d wanted to feel this for someone for so long, it was a pain she could nearly wallow in.
You’ve loved now. And soon you’ll have lost.
You’ll be missed by a man, and that’s an awfully sweet pain to bear.
Chapter Fifteen
“I can’t believe my feet went so soft in just five days,” Merry said the next afternoon, feeling blisters ripening between her pinched toes. “I thought I’d earned all the calluses I was in for that first week.”
Still, they were in the final stretch—so close they were hiking beside the motorway now, the cold, hard hills and rolling meadows having given way to civilization in these final few miles. The street signs were so colorful and . . . geometric. Rigid squares and rectangles, unnaturally round circles. The cars and their radios sounded so loud. They passed bits of trash now and then, the plastic wrappers striking her as downright pornographic after the pristine perfection of Rob’s forgotten world.
Any tension she’d felt following the previous day’s conversation had been gone by the time they’d crawled into her tent, burned off by exertion or exhaustion. She’d let herself question who her companion was, but once she’d closed them in their little cocoon, smelled his skin, tasted his mouth . . . She knew him. No confession could change that, merely inform it. Enrich it. Who he was then made him who he is now. And you love who he is now, so be thankful for the struggles that shaped this man.