by Sarah Hegger
She peered around the door frame cautiously. The kitchen was a cheerful space that could have easily absorbed a family of ten, but it appeared lonely and abandoned and, once again, spotlessly clean.
Richard waited for her. His hips propped up against the far counter with the window behind him. A large, central island stood between them. His arms were crossed over his chest and his face cast in stone.
“May I?” She indicated a spindle-backed chair pulled up to a table. She didn’t trust her knees right now. The table was tucked into a neat little alcove and cheerfully curtained in lime green and white.
He nodded and shrugged, uncrossed his arms, and then crossed them again. “Do you … er … want anything to drink? I have beer, wine?”
“A soda would be fine, if you have it.”
He handed her a can.
Lucy took it and popped the tab. She had no idea what she was drinking, but she drank it anyway. It gave her hands something to do instead of fidget. She noticed he took a Landshark and popped the cap without taking a sip. He used to drink Heineken.
Actually, he never used to drink much at all. She’d covered that part of their relationship and done a rather thorough job of it, which brought her to what she was doing here. Lucy put the can onto the table with a dull thunk. She was not sure, but Richard might have jumped slightly.
“I wanted to talk to you because of my dad,” she said, wincing. She could do better than that. “Actually, that’s only part of it. The other part is about what you asked me the other night.”
The only sign he was still alive was the occasional rise and fall of his chest.
“You asked me why.” She cleared her throat and took another breath. “You wanted to know why I … you wanted to know why I left like I did.”
He shifted slightly, his jaw muscle clenching and unclenching rapidly.
“I think you deserve some sort of explanation.” She wished he would say something, but the silence clawed between them. She spoke again. “Um … it probably isn’t going to be huge news to you, but it turns out I am an alcoholic. I have been in recovery for the last three years.” It seemed the most logical place to start.
He didn’t look exactly blown away.
She’d certainly never hidden her drinking from him. Only then, when they were all doing it, it was easier to convince herself there was no problem. She was just a girl who liked to party. “And as such I am tasked with making amends.”
“So you’re in AA?” His deep, smooth voice cut her off.
“Yes.”
“I know about the Twelve Steps. I researched it for a patient or two.”
“Oh, right.” Lucy mentally cut out the middle bit. He clearly didn’t need a summary of the Twelve Steps.
“Why now?” He broke into her thoughts.
Lucy swallowed and weighed her answer. “I think it’s time.” Her mouth twisted into a rueful grimace. “Actually, it’s way overdue, but I—couldn’t before.”
He stood totally still with his arms crossed over his chest, his beer hanging forgotten in one hand.
“I owe you this.” She stopped talking and looked at him. Silently asking permission to continue.
Finally, he made a soft noise in the back of his throat and nodded.
“Um … you and I.” Lucy took a juddering breath and another sip from her soda. Something sweet hit the back of her throat and made her cough. Forget about hard, this was like ripping her soul out. “I should never have, what I mean is, that you and … ah. Damn, this is not coming out the right way.”
“You haven’t said anything yet,” he replied in a flat voice.
“Right.” Lucy blew out a breath. Start at the beginning, Lucy. “I suppose, it all really starts with Ashley and me. Even before you and me or you and Ashley, there was Ashley and me.” His face grew harder and she rushed through her words. “You see the thing with Ashley and me; I was always jealous of Ashley and if she had something, then I wanted it. And Ashley had you.”
“How flattering,” he drawled, and took a long sip of his beer. His hands were not quite steady. It gave her a small shot of courage.
“It was more than that.” Her voice grew stronger. “I took one look at you and knew that I wanted you for myself. Taking you from Ashley was icing on the cake. I deliberately set out to break you two up and I managed that.” He flinched slightly as if she had struck him. “I wanted you and like a spoiled and ungrateful child, I took you.”
“Again, how flattering.” His eyes flashed blue ire at her. “You girls passing me from one to another like a pair of … what … high-heel shoes. You borrowed them from Ashley for a while and then gave them back?”
“Ah, damn.” Lucy dropped her head into her hands. She knew he would be hostile. She had no right to expect any less.
“Is that it?” he asked in a tone that made her flinch. “Are we done with the important thing because I have to give myself a root canal once you’re done.”
“Were you always such a hard-ass?” It slipped out of Lucy.
“No,” he snarled back. “I save it up for people who treat me like shit and then want to walk back into my life and have me play nice again. What the hell were you expecting, Lucy? That we would sit around, have tea, and laugh about the good old days?” He exploded from the counter, slamming his beer bottle down. Foam fizzed up over the lip and onto the counter. “Jesus. I don’t need this shit. Go back to Seattle, Lucy. Do us all a favor and go back to Seattle and don’t come back.”
“Richie Rich?”
“My Angel.”
“What would make you stop loving me?”
“We could start with you not giving me my fries back.”
“I will.” Her breathing sounded loud in the sudden silence. His face was set and furious and she almost took the gap and ran. She dragged in a ragged breath, her heart thundering so loudly in her ears, it made her voice seem muted. “I will go back to Seattle and leave you in peace. But first, I need to tell you how sorry I am.”
His eyes grew hotter and angrier and she had to close hers to regain her composure.
Her legs shook and she gripped the edge of the table for support. “I wanted to tell you how sorry I am. How I know I screwed up and I hurt you and I wish to God I could take it all back, but I can’t. I can only say that I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry.”
Neither of them spoke. Lucy could sense him still standing there, watching her, but she didn’t have the courage to look up. She pushed her chair back from the table. This was pointless if he didn’t want to hear it. “There’s more, but if you don’t want to do this, you have every right not to. Just, for now, if you could know that I am sorry. It doesn’t fix anything, but it’s true.”
“Wow.” He blew out a long, tortured breath. “This sucks.”
“Should I go?” Lucy heard the telltale quiver in her voice. “I can go, if that’s what you want.”
He gave a sharp exhale that was almost, but not quite, a laugh. “I have no goddamned idea,” he admitted reluctantly. “Until I figure it out, why don’t you keep talking?”
“Thank you.” Lucy reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a piece of paper. With shaking hands she spread it out onto the table in front of her.
“Is that a list?” Lucy nodded and he gave a short, hard bark of laughter. “You made a list?”
“I wanted to get it all down. If I ever got the chance, I wanted to be sure I said all that needed saying.” She steadied herself and sent a quick Serenity Prayer out to whoever and whatever was listening. Serenity, courage, and wisdom, it was all there and she took it.
And Lucy started the recitation of her sins. One by one she went down the items on her list. The screaming matches over nothing, the hysterical phone calls in the middle of the night, the bar fights she used to incite. The times she made him jealous, the times she let him down, and the times she stood him up. The odd occasion that the police got involved. The many, many encounters with pissed off barmen, bouncers, and
other patrons. All the men, always man trouble and throwing him front and center. The list seemed endless, but she was here and Lucy spared herself no detail, however grisly. She did it by the book: what she resented, why, and then her part in it. No excuses and no justifications, just the facts, ma’am, and the pure, unvarnished truth.
Lucy noticed out of the corner of her eye that Richard did not move. She was too much of a coward to look up, so she kept her eyes down and fixed on the table under her palms. All the way to the end she went. Last item on the list: Jason, and she stuttered to a premature halt.
“Don’t stop there.” His voice whipped across the kitchen toward her, and she flinched. “Now we’re getting to the good part.”
“I … ah.” The blood drained from Lucy’s face as she tried to pick up the train of her thoughts again. She didn’t want to say this stuff, to hurt him anymore than she already had.
“What’s the matter, Lucy?” He moved, stalking toward her on nearly silent feet. Lucy kept her eyes locked on the table, but she felt him move closer. She felt the air stir against her neck as he leaned down toward her. “You’re at a loss for words?”
She raised her chin. Her throat felt clogged and she coughed to clear it. “You were getting serious,” she managed past the lump. “We were in love and you were …”
“I wanted to marry you,” he drawled beside her ear. “Not immediately, we were too young, but I wanted to marry you. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she whispered, every pore attuned to the silent menace of Richard, hovering angry and dangerous beside her. “It scared me,” she admitted. “I didn’t think I deserved it and it scared me. I thought you would realize I wasn’t any good and you would leave me.”
“So you left first?” His voice became a low, menacing whisper. “You snuck away because you were frightened. I could almost understand that.” He gave a humorless laugh. “The real fucking kicker here is the other man. That’s the part I want to get to. Say it.” His voice lashed at her and Lucy winced. “I want to hear you say it.”
“I left you and ran away with another man.” Lucy trembled so badly she could barely speak. “I humiliated you and hurt you and I can never fix that but I am …”
“You’re sorry?” He moved away from her and Lucy drew a ragged breath into her starving lungs. “Forget the humiliation, Lucy,” he said, his voice shaking as badly as hers. “You almost fucking broke me.” Out of her peripheral vision she saw him grab his beer again and tip the bottle back.
“I know that,” Lucy whispered. “I know that and I broke me, too. I know you don’t care, but I broke me, too.”
“Jesus.” Richard stood frozen in the center of the room. “It was bad enough living it the first time.”
Across the space she dared to look at him. His eyes were tortured and stormy and it was like watching an emotional kaleidoscope chase its way through their depths. There was anger and hurt, confusion, disillusionment, and fear all crammed within one man. He looked away.
A trickle of wetness snaked down her cheeks. She was crying. She scrubbed away the moisture with her sleeve.
He moved toward the fridge and yanked it open, considering if he wanted another beer.
She should go, but she wanted to stay and she wavered indecisively.
“What happens now?” he asked, breaking the silence.
“That’s up to you.” The hand around her soda can shook so violently she had to put it back on the table. “Richard, you are under no obligation to forgive me. I am here to tell you I know I hurt you and if I could take it back, I would. I can only own up to what I did and ask for your forgiveness, over time.”
He shook his head, his expression colder than the weather outside when he turned to look at her. “Just like that?” He placed his palms on the top of the counter and bent his head forward. He looked defeated and angry. “It’s taken you all this time to come here and say this. There were times when I would have given anything—anything—to have you come here and do this, but now, after all this time? Nine years, Lucy.”
“I was drunk for six of them.” Lucy swallowed past her dry throat. “I spent those years blaming everyone else for what I did. It was Ashley’s fault for being jealous of me. It was your fault for trying to trap me.” She stopped, wondering if she’d said too much.
“Can I ask you something?” He didn’t wait for her nod. “Did you love me?” He kept his head lowered. “Because I was crazy about you. After you left with that prick, that is the one thing that kept going around and around in my head.”
Shit. That was an easy one. Loving Richard had never been a problem. “I loved you,” she said quietly. “I loved you to distraction.”
“But still you left.” His head came up and his eyes blazed at her across the width of the kitchen. “You left for another man. Did you love me when you did that?”
“Yes, Richard, I did.” Lucy eyed his beer bottle enviously. It would be so much easier to drown her pain in the oblivion of a good drunk. But that option was closed to her now and each day she made it more and more so.
“I don’t get it.” He threw his hands up. “You’re going to have to explain that one to me because I am just a poor, dumb asshole.”
“I don’t think I have an explanation.” Lucy clasped her shaking hands together. “At least, not one that will make any sense to you.”
“Try.”
“There was this brokenness inside me.” The words clawed up her throat. Her honesty was really all she had to give him, when it came right down to it. “I tried to drink it away, party it away, but nothing worked. I even thought if I loved you enough, you could fill the void for me and make it all better.”
“I tried hard enough.” He glared at her as if daring her to contradict him.
“Yes, you did,” Lucy agreed. “But it was not something you could ever do. It was something I needed to do. It’s like I was broken and I wanted to strike out against anything that held any meaning for me. I wanted to hurt myself, ultimately. And I did.”
“Yeah, Luce.” His shoulders drooped as the fight went out of him like a deflating balloon. “But you took the rest of us down with you.”
“I know that.” It came out as a whisper. “And I have to live with that, too. The only thing I can do is ask your forgiveness and give you my promise I have changed.”
“How long have you been sober?” His abrupt change of subject shook her.
“Three years.”
“Well done.”
“Thank you. It was very rocky in the beginning. It took me a long time to admit defeat but I hit bottom, eventually. And thank God I did.”
Lucy was killing him, as surely as if she had taken a scalpel to his guts. Christ. He should be harder than this. Especially when it came to this woman and after all this time. Apparently, they were both slow learners, because she could still get to him.
He’d seen her in all sorts of moods, from blackest depressions to giddy highs that terrified him she would never come down again. He’d seen her weep, wail, scream, and rant, but he had never seen her like this.
She sat there, so still and so quiet. Her dignity lay around her slim shoulders like a force field and pulsed with life. Despite the difficulty of what she did and despite her position as supplicant, she had never been stronger.
She awed him a little and frightened him a lot. Tears slipped, mostly unheeded, down her face and he tracked them, fascinated. It was as if they came from a place so deep it was beyond the petty performances of her youth. It reached out to him and fastened grim fingers around his heart.
Richard had never ached to hold her more. His hands shook with the need to pull her against his body and hold her until he could absorb all her hurt into himself. It was what he had tried to do all those years ago. Tried and failed, his memory put in quickly. In the end, her brokenness had been too much for him. For a while, it looked like it might be too much for her. And yet, here she sat. A survivor, a victim, and a perpetrator all rolled into o
ne.
It scared him shitless. This need he felt to make a connection with her again. She still had it. All the Svengali-like appeal for him she’d always had. He stood here and listened to her rehash crap he didn’t like to even think about, and all the time part of him watched the way the light played on her silky hair. How her skin still looked like a peach and how those huge eyes could still strip him down to his essence. He was one sick son of a bitch.
“I don’t know, Luce.” He had to say something. The silence in the kitchen was beginning to make all sorts of dumb shit seem possible. “I’m glad for you, I really am.” That much was the God’s honest truth. “But I don’t know if I can do this about-face and everything is all right again.”
“I can understand that. I’m not asking for anything like that.” Man, did she have to look so completely crushed? Not that it showed, but he knew Lucy. She hadn’t changed completely. She was trying not to cry again. He’d seen her do it so many times around her dad that he could see right through her mask.
“I’m not saying I can’t, ever, forgive you,” he put in quickly. Despite it all, he was on the back foot now and feeling like the biggest shit and a bully. She had come here with her heart in her hand and her pride on a platter. And what did he do? “I just …” He searched for the right words. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”
Lucy took a breath and straightened her shoulders in a graceful unfolding that held him spellbound. She had always had a kick-ass body. You didn’t have to like Lucy Flint to admit she was the stuff sweaty fantasies were made of. She was slim, but not skinny, and all her curves were deliciously positioned in the right places. He’d heard she’d done some underwear modeling in New York. No big surprise there.
And there were the legs. Richard let his eyes stray down. Those legs that used to drive him animal, crazy, wild. Given the chance, they might still do so. Richard dragged his gaze away.
“So what are we now?” He risked a few steps around the counter.
She choked out a funny little laugh and it stroked luscious fingers down his spine and drew a smile from him. “Battle weary?”