Falling Again for Her Island Fling

by Ellie Darkins

  ‘What? What have I said?’ Guy asked. ‘Is your secret something to do with me, with us?’

  She wanted to shake her head and deny it, but there was a difference between lying by omission and lying outright, and it turned out she wasn’t actually great at either of them.

  ‘I think you should probably just tell me what’s going on,’ Guy said, giving her a stern look.

  ‘I don’t know how,’ Meena admitted, not wanting to look up and meet his gaze. Even after all this time, the pain she felt when she thought about what she had lost felt as fresh as the day she had first found out. How could she inflict that on Guy when she had the choice to spare him?

  Was that what she would have wanted? she asked herself. She realised she had never considered the question before. But if she could have woken from her coma with no idea about the life that had once been growing inside her—would she want that?

  No.

  The answer came to her as quickly as it was decisive. That life had been important. Valuable. And she wouldn’t want to diminish that by forgetting. And she owed Guy the same consideration she had been shown.

  She sank into a chair, knowing what she had to do, that knowledge making it more impossible than ever to look him in the eye. Before she realised what was happening, Guy was sitting beside her, reaching for her hand, and she wondered what must be showing on her face for his sudden change of mood.

  ‘Is it something I can help with, Meena?’ he asked, and she nearly broke at the tenderness in his voice. She shook her head.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do. Nothing anyone can do. It’s in the past but it still...’

  ‘It still hurts,’ Guy said simply, and she nodded. ‘It’s something to do with when we were together. Or your accident.’

  ‘Yes. Both.’

  With gentle fingers, he lifted her chin, forcing her to meet his gaze.

  ‘What is it? You can trust me, Meena.’ And she knew that she could. Despite everything, when she was with him she got that same feeling as she did when she was on Le Bijou. A feeling like nothing could touch her. That she was protected from the worst ravages of the real world. She took a deep breath, knowing that nothing was going to happen that would make this any easier. That she couldn’t delay any longer.

  ‘I was pregnant, Guy, when the accident happened. I lost your baby.’ She watched as his face creased with confusion, then shock and pain, coming to rest firmly on the latter.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’ he asked, leaning away from her, subtly putting space between them.

  Meena shook her head. ‘I thought it would be better for you not to know. I didn’t want you to feel the pain that I did.’

  His expression registered shock, and she waited for it to shift or change, but it was fixed there, much as she remembered her own world stopping when she had first been told the news. She squeezed his hand, knowing what a blow he had just received. Wanting him to understand that he wasn’t alone in this.

  ‘Why did you change your mind?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘You had a right to know,’ she conceded. ‘I finally understood that.’

  ‘I was going to be a father?’ he asked, a slight tremor in his voice.

  Meena gave a sad smile. ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think so?’

  She took a deep breath, facing some of the uncertainties that had haunted her the longest. That had made her life the hardest over the years. Exposing the depths to which she had lost her sense of herself when the accident had stolen her memories.

  ‘I know that I was pregnant,’ she explained, ‘because the doctors in the clinic told me that I had had a miscarriage. But I don’t remember it, Guy. I don’t remember knowing that I was pregnant—if I knew that I was pregnant. I don’t know what we would have wanted for the future. I don’t know how we would have felt about a baby coming. We weren’t married. I was going back to my research...’

  He reached for her hand, looking closely at her face as he narrowed his eyes.

  ‘You thought we wouldn’t be happy about it?’ he asked.

  ‘I... I don’t know.’ It was just one of the many, many things that she didn’t know about that summer. Who she’d been, what she’d wanted. How she’d changed.

  ‘I do,’ Guy said, squeezing her hand and moving closer again. ‘You would have told me, if you’d known about the baby. I know it. And we would have been excited.’ She was sure that his sad smile mirrored her own as they both thought about a life they hadn’t lived. A future that had been wrecked out on that road.

  ‘But...?’ How could he be so sure? How could he be so sure about what she would have wanted when she didn’t even know these things about herself?

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered,’ Guy said, and she clung to the certainty in his voice. ‘Any of it. We would have been happy.’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t believe I have to rely on you to tell me how I would have felt. How do I know if you’re telling the truth?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t begin to know how difficult that must be. I guess you have to decide whether you can trust me or not. I’m sorry I can’t give you more than that.’

  She breathed out and realised how much of a relief that was. How long she’d been carrying the fear that, as painful as it was to have lost the baby, perhaps before the accident she hadn’t wanted it.

  ‘We’d talked about it,’ Guy said, and Meena’s eyes widened in surprise.

  ‘But how could we have? You said you didn’t know I was pregnant.’

  ‘No, not this baby.’ He shook his head and she wondered what he was thinking. Wished that she knew him well enough to guess what he was feeling right now. ‘But we had talked about the future,’ he went on. ‘About children and marriage.’

  How had they become so serious in so short a time that a smashed skull could erase it? she wondered, disbelieving. And how could it have ended so abruptly? Both of them going on with their lives as if it had never happened. As if it had never mattered.

  ‘Did you not wonder why I didn’t come to Australia?’ Meena asked, wanting answers to the questions that had haunted her for seven years.

  ‘Of course I wondered,’ Guy snapped, pulling his hand away. ‘I called your phone, but no one answered. I emailed. Same. You weren’t on social media. I could have called the resort, but you’d been so scared that if anyone found out about us that you would lose your job and I didn’t want to risk it. What would you have done, if the situation had been reversed?’

  What would she have done? How could she possibly know? She had no idea why she’d made any of the decisions that she had when it came to Guy. No idea about who the woman making those decisions had been.

  Except that wasn’t really true any more, was it? Not after that night on Le Bijou when she’d started kissing him and never wanted to stop. For the first time, she’d started to understand what had happened that summer. Had started to feel like the woman who had made those decisions.

  ‘I would have tried to find you,’ Meena said, but added on a sigh, ‘But I’m not sure I could have done more than you did.’

  ‘After a while, I just assumed that you had...moved on. And it made sense, really. Plenty of people have summer romances and they just...end.’

  She shook her head. She thought that he’d known her better than that. At least, that was what she’d wanted to believe. ‘I don’t. I didn’t.’

  ‘I know.’ He reached for her hand again and she didn’t stop him. Didn’t want to. She felt anchored, with her hand in his. As if she could start to put the pieces of herself back together again. As if she could finally start to understand herself.

  ‘Can you tell me any more about the baby?’ Guy asked, his voice quiet.

  Meena took a deep breath. ‘I’m so sorry, Guy, but there isn’t much to tell. I was only a few weeks pregnant. Barely
far enough along to take a test. That’s all the doctors were able to tell me when I woke up.’

  ‘So we won’t know whether it would have been a boy or a girl.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He squeezed her hand again, and Meena felt it in her chest. ‘You don’t have to keep apologising,’ Guy said. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t anyone else’s,’ Meena said, voicing a thought she’d always shied away from. ‘Whose fault was it, if not mine?’

  ‘How about the person that caused the accident?’ Guy asked. ‘You know, you’ve never told me what happened.’

  Because there wasn’t much to tell, and she’d had it all second-hand anyway. She didn’t remember a moment of it. ‘It’s not much of a story. I was crossing a road and apparently a motorbike came too fast around a corner, lost control and knocked me over. Head injury. Internal injuries. I think you can imagine the rest.’

  ‘How long were you in the clinic?’

  ‘In total? A couple of years.’

  She laughed at the surprise on his face; what else could she do? ‘Did you think I just got up and walked out? Guy, I had to learn to walk. I had to learn to talk. I was lucky that I had health insurance. If it wasn’t for all the support at the clinic, I don’t know that I would have ever been able to live independently. I’ve only been diving again for a year or so. Did you know they make you wait five years after a serious head injury? I’m lucky that I haven’t suffered from fits since it happened. If I had, I wouldn’t have been allowed back in the water at all. I was worried, every day of those five years, that I would never be able to get properly back in the water again.’

  ‘So by the time you got out of the clinic...’ Guy started, finally piecing together the timeline of their relationship.

  ‘Everything from that summer was gone. My phone was destroyed. I couldn’t access any of my online accounts for months because I barely knew who I was. By the time I was even thinking about it, the tech companies made it impossible and I didn’t have the energy to fight them. I had to let it all go, start fresh, concentrate on my recovery and rehab.’

  ‘You let me go,’ he said sadly.

  But it wasn’t as simple as that. She hadn’t let go, not really. She hadn’t even known what she was clinging to, but she’d never stopped thinking about who the man she had given herself to might have been. ‘I didn’t know who you were. All I knew was that I had been pregnant. I found a couple of notes, scribbled on the back of a dive plan, that made me think that maybe I’d had a boyfriend. They were the only clues that I had. It wasn’t enough to go on.’

  ‘I wish I’d been here.’

  She couldn’t let herself think about that. About all the ways that her life might have been different if his flight had been a week later, or if she’d crossed the road in a different spot. They could have a family now—could be a family now. It was too strange even to consider.

  It still didn’t feel like her, the woman who had been hit by the motorcycle. In a way, Meena was glad that she couldn’t remember that time. Because she didn’t have to think about how much she had changed. What had motivated that change. She could try to get on with her life as she had been before her memories had gone.

  Until Guy had turned up and reminded her that that wasn’t possible. She couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t changed that summer. Even without her memories, she had known that something was different. And that was why she’d spent the last seven years trying to make sense out of the different pieces of her life. And why she had consistently failed. Because she needed to know it all to make sense of it.

  She realised with a jolt that her hand was still resting in Guy’s, and with another jolt that she had no intention of moving it. Because this was the missing piece. She couldn’t figure out who she had been that summer unless she followed through on these feelings that she had for Guy. Unless she acted now, as she had acted then, to see if that made her understand who she had been. She pulled his hand a little closer to her and then looked up, meeting his eye.

  He had sat down close to her on the sand. He had taken her hand. But she was the one who was going to move closer. To tip her face up to his and make absolutely clear what she wanted from him.

  ‘Meena...’ he started to say, but she laid a hand on his arm and he stopped, his gaze moving from her face down to her hand and then back to her eyes. ‘This is not a good idea,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Does that mean that you don’t want to do it?’ she asked, without a hint of guile, because really she just wanted to know that they were on the same page, that she hadn’t misread the situation and was about to make a complete fool of herself.

  ‘Of course I want to,’ he said, and she thought that it might be the simplest, most uncomplicated thing that he had said to her since he had shown up in St Antoine. But the consequences of his confession were anything but simple. ‘That doesn’t mean that I think we should. I’m going to be leaving soon,’ he reminded her, as if the thought didn’t already haunt her. ‘Again.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I’m not looking to the future. But...but my past is so complicated. And so much of it is missing, and I think that... I think that we could fill in some of those gaps, if you wanted...’

  He shook his head, spoke softly, one hand coming up to play with the curls that fell forward towards him. ‘We can’t recreate the past, Meena,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve proved that already. It’s not going to bring your memories back.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said quietly, turning her face towards his hand, where it played gently with her hair. ‘I’m coming to terms with that. And I don’t want to just re-enact the past either. But I want to understand who I was then. And this is a way to do that.’

  ‘So I’m just an experiment to you. Is that your plan? It’s hardly fair to ask that of me, Meena. What do I get out of it?’

  She pulled back, taken aback by the bluntness of his question. He looked startled, too, at having asked that.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, moving closer as suddenly as he had retreated, the shock falling from his face leaving something softer, yet more intense. ‘Stupid question.’ His hand lifted to her face, cupping her cheek as he moved closer. So close that she could feel the warmth of his breath on her lips. ‘I get you.’

  ‘And that’s not enough?’ she asked, wishing her voice didn’t sound so small.

  ‘God, Meena.’ He sounded as if the words were being ripped from his throat. ‘It was always enough.’

  His hands threaded through her hair, pausing as they encountered the bumps of her scar tissue, smoothing them with his fingertips. He tilted her face back up to his and then his lips were on hers.

  * * *

  That’s not enough? He wasn’t sure that anything was ever going to be enough when it came to Meena. From before the moment that his lips had touched hers, he’d wanted the wet heat of her mouth. From the instant that he’d felt her tongue against his, he’d wanted more, deeper. When her body pressed against him, he wanted heated, naked skin, cool silk sheets and weeks to rediscover her body.

  It had always been that way for him.

  When they had first been together, she’d been the one to hold back. To grant first kisses, then touches. And she had held back in other ways, too. She had been the one who had insisted that they keep their relationship a secret. Which he’d understood. Of course he had—St Antoine was a conservative country; women could be judged harshly for sex outside of marriage. And she’d been worried for her job, what might happen if she was found having a relationship with him.

  But it had still angered him. Because what did any of it matter, if she was moving to Australia? But she had been insistent that she didn’t want to be the subject of gossip, even if she was leaving soon. And she didn’t want to be fired—she wanted a letter of recommendation. Which had all been completely rea
sonable, he could acknowledge now.

  But at the time, once he’d got back to Australia, it had only fuelled this idea that he’d imagined it all. Not the kisses. Not the sex. There was no way his imagination was that good. But the rest of it. Their plans for the future. Their intimacy. The whispered words of love that they had shared, first shyly and then urgently, as his time on the island had drawn to a close and they had realised that they had a decision to make.

  Now he knew that she would have come with him if it hadn’t been for the accident... And that all his feelings of abandonment and hurt that he had carried with him for years had come from nowhere—or, probably more accurately, from his own fears and insecurities; they had nothing to do with how Meena had felt about him and everything to do with how he had felt about himself. He’d turned that self-doubt against himself, and it had done so much damage to his heart that the pain had radiated out and started to hurt the people around him. But the damage had been done, whether it was based on a misunderstanding or not. And he couldn’t risk hurting Meena again.

  She’d been through too much. Deserved better than him. Better than the person who he was now.

  But, when he was kissing her, he didn’t feel like that person any more.

  He felt again like the man he had been when he had first met her. When he’d been trying to find a way to impress his parents, getting to know their business and hoping that they would see that he wasn’t as useless as they seemed to think. Like a man who had found the person who made him feel strong, capable and decisive.

  Meena moaned into his mouth, and he didn’t care whether he was the boy he had been before or the man he was now. All he knew was that he was a man, and the woman he desired more than any other was kissing him back, and he wasn’t going to stop her.

  How could he stop her, when this was everything that he wanted? With Meena in his arms, sliding onto his lap, he could believe that he was wrong. That he could be the person who fell in love with her again. That he could love her without hurting her.