Hope, eternal and irrepressible, shot through her before she could even try to contain it.
“Because you’re a part of me, Elodie, you’re a goddamn part of me. I have been fighting that since probably the first night we met, but I can’t keep doing it. Not if the result is us living in different homes, different towns. It’s destroying me, not to see you.”
She stared at him in a state of complete and utter surprise. This didn’tsoundlike it was about the babies.
“What does that mean?”
He angled his face away, sucking in a deep breath. “I was only young, when my mother died. Young, and I adored her.” His smile was tight, and it pulled at something deep in her belly. He turned back to her, eyes boring into hers, so loaded with emotion she could have started crying all over again. Instead, she held her breath.
“But it was the way my father was afterwards that really destroyed me. We’d lost our mother, but dad became like a stranger. He drank too much, and when he’d been drinking, he’d either bring random women home, or he’d start lecturing us about the stupidity of love, the whole idea of marriage. Even without his constant sermonizing on that score, I drew my own conclusions, when I realised how much losing our mother had ruined him. It was far safer to be my own person. Never caring about anyone enough to go through what we did as boys, what our father did.”
He cleared his throat then. “Then, with the baby Marcia told me we’d conceived, I started to open my heart, to believe I could love, and the world wouldn’t fall apart. You know how that turned out.”
Sympathy and rage burst through her in equal parts. It was even easier to feel anger towards Marcia now she’d seen her.
“I’ve spent the two years or so before I met you unintentionally following in my father’s footsteps, doing my level best to drink myself into oblivion and fuck anyone who showed an ounce of interest in me.”
She flinched at that, hating the idea of Raf putting himself through that.
“I need to be honest with you,” he muttered. “Because I’m asking you to give me something I probably don’t deserve. I need you to know who I am, all my flaws, all my issues. I need you to understand that I’m not proud of my past, not at all. I’m sofar from perfect, whereas you—you are like an angel brought to earth.”
Her whole body seemed to soar like the angel he’d just called her, she felt as though she were lifting clear off the ground. It was such an important conversation to be having like this, her just inside the door of her parents’ home, him on the other side of it, standing beneath the small porch.
“I’ve been hiding all my life from feeling anything real. Ever since I was a boy, and she died, I’ve unconsciously chosen to box away any feelings that got too big or real, because all I could think of was the flipside. The what if.”
“You were protecting yourself,” she said, her voice hoarse.
His eyes locked to hers in a way that was truly a meeting of hearts and minds. He nodded once.
“And it was fine until I met you. With you, everything was different. Harder. I couldn’t keep you boxed away. We agreed it was just going to be casual, and that gave me cover, for a while, to pretend that everything was fine, and I could manage whatever we were doing. That you weren’t a threat to me.” His lips tugged in a smile, but it was laced with self-recrimination. “But I was lying to myself. I’ve been lying to myself this whole time, fighting what we are, what I want from you, and I don’t want to fight it anymore. Actually, I can’t.”
“What do you want?” She sounded strangely calm, given the sense she had that her whole future would be predicated on his response.
He was silent, his eyes darkly intense.
“Raf?”
“I want a thousand things,” he said apologetically. “But I don’t want to ask for too much. I failed you, Elodie, and so to turn up here, asking you to trust me again, I know how that must seem.”
“How did you fail me?”
“I think—and I could be wrong—that you were falling in love with me, in London.”
She swallowed over a razor-blade throat. She didn’t answer. She couldn’t.
“I didn’t want to repeat past mistakes—I should have ended things with Marcia, when I realized how much more she wanted from me, than I could give. That was all I thought of, when I suggested we live separately. Not what was in my own damned heart. I didn’t ask myself why it felt as though I was walking through wet cement, turning my back on you.”
Shock had her moving her hand from the door to her throat and, by virtue of the fact it was old and heavy, it started to swing closed. She saw surprise on his face, and then determination, as he pressed his foot to the opening, keeping it wedged enough that they could still see each other.
“I was—,” she started to explain, but he spoke quickly, as if afraid of whatever she might say.
“This is not the time for me to ask what I want to ask, or say what I want to say. I know what I did, and I know it will take time to fix. I presume this village has accommodation?”
She furrowed her brow, genuinely confused now by what he was saying. “I—there are rooms above the pub.”
He nodded. “I’ll take a room,” he said, suddenly more recognizable as Raf, taking charge and making decisions. “I want to be near you. I want to come to the scan with you—to all the scans, all the things, I want to rub your back if it’s sore, and your feet at the end of the day. I want to go on walks with you,” he muttered, invoking the spectre of Aaron. “I just want to spend time with you. Do you think we can start with that, Elodie? Would you see me, if I was nearby?”
She dropped her head forward, shaking it slightly. Heard his intake of breath. She was too overcome to be managing this properly. She reached for the door, pulling it open more widely.
