‘Ava, I’m sorry.’
‘I don’twantyou to be sorry, Damien. I want you to—’stay, said the quiet voice in her mind. And for a moment she thought she would swallow it – that word, and everything it held within it. But she didn’t. She looked up at him – though his features had started to blur. ‘I want you to stay,’ she whispered.
She wanted to feel the way she had before – with his arms curled around hers – as though the two of them together could draw a curtain over themselves, and block out the whole world.
She wanted not to have made the same mistake, over and again.
‘Ava …’ Damien opened his mouth and closed it again, a knotted expression upon his face. ‘Ican’t.’
‘I love you.’ This time, when she said it, the words came out a little steadier. ‘I love you, Damien Carter.’
‘Ava,’ he said – his voice firm, pleading. ‘Please. I’m not … I’m not the person you should be with. I’m not … I’m notgood, or—’
She bit back the nervous laugh that rose in her throat, and looked at him for a long moment. Trying to see beneath his skin – trying to make sense of any of this.
‘Is that what this is? Are you … are you trying to prove it to yourself? That what your father told you, all those years ago, was true?’
Now the humour slid from his face – replaced with something else. Something trembling, and raw.
‘Ava—’
‘Does it make it better, or worse?’ Ava asked. ‘This self-fulfilling prophecy you’ve placed in front of yourself? If you do bad things, then you are the bad person your father claimed you to be? Is that it? Is that why you’re leaving? Because otherwise you’d have to face up to the truth – that you’re not some awful monster, and that your life is only a set of choices, choicesyouhave made—’
He winced – and whatever warmth had been left in his gaze disappeared entirely. ‘Ava, please.’
Ava didn’t know why hearing her name on his lips suddenly felt like a pinch to her stomach, but she set her jaw. ‘I think I saw you, you know. The first night I arrived home in Liverpool. I saw you standing in the rain, your arms opened wide, head tilted up as though you would drink the rain from the sky.’ Her mouth twitched at the memory. ‘And I envied you. For it looked like freedom. It looked like being carefree. It looked the opposite to how I felt, waiting for my brother to collect me, and drag me back to a life I had been trying to run away from.’
She leaned forwards. ‘But then I got to know you. And I realized we were both trapped – just in different ways.’
Damien’s flint-like gaze softened, brows pinching together. ‘You are not trapped,’ he said.
‘Neither are you,’ she countered. ‘And whatever reason you think you need to leave Liverpool—’
‘You,’ Damien corrected. ‘I have to leave you. Because I care about you. Because—’ Something flashed across his face, and he frowned, the muscle in his jaw twitching. He wasn’t looking at her now, he was turning the teacup around and around upon its saucer, the porcelain clinking gently.
She shook her head, wishing her throat did not feel so awfully tight, wishing that the lump forming within it would disappear, but it didn’t. It simply grew, the buttercups upon the tablecloth blurring into streaks of white and yellow as she said: ‘Jem didn’t care enough to stay with me. That is why he broke off the engagement. He said that he couldn’t love me in the way that I loved him, and that was why we could not be together.’ She swallowed, watching two dark circles drip onto the cloth, sinking into the threads of white. ‘But you say you caretoo muchto stay, and I do not know which of the two is worse.’ She wished she could look at him, wished she could lift her chin and watch him as she spoke, but she couldn’t. She just watched the wet spots gather, more rapidly now. ‘They both feel rotten. But I think this is worse. Because at least with Jem, I could tell myself I had made a mistake. I had misread some sign, some signal. With you—’ She rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘Ava—’ His voice creaked, like ice about to break.
‘No,’ she said, sucking a deep breath into her lungs and looking up, hating the pitying slant to his eyebrows, the shine to his dark eyes. ‘Don’t say any more. You’ve said enough.’
And then she stood up, trying desperately to hold her chin high as she walked past the tables of people, and out through the door.
‘Ava, wait.’
He followed her out into the street – the dusk pulling in above them like a tide, the wind cool.
‘I always thought I was invisible, Ava,’ he said, breathlessly. ‘And then I met you.’
There was something in his tone that made her heart ache all over again – but not like it had with Jem. This was different. Sweeter, almost – a gentle thrum that started in her chest and worked its way down into the pit of her stomach.
She closed her eyes. ‘You’ve never been invisible to me, Damien Carter.’
‘No,’ he whispered, coming to stand beside her, his breath warm and uneven against her cheek. ‘But this cannot work between us, Ava. Itcan’t. No matter how much I wish it could.’
The words stung, sinking into the cracks upon her heart, the ones she had tried so desperately to knit back together.
‘You belonghere,’ he said, one hand reaching to cup her chin as though she were something fragile. Something that could break. ‘And I belong—’
