“I had an affair with my swimming coach from the age of sixteen and when I was eighteen she got pregnant. She let me believe the baby was mine, but on the day she was born she finally told me it was her husband’s, even though she’d told me she wasn’t with him for the last eleven months we were together.”
I tried to say the words in a quiet, measured way, but the enormity of what I was finally admitting to someone was too much. The relief at revealing a secret that had plagued me and shaped my life for years was immense. My voice cracked with emotion and I slowly slid down the cupboard until I was crouching down.
“What?” Elijah asked, dropping his beer bottle onto the floor.
I looked up at him and swallowed hard. “Alison had a baby that I thought was mine but it wasn’t. We had an affair for two years, from when I was just sixteen.” I let out a hollow laugh. “If you can call it that, basically we shagged in the changing rooms at the pool, apart from one time when her husband was evidently away.”
I sat down on the floor and felt a wetness seeping around my backside as Elijah’s beer flowed slowly toward me. I glanced down at the pale amber liquid but didn’t have it in me to move, staying there until Eli flopped down beside me with a muttered ‘fuck’.
“She was your coach and you were a kid,” he said looking totally bewildered. “That’s fucking sick, Sam.”
“Yeah, I know that now, but at the time I thought I was god’s fucking gift for bagging her, having someone like her wanting me.” I thought about it for a few seconds. “She was thirty-three, same age as I am now.”
Eli blinked slowly and then shook his head. “That’s just wrong.”
“But like I said, I didn’t realise that at the time because I wanted it as much as her. As soon as my hormones kicked in I tried everything to make her see me as more than a bit of a kid who was pretty good at swimming. Then, when I hit my sixteenth birthday and got a bit of stubble on my chin, bingo, she noticed me.”
I had no clue why I was almost defending her, she’d been so fucking wrong in what she’d done. Apart from it probably being illegal, her actions had made me do something that I wasn’t proud of – I’d denied my son.
“So that’s why you didn’t want anything to do with Frankie?” Elijah asked. “Why you told Maisie you weren’t interested?”
“Pretty much, although now that I think about it, it’s a pretty shit reason. I’m supposed to be an intelligent man, yet I couldn’t see that Maisie was a different sort of person. She’s kind and generous and so fucking forgiving bro, it’s unbelievable. You know when he was born, I accused her of doing what Alison had done, all because Frankie had blue eyes when he was born.”
“All babies have blue eyes.”
“I know that now, but I told her to get a DNA test. No, not asked, told.”
“You twat,” my brother groaned.
“I know, which is what makes it even more astonishing that Maisie even let me speak to him. Yeah, she told me I had to quit coaching Frankie at first, but since I helped her out she's been nothing but amazing. Letting me into their lives and even considering letting me be a dad to Frankie is more than I deserve.”
“Like you said, you did help her out. Maybe she’s just showing her gratitude and maybe she’ll actually knife you in the bollocks one day when you least expect it.”
I grimaced and cupped my balls, flashing a pained expression at my brother.
“Shit,” he said, raking a hand over his head. “You told Mum and Dad?”
“No!” I snapped. “And I don’t want you to either. This is one fucking secret that stays between you and me.”
Elijah frowned.
“You can tell her, but I mean it Eli, if Amy tells them I’ll never forgive her, I fucking swear.”
“Okay,” he sighed. “To be honest, I agree. It would fucking kill them knowing she did that when you were her responsibility.”
“I was sixteen, bro. It’s not like I wasn’t legal,” I reasoned.
Eli shook his head. “Only just, even so, she had no fucking right. She did wrong. She violated her position, she fucking violated you. How would you feel if that was Frankie?”
I pushed my back off the cupboard door, clenching my hands into fists and stared wide-eyed at my brother.
“I’d fucking kill them.”
“Yeah,” he said, grinning. “You’re ready to be his dad.”
My heart halted, missing a few beats at Elijah’s words. “You think I can do this?” I asked.
“I know you can. Do not let what happened with that woman shape your life any more than it already has. We had a conversation about regret a few years ago, which I know for definite now was about Frankie, am I right?”
