Читать книгу Reunited In The Snow - Amalie Berlin - Страница 11

ONCE WEST HAD made a decision he did his best to move on it. Over the hours between Lia’s arrival and the dragged-out end of his shift, he’d decided the only way to handle things was to tackle his Lia problem head-on, as brutally as his conscience would allow.

The circumstances of his shift only served to wrench up his irritation—two of his three assigned physicals had showed up, but the third, a recalcitrant astrophysicist, had ignored multiple calls to the telescope. Then, five minutes before the end of his shift, an emergency bone-setting had dragged his shift out an extra hour.

By the time he made it to her cabin door, some of his gut-swirling panic had settled into annoyance, and he let it. Was glad for it. Annoyance helped keep fond memories at bay. He didn’t need anything making him want to go to her, talk to her, make her smile. Kiss her. Even if he could drum up anger for her, he doubted he’d still want to be outside of her presence. Ever.

The only way to handle this was to make sure she didn’t want him, make sure she hadn’t come all the way to Antarctica to try and reconcile. Make sure she understood they were done.

Remove temptation.

He had to, harsh and quick, like a battlefield surgeon removing a gangrenous limb so the person would live. Only he was also the limb.

He took a deep breath to wrest control back from the willful, stubborn and half-wild, survival-focused part of his personality, and knocked.

Get the words out, move on. If she didn’t want him, he wouldn’t have to fight his own impulses for the next ten days. Not the best plan, but the only one he had.

He listened for signs of movement within. If she was there, he’d hear her.

Seconds ticked on, but no sound came from inside the tiny room. He knocked again, louder.

Then he heard the sound of bedclothes rustling, and when the door opened, her sleepy, confused face appeared in the frame. Four hours of frustration, but when he looked at her, memories of their mornings together and that old affection wrapped around him, making him want to wrap around her. Pretend now was then, and at any second, the sleepy confusion would warm to one of those soft-eyed smiles he’d so adored. The glimpses she’d reserved for him, past her strength, competency or expectations, to see the woman within.

But when her confusion cleared, there was nothing soft in her eyes for him.

Good. He did his best to ignore the exhaustion in her eyes, in her whole body.

“I’ll make it quick,” he said, gesturing inside with a nod.

“Tomorrow.”

He finally noticed in the dim light that she was wearing pink from head to toe. Some fluffy pink thing. Pajamas, maybe. It had a hood and feet built in. His annoyance had already started to fade.

Why was she wearing pink everywhere? She hated pink. Lord, he wanted to ask. But that would be showing an interest, the opposite of what he was trying to do. So would touching her, even though the urge to feel her skin against his boomed through him like a foghorn.

“Now or never, Lia.” He curled his fingers to his palms with the control it took not to push the door in, haul her to him. Just looking at her hurt.

Hell.

“Speak now, or forever hold your peace?” She spoke softly, like the effort to utter every word shaved a year off her life.

The ceremonial words sailed straight and true, and hit harder than a sledgehammer. Despite his determination to be a stone, he couldn’t hide the shock rippling through him, but grit his teeth, nodded once, and she stepped back to let him in.

This was why he didn’t stick around to watch the destruction after whatever life catastrophe had triggered. He couldn’t stand there, inside the bubble of pain he could almost see around her, warping reality. As if this cabin were some awful place that existed between two universes, the one where he’d gotten everything he’d ever wanted, and this one, where the last gift he could give her was walking away.

He closed the door behind him and leaned there, while she tracked the measly few feet that made up the whole of the walking space, getting as far from one another as was possible in the tiny space.

In his mind, all afternoon, when he’d pictured himself coming, acting it out, he’d dialed his performance to eleven. Shouted. Said ugly, awful things. Lied. Everything he could think of to make her angry, to make her hate him. But there with her, breathing the same air, feeling the pain written all over her, from the tilt of her eyebrows to the way she shifted from foot to foot, fidgeting, her hands hidden in her cuffs, he couldn’t do it.

He couldn’t do it, more proof that he had to make her want to stay away.

He forced himself to look her in the eye, but kept his voice quiet, and more sympathetic than he wanted. “I don’t know what you’re wantin’, lass, but you’re wastin’ your time comin’. It’s done between us. Over. Say what you want to say, and let’s have done with it.”

He heard his accent thicker than it had been in years, not just the shifting pronunciation, but the words, the cadence. Further proof this was scrambling his eggs.

“I didn’t come to say anything. I wanted to see with my own eyes that you were alive and well.” Her voice wobbled, like it had to pass through bubbles of emotion in her throat. This would be easier if she would just shout.

“And now you see.”

“Alive. And I need to understand why the man who said he loved me, the only—” She stopped midthought, and closed her eyes, hands slipping from her sleeves enough to fidget before her as she struggled for composure. “Why would you just leave without word, three days before our wedding? I deserve to know what I did wrong.”

There it was, her taking the blame for it. An example of exactly what she would do if he told her the whole damned story, try to take his guilt away or at least share the load. She’d probably say his brother had committed suicide because she’d taken too much of West’s time, or that it was her fault because she was the subject of West’s ultimatum. He couldn’t have an addict around his new family, and he’d picked Lia over Charlie. And Charlie had picked drugs over rehab and family. A choice Charlie obviously wasn’t ready to make, and he should’ve seen that. If he’d listened…

He lifted one hand to mash against his forehead, trying to rub away the tension headache already starting to drill in.

Don’t think about Charlie.

He didn’t need to explain. He wasn’t going to explain. But if he wanted her to believe him, not take the blame, he had to give some excuse. Pinning some action on her would be an even greater sin than the lie he was about to tell. He couldn’t make her take the blame. He’d take it. He deserved it.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” The muscles all seemed to have tightened, and making his mouth form words was harder than running in water. “Something happened, and I needed to go. So I left.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to talk about any of this, and you know that.”

Her shoulders bobbed quickly under the fluffy pink onesie she’d zipped herself into. In any other circumstances, the ridiculousness of her outfit would delight him—with the hood and the footsies attached—but he hadn’t smiled in a long time.

“I don’t care about your aversion to talking about the past. It’s not that far in the past, and I need to understand.”

“Aye, I see that. But you don’t need to know everything. You’re not part of my life now, Lia. We’re not friends. We’re not lovers. We’re not engaged.”

“If you had to leave, I would’ve gone with you.”

“No,” he said swiftly, searching for any route that would get through to her. “When I proposed, I thought it was love. I thought I loved you. Turns out, I didn’t.”

The color drained from her face.

“But when I left…” she started, but then just stopped. Like she didn’t even have an avenue to try and argue it. Like it was almost expected.

Which it probably was. He had left her days before their wedding.

That was something he should apologize for; he could do that without explanations. But softening his position now would be a bad idea. Inside, he was already as soft as peat; it wouldn’t take much for him to sink into the dreck. He’d apologize another day, after she’d accepted things.

“Is there anything else you want to discuss?”

Speak now, or forever hold your peace… She didn’t even have to say the words this time.

“I guess I don’t have anything else to say,” she said, the words hanging there, sucking the air out of the room as she extended her left arm a bit, eyes fixed on the hand she’d let slide out from the cuff she’d tucked it into for warmth. “Just…”

He followed her gaze down to her hand. And the glittering diamond ring still perched on her finger. Where he’d slid it almost a year before.

The ice he’d felt cramming into the back of his neck earlier returned, a single, hard throb in his head stopping him from saying anything else. Why would she still be wearing that?

“I came to give this back.” Her voice wobbled, then cracked, the sound as sudden and startling as a gunshot. “This beautiful ring we designed together, and the lie that it represents…”

Lia had other things she wished she had the strength to say, but as soon as she got feeling back in her face, she might be able to be proud of herself for still breathing after having him say the worst thing he could have to her. But all she could think of was to return the ring.

She flexed her hand, noted the way it trembled, the way her body could respond while mentally she still scrambled for anything to say. Her heart rabbited away. She heard her breath as if through a stethoscope, but it was as if every part of her brain was focused on keeping her upright and breathing. All emotion. No reason.

West stared at the ring, his jaw bunched and his brow beetled, but he didn’t say anything.

Take it off. She was supposed to take it off now.

Forcing her arms to move, she latched on to the exquisite trigold engraved band and pulled.

In the first days, when she hadn’t been able to locate him, the ring had been a comfort to her. When she discovered his empty flat, she’d clung to the promise she’d still trusted in and wanted to protect.

Her hands were cold enough that the knuckle, which always snagged it, had contracted, and it took nearly no effort for the ring to pop free. But everything still wobbled. Her hands. Her voice, when she finally found some words, the last she hoped she’d ever have to say to him. “I can’t carry it anymore, or the weight of your broken promises.”

The last word was whispered, no strength left to fake, all swept away with the sudden, sickly warmth washing over her face and down. Lightly stinging in her eyes and cheeks, then like a fever in her throat where muscles tensed, opened, hollowed so that when she breathed in it sounded strangled, choking…

Oh, no…

She was going to cry. As if she needed one more ounce of humiliation. The cascade of physical processes had already begun, the ones she could feel and which let her know it was too late to stop.

She thrust her hand out to him, the ring on her quaking palm.

He started to say something, but stopped dead a split second before her chin began the quiver and tears spilled.

Focusing on the process of it was the only thing she could think to do.

Useless Science Fact Number One: tears from grief and pain were chemically different from those summoned by dirt or onion fumes.

Useless Science Question Number One: How would these tears have dried on a microscope slide? Spiky or like a web of fractals, like that strange theory she’d once read which hypothesized that different tears produced different crystalline salt structures.

She looked away from his eyes, not wanting to see him through the wavering watery line, or the horror there. But that coping mechanism fritzed and she had to reach for any other information to sedate her emotions.

“Lia?”

What else?

Something…

Prolactin.

Useless Science Fact Number Two: prolactin was somehow present in tears—a hormone initially believed only to govern lactation and the reason babies instinctively suckled. There was no way to stop it.

“Lia?” He said her name again, confusion present in his voice. As if she shouldn’t experience grief. Like she wasn’t a human who’d gone through loss in the past, who wasn’t having her third round of grief in a handful of months, just because he’d wanted to share those old pains with her, or know her. Never wanted to let her close enough to love her, just close enough to fool her into thinking she’d finally found someone who would.

Lia never cried.

Ophelia had, but only when she was alone. She needed to be alone now.

He said her name again, but she could only shake her head, her eyes fixed on the little closet at his shoulder.

Why was he still standing there? Didn’t he have any decency? Couldn’t he see that she…

The ring. He hadn’t taken it; she still felt it weighing her palm down.

When she gave it to him, he would go…

She thrust it forward, finally looking again at his face, his horrified face.

Enough. He had to go.

She opened her mouth to tell him, but a short, choked hiccup came out instead, and in her own horror, she slammed her free hand over her mouth to hold it.

“Lia?”

He had to stop saying her name like he could make her stop feeling by him being horrified by it.

One step forward came with his word this time, so her knuckles touched his chest.

The brush of his hand on her well-padded arm got through the grief fogging her brain.

He thought he could be horrible and cruel and then just…what? Comfort her? Maybe tell her to stop being dramatic?

No.

She peeled her own hand from her mouth and slapped his hand away hard. Then again, because it wasn’t far enough. She’d come all this way, and now all she wanted was distance.

Distance and getting rid of the ring, which he still hadn’t taken. A quick survey of his attire provided an array of pockets where she could stick the cursed thing. She found one, and as soon as she’d stuffed the diamond band inside, she shoved at his chest.

“Lia, you have to take a breath. Calm down.”

“Stop saying my name.” She panted the words, because she was only half functioning on intention.

“Okay, but you have—”

“Get out!”

West lifted both hands, palms forward, to stay her, and backed warily out the door.

As soon as he stepped through, she took two big steps, made sure it was as closed as possible, then flipped the locks.

She crawled back into bed and pressed her face into the pillow to muffle the sounds she couldn’t stop.

It was done. It was over. She’d wanted to know what she’d meant to him, and now she knew. But she’d always known that, in the back of her mind. She’d just let herself pretend otherwise.