“Don’t you have somewhere you need to be?” That’s the very question he’d asked me over an hour earlier after I told him I didn’t want him to leave, and I’d found myself shaking my head without saying a word. There wasn’t anywhere else I needed to be that night. All the questions I’d tried to lock away in that tiny box in my mind, well they wanted out. They wanted to breathe. They wanted to know what had gone so wrong with something that had, once upon a time, felt so right.

We’d walked across the road to the closest bar we could find. It was six o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun was still high in the sky with it being the height of summer in our usually cloudy city, but it felt like it was midnight already. The day, just another ordinary day where I was supposed to meet my mum for a coffee after work, was slowly turning into one of those key memory days.

I had no idea how to handle it, so the only thing I could think to do was to find alcohol. Probably not my wisest decision considering that was the very thing that had brought Alex’s family to its knees, but there we sat, opposite one another in a dimly lit bar, tucked away in a corner as we stared helplessly into one another’s empty eyes. Blue, soaking in the hazel. The hazel, forever searching the blue like it held treasure beneath it.

“I feel weird drinking on my own,” I eventually told him, circling the edge of my tumbler with my index finger for something to do that would hide the subtle trembling of all my limbs.

He smiled that slow-rising, lazy smile of his. “Would you feel weird drinking if it was Marcus sat opposite you?”

“I… No.” I frowned.

“Then don’t feel guilty about drinking in front of me. I want you to feel relaxed around me, to feel comfortable like you used to.”

Looking down at my drink, I pulled in a breath before forcing myself to look back up at him as I lifted the whiskey to my mouth and took a sip. He eyed me the whole time, his gaze flickering between the motion of my lips, the curl of my fingers around the glass, and my throat as I swallowed the cool, burning liquid. When I placed my drink back down on the table, I had to clear my throat just to make some kind of sound. The air was tight around us.

“He told me he didn’t mind me being friends with you, you know?” I admitted to him quietly. “Marcus isn’t worried about you being in my life.”

“Really?” Alex raised a brow.

“Really.” I nodded once.

“Silly boy,” he muttered weakly.

“He trusts me.”

Dragging his teeth over his bottom lip, Alex tried to hold back his smirk, but it was clearly proving too hard for him as it broke free anyway. “I’m not sure if you believed me the first time I told you, but I’m not here to steal you away. Far from it. I know I fucked up, and I genuinely am glad that you found him when you did. I'm glad you're happy.”

“Are you?”

“My love for you is unconditional, whether you love me back or not. I know that now. It’s not just there if you’re available, or if you’re in trouble. It doesn’t just live in me if you’re by my side. It’s a lifelong thing. I can’t help it any more than I can help breathing. You’re a part of me now. Does it suck that I can’t be the one to make you happy? Babe, you have no idea. Does it make me angry that I pushed you away? You already know the answer to that. Does it mean I don’t want you happy? Hell no.”

“And if I told you to leave my life forever now, would you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that?”

He laughed softly, shaking his head as he stared down into his glass of water and sighed. “If I believed that there was no benefit to me being in your life at all, not even as a friend, I would leave again. If, once I’d laid all my cards out on the table for you, you told me that I brought too much chaos to your heart and your life, I would go.” He stopped, glancing back up at me through hooded eyes. “But it would never be ‘just like that’. It would feel a lot like grief again, and we both know that is the most difficult emotion in the world.”

Tilting my head to one side, I studied the subtle features on Alex’s face that weren’t there in our more youthful years. Sure, we were still only young, but he’d always had something about him that propelled him beyond his actual years. That misspent youth of abuse, neglect, suffering – it all sat on the very surface of his skin, just like his father, reminding everyone who saw him to be careful of how they handled Alex Law. There was more to him than anyone had ever truly seen. There was more to him than even he knew was there inside of him. All it was ever going to take was the right person to pull it out and show him just how magnificent he could be, if only he’d allow himself to let go of all the guilt, shame and blame he laid at his own feet every damn day.

“Where did you go?” I mouthed to him, leaning back in my seat. “Where did your parents take you after you left Leeds?”

Alex closed his eyes before he pushed himself back and stared down at the overused wooden table that sat between us. “We moved about ten miles from here at first. My dad always had this theory about running away. He said that if people came looking for you, the last place they would look is right under the nose of where they were standing. So we stayed local. We always stay local.”

I wasn’t sure why this surprised me so much, but knowing he’d only been a short car ride away suddenly made everything feel worse. That pain in my chest got sharper as I stared at him in confusion. “Why didn’t you ever…?”

“Let you know?” he asked, snapping his head back up to look at me. His eyes were wide, yet innocent, all the whites shining as the sadness in that beautiful, honey colour poured out. “I couldn't. I knew you loved me, Nat. I knew all it would take for me to get you back was one phone call and that would be that.”

“And you didn’t want that,” I said softly.

“For you. I didn’t want that for you. I couldn’t hurt you anymore. At one point, I’d have rather you thought of me as dead than alive and within reach. I needed you to move on.”

All the things his father told me in the hospital came flooding back, and it was my turn to avert my eyes then. I could no longer put all the blame on Alex’s shoulders. There was a reason that he did what he did. There was a reason he pushed me away, and now that I knew it, I just had to figure out how to process our time apart all over again. Here he was, sitting before me, pouring all his emotions out like a totally different man to the boy I once knew, and here I was, dumbstruck. Confused. Wishing upon all the stars that were yet to show themselves in the night sky, that I could go back five years and shake some sense into him.

“You asked me why I ran from the hospital.” I pushed my free palm through the length of my hair, pausing with my hand tucked in the thickness of it as I looked up at him. “I ran because your father told me what he did to you all those years ago. He told me that he forbade you to fall in love with me.”

Alex’s eyes widened even further then, a small huff of disbelief falling from his already parted lips. “He remembered,” he whispered. “The arsehole finally remembered.”

“It’s true?”

He gave me a small nod, and I found myself reaching for my glass and draining its contents completely before slamming it back down on the table.

“Shit, Alex. You should have told me.”

“If I’d told you, he would have hurt you, killed you even. You have no idea what he’s capable of.”

A short burst of laughter broke free, and I looked up at the ceiling, shaking my head with an exasperated smile on my face. “What is he, part of the mob? Those were just the ramblings of a drunken old man.”

Alex’s hands flatted on the surface in front of us, his face suddenly turning serious as he leaned forward. His eyes darkened, just the same way they always did when he turned cold. “The ramblings of a drunken old man who once held a knife to my mother’s throat and broke her skin with it. The ramblings of a drunken old man who locked me in the cellar once, only opening the door to beat me with his slipper every time I dared to whimper about the cold. The ramblings of a drunken old man who once chased down a stranger in his car because he’d dared to cut him up on the road, before beating him to within an inch of his life, only to wake up the next day and not remember a single moment of it.”

“Alex, I’m sorry. I didn’t…”

He narrowed his eyes as though in pain and spoke through barely moving lips. “Don’t ever believe that I would have walked away from you if I’d had a choice. I was young, too. I didn’t see a future for you that wouldn’t get you hurt. That day, when you stormed in, I saw it all playing out in front of me like I was seeing things five, ten, fifteen years ahead. The years and years of you rushing to save me. All the times you’d beg me to get the police involved and lock him away. All the times you’d have to clean my mother up. All the mornings you’d wake up covered in sweat from the nightmares you’d had because of the things you’d seen. My family… they were no good to be around, Nat. I loved them. I couldn’t ever betray them. I couldn’t ever walk away. But you? You deserved better. You still deserve better.”

There wasn’t anything I could say to that. Everything he said was right, and it was only now, seeing it through his eyes and hearing it from his thoughts, that I could understand that. But there was one thing that Alex Law had done wrong in all of this, despite his best intentions. There was one mistake he’d made in the big, sorry mess that was our supposed fairy tale.

Sliding my arms over the table, I let my fingers brush the edges of his forearms, before I leaned closer in and lifted my eyes for him to see the fight that had always lain there, deep within me.

“With all due respect, that wasn’t your decision to make. That was mine. It was my right to choose. It was my right to decide what I wanted in life, and you took that away from me.”

“Choose?” He frowned harder.

“Yes. You made that choice for me, and that’s where you went wrong in all of this. You made all the wrong choices for both of us. I wanted you to choose me, Alex. I wanted you to have faith in me, to believe I could handle anything, but you didn’t. All these years you let me believe that it was my fault, that I’d done something wrong. You let me believe that if we were meant to be, we would have been already. You had no right to deny me what I wanted more than anything in the world just because you thought it was your duty to save me.”

I was unwavering as he stared at me, completely dumbfounded, his eyes now searching mine frantically as he tried to read what the hell was going on inside my mind. “He would have hurt you, Nat. You expected me to just sit by and watch that happen? You would have expected me to live with myself if he’d gotten his hands on you, if he’d beaten you, broken your bones, or come close to killing you?”

“I would have taken all of that a thousand times over, rather than have to face the pain that came with walking away from you.”

“Don't say that.”

“It's the truth.”

“No,” he released through a sigh, shaking his head furiously. “You don’t understand. You don’t believe him or me when we tell you of the danger you were in.”

“No, you don’t get to patronise me, Alex,” I said as carefully as I could. “You’re the one who doesn’t understand. Listen to me when I tell you that there isn’t anything I wouldn’t have suffered, there isn’t any pain I wouldn’t have endured in order to be with you. I loved you with that unconditional love you just talked about. I would have walked across hot coals to have you in my life. I would have taken all your father’s abuse just to wake up with you every morning.”

“Natalie,” he whispered, his arms pressing harder against my fingertips.

“I was yours for the taking. Heart, soul, body, the whole fucking works. You were my happiness. That’s how much I loved you back then.”

“Back then?”

“Back then.” I nodded.

“And now?”

I smiled genuinely then. What I wouldn’t have given to throw my arms around his neck, bury my lips into his and close my eyes on the rest of the world. What I wouldn’t have given to remove that invisible divide that kept us apart, without feeling any remorse, guilt or sadness. What I wouldn’t have given for us to live in simpler times, when we were just a boy and a girl too scared to be in love.

“Now things are different because you removed all my choices from me. I have no freedom to move of my own accord anymore. Maybe I never will. Now? Now, I’m just trying to survive without ever getting hurt again.”

“And you think that’s possible?”

“I think…” Swallowing again, I closed my eyes for just a moment and sighed. “I think I need another drink.”

When I blinked and looked back over at him, that half smile of his was there again, and without another word being said, Alex raised his hand to the passing waiter and put an order in for my second drink. There was something therapeutic about sitting there with him, even though I knew it should feel wrong. After years of pretending he was nothing to me anymore, it felt good to pour out some painful truths.

When the waiter returned, he had two whiskeys in his hand, sliding one to Alex this time while I just watched on with an amused expression on my face.

“When in Rome,” Alex muttered with a smirk on his face before lifting his glass in the air. “Cheers. To old friends.”

I met his glass with mine, straightening up in my seat as I looked at him. “To old friends.”

“And good memories.”

“The best.”

“And bad memories.”

“The worst.”

We both drank then, staring at each other like I imagined a couple on their honeymoon would gaze adoringly across the table at one another each morning at breakfast.

“I always looked for you in the crowd, you know?” he began, scratching his eyebrow with his free hand while his other hand turned his glass in circles. “Even though I knew I shouldn’t, I always looked for you in the crowd. Then I found myself looking for people that dressed like you, smelled like you, read the same books you read, etc.”

“Did that help?”

“Not really.”

“So why torture yourself like that?” I asked, even though I knew the answer already. I’d found myself doing the very same thing through my last year of schooling, and then all the way through university at Preston. Only when I found myself doing those very things, I had to chastise myself fiercely, reminding my broken heart that we were trying to pretend he never existed.

“I’m not sure. I guess I got comfort from it. It made me believe that you hadn’t just been a figment of my imagination – that someone like you really did exist. I sought out people like you because it was the little things about you that got me hooked. I wanted to feel that with someone else.”

“And did you?”

“Not once.”

Relief flowed through my bloodstream, but the guilt of that relief proved too painful, and I imagined Marcus at home in his apartment, probably waiting to call me in just a couple of hours, him thinking I was at home with my parents, eating in front of the television or curled up in a hot bubble bath as I soaked the night away. If only I could find the strength to get up and walk away.

“Your father told me about your other girlfriends.”

“Girlfriends?” Alex smirked, his brows still furrowed together.

“Well, the other women in your life.”

“My old man doesn’t know enough about my life to comment on the girls that have passed through.”

“I think he might see more than he claims to.”

“Is that so?” he asked, his voice low and slightly seductive all of a sudden. “Hmm. Tell me then, what’s he seen that was so exciting that he had to tell you about it while having a suspected heart attack?”

The edge to his voice had me blinking quickly, but I held my own, not allowing my smile to falter as I studied his reactions. “It was just idle chit chat. No need to get defensive. I had assumed there’d been others since me.”

“Sweetheart, I’m not defensive.” He chuckled. “But I am confused. And you… you’re curious. I can see it in that small scowl you’re trying to hide. What’s got you so intrigued, Nat?”

Licking my bottom lip, I decided to stare at the content of my glass when I spoke. “It was just something he said about the way they looked.” I dared myself to peek up through my lashes and when I did, Alex quirked a brow, and his jaw twitched as he fought to stay composed.

“Go on.”

“He said…” I paused, not wanting to sound conceited. “He said I looked like all of them.”

Alex’s hands flexed around his glass. “He was wrong,” he muttered quietly.

“Oh.”

“You didn’t look like them, they all looked like you. Only cheap imitations.”

“Oh,” I said a little lower, pressing my lips together so I couldn’t grin, but the temptation to ask more and know more proved just too much. I’d never claimed to be a saint. “All?” I asked him, raising a brow to match his earlier expression.

“You want numbers?”

No. “Yes.” Shit.

“You’re a hard woman to get over,” was all he offered.

“That’s not a number.”

“I don’t have a number to give. All I know is that it’s been a lot of women over the last five years. I’ve had a lot of regrettable drunken nights, a lot of memories I wanted to stop taunting me for a while. A lot of memories I needed silencing.”

“So things with you and Bronwyn, they didn’t last?”

He looked at me then, a brief wave of what looked like disgust washing over his face. “She was a means to an end. She came in useful when I needed her.”

“I bet she did,” I mumbled, sounding sulkier than I wanted to sound. I had no right to get jealous, but the memories of them together in the club that night – they had haunted my dreams so many times over the years, I’d come to see her as some kind of demon. I’d come to despise her, without really knowing much about her at all. “Sorry. That’s none of my business.”

“I never slept with Bronwyn.”

I frowned. “Then why…?”

Alex sighed, his body sagging as though he’d had enough for one night. “I just needed you to believe that I had. I needed to give you a reason to hate me, to realise being with me would only make you miserable. It was some kind of… misdirection. I don’t know. Looking back, none of what I did makes sense now.”

“I see.”

“You don’t believe that I didn’t sleep with her?”

“Can we change the subject?” I asked suddenly, taking another long sip of my drink so he couldn’t see the blush of jealousy that was raging in my cheeks.

“That’s up to you. You ask me a question about my past, about the girls I slept with, and I’ll answer it. I’m done lying to you. I’ve nothing to hide anymore. I’ve lost everything I was ever trying to save anyway.”

“I just… I know I have no right to, but discussing how intimate you got with other women, it makes me feel like this little girl who doesn’t want someone else playing with her dolls. I don’t want to be that girl.”

He leaned closer, ducking his head until I had no choice but to stare into his eyes again. “You think I was intimate with her? With any of them?”

“You slept with them, didn’t you?”

Alex laughed freely for a moment before he somehow managed to compose himself. “That’s not intimacy, baby. That’s sex – a physical act with no mental connection. Just… gratification. You should know two things, Nat. One: I never looked any other woman in the eye while I was inside them. No other woman beside you. I couldn’t stare into a girl’s eyes and let them know I was thinking of someone else. You were all I ever saw. I've been a bastard, sure, but I'm not that fucking heartless. Two: You’re the only woman walking this damn planet that I’ve dared to share a bit of my soul with. If you can’t see that that is what intimacy is – not if someone woman lets me screw her just for a temporary reprieve of Natalie Vincent induced insanity – then I can’t help you out here. I won’t ever be able to convince you of the difference between you and them. You… You blew my mind. They blew me off at best. I’ve been a slave to you, even before I let you go. But the shackles have seemed a little tighter since I stupidly watched you walk away. You’re the biggest regret I never allowed myself to have.”

“What am I meant to say to that? I did everything you asked me to do. I walked away when it killed me to do so.”

“I know,” he interrupted. “Believe me, I know.”

“Do you?” I pushed out as I moved closer towards him. “Do you?”

“I wish I could find a way to show you how much I hated hurting you. I thought I was doing the right thing. I was young. I was scared.”

“So was I,” I reminded him. “What’s changed so much now?”

“Everything. Don’t you see? Everything has changed now. My mum has gone. My dad gets weaker every day. It’s only a matter of time before he finishes himself off and leaves me with nothing. He’s all I’ve got now. He’s fifty-five and he’s dying. That’s not an ‘if’ anymore, it’s a ‘when’, and I know it will be soon, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to help him until he takes his last breath. But what happens then, Nat? What? I drift around wishing that I hadn’t fucked up? I spend the rest of my life knowing I gave up the best thing that ever happened to me and I wasn’t even man enough to put up a fight? Sure. I can do that. I can pick up women, fuck them and think of you. I can give them pleasure, imagining it’s you I’m kissing, imagining that it’s your body I’m begging for forgiveness from with my mouth?”

“Alex…”

“Or do I try and do what I should have done five years ago? Do I realise that I’m still young, only twenty-two with a whole life ahead of me? And do I try to fix that early while I still have time? Do I try to lay all my shit bare and hope, even if there’s only a one percent chance, that at some point you might decide that you can’t live without me, either?”

“You said you weren’t here to break me and Marcus up.”

“And I’m not, but that doesn’t mean I can’t hope you will pick me anyway. It’s a long shot, but at this point, it’s all I’ve got.”

“I can’t just drop my life and everyone in it because you’ve decided that I’m good enough now.”

“I chose the path I thought was right at the time. I didn’t choose what I wanted. Those two things don’t always go hand in hand. And you were always good enough.”

“Try telling that to the seventeen-year-old girl whose heart you broke.”

“Fuck, how I wish I could,” he groaned, scrunching his face together as though the very thought was the one thing that brought him the most pain. “I’d never let her go. I’d never leave her side.” When he opened his eyes, they shone at me, inviting me in, inviting me to take a look at all the deepest secrets he’d kept hidden beneath them his whole life. “I’d live just to make you the happiest woman in the world.”

My past, my present and all my possible futures were suffocating me, making the walls of the bar suddenly feel as though they were caving in. All the anger, the loss, the hurt, the pain – they were all there, beating their angry drums of war in my chest, chanting, how dare he, how dare he, how dare he? The lust for the boy, the need for the man, the daydreams of a life together where we curled up in front of the fire in winter, sprawled out on hot beaches during summer holidays, and decorated the tree together at Christmas – all those things attacked me, too. Every emotion had a conflicting partner there, sparring them on, taunting them with too late, it’s tough, got to move on, remarks that did nothing to dilute the ache in my chest.

“This is bullshit,” I whispered as the anger started to rise. “If you loved me, you’d never have let me go.” My face tensed, the unfairness of this whole, sorry, fucked up situation suddenly proving too much for me to deal with.

“You know I loved you,” he croaked.

“You were a coward,” I hissed, unable to stop myself from pressing my chest against the table and letting it all out. “A fucking coward who chose to base a life decision on a theory of ‘what if’ rather than looking at the facts in front of you. And the facts were I would have stood by you through every fire. All of them. I would have burned right beside you with a smile on my face. But you chose to run instead of fight, and along the way, you decided to nail the coffin shut on us forever by making a fool out of me in front of everyone that night at the club. You made me feel cheap and desperate. You made me feel like a pawn in your sick game.”

The muscles in his jaw twitched as his face set to stone. Whatever he’d been expecting from me, this hadn’t been it.

“I loved you, Alex,” I told him, not hiding the fact that it felt like someone was stabbing me in the throat as I spoke. “From the minute I saw you the night of Lizzy’s death, a part of me knew. I saw you and it was like with just one look, one offer to see me home safe, I knew you were special. You twisted me up. You made me think things I’d never thought before. I believed in you. I saw every part of you, and I wanted it forever. I was just a teenager and I knew what I wanted. Was I scared? Terrified. But you… I believed in you. I believed in us. Natalie and Alex. Us.”

“Natexus,” he mouthed.

“All the way,” I finished for him, my tone sharp as my nostrils flared and my head began to shake. “You were my best friend. My best fucking friend who I wanted to drown in. I told you everything.”

His eyes scanned the table as his panic set in, and in that moment, he didn’t look strong like he had done the first time I saw him at work. He looked like the boy who laid on the floor as his father went to town on him. He looked vulnerable, unsure and desperate. And I wanted to go to him, save him, show him that I didn’t mean to shout, and I really did care for him still. But all the years of pretending had finally caught up with me, until pretending wasn’t even a word I knew how to spell anymore.

Pushing my chair back, I didn’t take my eyes off him as I began to stand. Alex didn’t do anything except watch every move I made, those frown lines of his telling me all I needed to know as his eyes pleaded with me to stay. He watched me as I drained my drink. He watched me as I wiped my wet lips with the back of my hand. He watched me sigh and sigh and sigh again. He watched me pick up my bag and hook it over my shoulder. He watched and waited as I took a step closer to him, until I was so close I towered over him. He leaned away, one hand over the back of the chair, the other resting on the table while his eyes, open and vulnerable once more, looked up at me and waited.

“I’d never done anything to let you down back then, yet you walked away from me and forced me to walk away from you. I felt so worthless after that, so lost. I wasn’t sure how to carry on. I hated feeling weak,” I told him softly. “I’d never live with myself if I inflicted that same pain on someone who had never once let me down. And Marcus has never done anything but love me, even when there wasn’t much about me for him to love.”

As the lights of the bar twinkled against the sheen of moisture in his eyes, I lifted my hand to his chin, pinching it between my thumb and index finger before I cupped one side of his face in my palm. He was warm and familiar, but I felt cold and alone.

There had been life before Alex Law… and this was my life after him.

The pain of not having what I could no longer deny I still craved.

The pain of missing someone who had always felt like such an intricate part of who I was.

The pain of all those mistakes haunting the two of us forever.

Leaning down, I placed a gentle kiss on those whiskey-coated lips of his and allowed myself to close my eyes. It wasn’t intimate, it wasn’t sexy and it contained no passion whatsoever. It was a goodbye, and he felt that as much as I did. When my eyes flickered open, I spoke against his mouth and stared straight into his soul before I whispered my parting words.

“I love you, Alex, and I’m so grateful you love me still. But I will not let a good man like Marcus pay for our mistakes. I won’t hurt him. I can’t hurt him. You have to let me go now.”

Then I left…

Dragging my heartache in an invisible suitcase behind me.