Chapter Twenty-One

“So I guess I have no choice in the matter about your driving me home?”

“Not unless you want to insult my mom’s two best friends.”

“Far be it from me to buzzkill those sweet women.”

“Yep. That’s been my experience as well. If the world had more people like those two, there would be no wars. Who could ever confront them? They’re a force of nature.”

Harper laughed, but then rested her hand on his.

“Betty told me about your mother.” She looked at him, her damp eyes reflecting the lights of an oncoming car. Those eyes he’d thought about so many times over the years. “Must have been awful.”

“More than you can imagine.”

“I wish I had known about her passing. I would have come to the funeral.” She sighed. “I mean, I’d made myself scarce with your mother. I had to. But had I known—”

“How could you have? Had I known, I’d have done things differently too.”

“I hadn’t appreciated that when you left me, you left her too. Maybe it was even harder on her.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think I caused enough pain to go around.”

Harper laughed softly. “More than you can imagine.” She parroted his words deliberately. Taking a deep breath, she prepared herself for the question she never thought she’d get a chance to ask. “Why’d you leave?”

They pulled up to her place and he put the car in park. He turned to look at her, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Do you mind if I come in to continue this conversation?”

She nodded, opening her door and getting out. This time she unlocked the front door with less drama than last time, reaching out her hand and offering it to his as she walked inside.

She then motioned for him to have a seat on the sofa.

“I’m going to ask you something, and you can feel free to say no, Harps.” He pursed his lips, afraid she’d say no.

“Go right ahead.” She nodded.

“If we’re going to have this talk, can we do it in bed? Naked?” He held up his hands as if in defeat. “Not because I want to make love to you—even though of course I do—but because I want this to be a bare-bones, intimate conversation, nothing held back. I want to be able to hold you as tightly to me as I can, to let you know exactly where I’m coming from and why I did what I did. If after all that, you want to kick me out, I’ll leave, no questions asked.”

Harper stared at him, squinting as if she wondered if this was some sort of trick. He could hardly blame her.

He removed his coat and helped her with hers, then reached out to clasp her hand in his. He nodded. “Lead the way.”

They walked down a short hallway into a large bedroom decorated in shades of white. The bed contained more pillows than a bed ought to hold, but he had to admit it looked inviting. Not nearly as alluring as it would with a naked Harper in it, though.

“So, uh, how do we go about this? Minus the seduction, I don’t quite know the protocol for getting naked with your ex-boyfriend who abruptly ditched you but then with whom you’ve decided to have tawdry booty call sex, except this time the plan is for skin on skin, but evidently no skin in skin? Do I have that right?”

He laughed. “In a manner of speaking.” He reached over to Harper and pulled down the zipper of her now very wrinkled dress. “How’s this for a start?”

“It works.” She stood before him in only her panties while she slid off his suit jacket then unbuttoned each shirt button slowly and methodically as he unknotted his tie.

He got to his belt before her and unfastened it while she took care of the zipper of his suit pants, and together they shimmied both those and his underwear off as he toed off his shoes and socks.

Once again Harper was left in underwear in those shoes, and despite himself, Noah grew instantly hard at the sight of her, so sexy and beautiful.

He looked down then up at her. “Sorry, I can’t seem to help myself.”

She grinned. “It’s fine. But tell him it’s look don’t touch.” She pointed to her feet. “Okay if I finally remove these?” She pulled back the covers and sat down on the edge of the bed.

He sighed. “I suppose if you must.”

“Would you like to do the honors?”

His face lit up and he sat down next to her, motioning for her to put her foot in his now naked lap. “I’m gonna miss these,” he said with a grin.

“Maybe if you’re lucky they’ll make a command performance at some point in time.” Which would mean that they were still together, or at least sleeping together. He smiled inwardly at this slight glimmer of hope. However he could water her garden, he was up for the task.

He fumbled slightly as he unbuckled the fine straps of her shoes, and once he’d removed them both, he massaged her feet. “I’d imagine they need this after withstanding hours teetering on those things.”

She nodded. “The price of beauty is pain.”

“I’m afraid sometimes the price of love is as well.”

He motioned for her to make room so that he could join her but first helped her ease out of her panties.

“Just so you know this is going to take a tremendous amount of willpower to lie naked beside you like this. But I’m willing to undertake this mission because I believe in it.”

She shrugged. “I’m not even sure at this point what the mission is, but I do remember my question: why’d you leave?”

The room was quiet but for the light hush of the furnace running. Now was the time for truths to come out, once and for all.

He took a deep breath.

“Right before I left, I found out that Matt had gotten Katie pregnant. Little Matt, my kid brother. Was he maybe twenty at the time? And bam, all of a sudden kicked in the gut with this reality. It scared the shit out of me. Even more so because of all the ‘real world’ stuff that was looming.”

Wanting to run his fingers through her silky strands, he paused to pull the ponytail holder out of Harper’s hair. They were facing each other, side by side, their bodies touching in some places but not in others. Despite the intensity of the discussion Noah wanted nothing more than to drag his cock along her slit to see if she was as wet as he hoped. But he had to refrain.

“I guess Matt’s thing stirred up huge feelings of inadequacy in me due to my father leaving me when I was a toddler. All of a sudden, I felt like I must be exactly like my shitty father, unable to hold down a commitment. I thought I would jump out of my skin if I didn’t put one foot in front of the other and keep on going.”

He placed his hands on either side of her face, then gently placed a kiss on her forehead.

“And so I left.”

He could hear Harper softly crying now and it broke his heart how much he’d hurt her. He pulled her into a hug, stroking her back to soothe her.

“Harper, I wrote you lengthy notes of explanation in my head all the time. I had conversations with you, detailing my motivations. But every time they seemed to fall short, so instead I did nothing. I convinced myself that you were better off without me, that I’d let you down and it was time to move on.”

In between soft sobs, Harper prompted him for more answers. “But where did you go? What did you do?”

“I traveled for a long while. Worked on self-discovery at an ashram in India.”

She wrinkled her nose. “And did you find yourself?”

He shrugged. “It’s complicated. I mean yeah, it was one step on a crooked path to figuring my shit out. A really hot step, I might add. It made me appreciate air conditioning, that’s for sure.” A smile curled up one side of his mouth.

She frowned. “Dammit, Noah. Stop with the grinning. That smile always sucker punches me right in the solar plexus. How can a girl resist that thing?”

Did that mean she was finding him irresistible? Could it be possible that she would consider a reconciliation? Did he dare hold out hope?

“So then what happened?”

“Eventually I came back to the States and started law school. It wasn’t long after that when my mother became ill, and I needed to be honest with myself that I hated every minute of law school anyhow, so I withdrew.”

“Do you regret it?”

He lifted his eyebrow. “Hell no. I wasn’t cut out to be a lawyer. I’m too averse to conflict.”

“Is that why you left me? To avoid conflict with me?”

She was avoiding eye contact with him, so he lifted her chin with his pointer finger, fixing his gaze on hers.

“The thing is, Harp, the crazy thing is, it had nothing to do with you. I know that doesn’t help you at all. But it was all about me. I totally get that what I did was about the shittiest thing I could have done to you. It wrecked your self-esteem. At the time, I was too caught up in me to realize that. I needed so badly to get away. To escape my brother’s fate.

“When Katie got pregnant, it scared the crap out of me. All of a sudden I watched my own life flickering by like on one of those movie reels they used to show at the cinema back during World War II. And it was me and you and a passel of kids and me with a lousy job and not being able to afford a wife let alone a kid, let alone a slew of them, and I don’t know why it scared me so much. More than likely because of my father, because of what a complete dick he was, up and leaving my mom the way he did, with her having to support two kids on her lousy salary and how we always struggled and did without.”

He ran his fingers through his hair, exasperated at himself for his lousy explanation. “So what was my response? I did the stupid thing: I ran from you before we got caught up with burden and responsibility and the real world in ways that I wasn’t prepared to contemplate.”

“But you didn’t even include me in that discussion, Noah. You didn’t give me a chance to have a say in things. You took my rights from me. And you took my boyfriend from me.” She shook her head as if she was erasing that comment. “No. You took my world away from me. You and I had been together forever. It was always Harper and Noah. Noah and Harper. But then it was bye-bye Noah and to a certain extent bye-bye Harper. I didn’t even know who I was. I was so lost without you. And heartbroken. And insulted. And truly disrespected. You didn’t have the common decency to include me in your decision-making.”

He leaned forward and tenderly clasped her face between his hands. “In some ways that’s important, Harper. Don’t you see? You and I didn’t have a you and an I. We were a ‘we.’ We’d become one unit. I needed to figure out me. And I think you did as well. Had I stayed here, you never would have detached from me. And it’s not that I didn’t like to be so close to you—I loved it. But I knew in my gut that we needed to be two separate people before we could ever become one in a true sense of the word. And of course I knew leaving was the ultimate risk because the chances were strong that you’d never take me back. It was a risk I believed I had no choice but to take.”

She frowned.

He pulled her close, locking eyes with hers. “I could never have been the man you needed when I was the boy I was. I needed to grow, to learn, to live before I could have understood what it meant to truly be the man you deserve, Harper. I hope you’ll take that into consideration.”