Chapter 19
"What's happening?" I scream and seize my mom's hand tightly. She runs alongside the doctors who rush me out of the delivery room. "Where are you taking me? Mom!"
"They know what they're doing," she can hardly keep up, "breathe. Just breateh."
"Don't let her die!" I cry hysterically, which makes it hard for the air to enter my lungs, only contributing to the situation.
"We're almost there, Elizabeth," the doctor in the white robe tries to calm me down without success.
"Get her out!" I can't control myself.
"You have to relax."
I feel something fluid between my legs, reach out my hand and touch the wetness. When I pick it up, it's red.
"Colin!" I scream without thinking, without remembering that I can scream until tomorrow. He's not here, and I'm going to lose the only thing left of him. "Colin! I need you!"
"Your eyes are red." Colin doesn't take his eyes off me as we sit at the small dining table in my miniature kitchen and drink coffee quietly. We both find it difficult to find the right words. Through the accusations and the insults that we have gone through in recent weeks, I wonder what remains of us.
"I cried all night," I admit. After seeing how I looked yesterday, I don't think anything will surprise him, and I have nothing more to hide.
"I make you so sad." He looks down at the cup of boiling coffee. "You used to be happy, you smiled, lit my day. You're not happy any more, you're off, and it's my fault."
"I feel like I have nothing. I don't have a job, I have a child to support, and I don't know how to do it. How many years can she sleep in my room?" I look up. I know his look and the honesty that comes from him. "She needs a space of her own, and I can't give her what she needs. What kind of mom am I?"
"I repeat my offer. Do you want me to help you find a house that will suit your needs?"
"If you leave, I'll be left with a house I can't afford." That will get me into bigger trouble.
"I'm not leaving." His safe voice repeats the words he has said from the moment he returned.
"I want to believe you." I lower my head and close my eyes, the thoughts rushing through at a dizzying pace, from present to past and back to here and now. Only, the future is foggy, and I can't predict what tomorrow will bring.
"Elizabeth, I'm not leaving," he insists. "Look at me."
Don't! Don't you dare raise your head and sink into dreams that may fade like smoke in the air.
I can't resist. It's the pleading in his voice, or maybe his honesty, but like the seventeen-year-old girl I was, I yield to his request and look up into his familiar blue eyes.
"I won't leave," he emphasizes every word.
"I have to find a job." I swallow and pray that I won't say the wrong thing. That I won’t give in completely and go after the words I have been waiting to hear for years.
"Why do you insist on not returning to the store?" He tries to hide the frustration in his voice without success.
"I don't want to be a saleswoman anymore," I sigh.
"And you don't want to work for me."
"Not really, but my options are limited. I have a high school education and the hours I can work are very restrictive."
"You should learn something, Liz." Again he is pragmatic, solving problems. If only he hadn't caused them in the first place.
"And how will I pay for it?" I laugh bitterly, and in response he raises an eyebrow as if the question was stupid. "Forget it, I don't need handouts."
"Would you rather be a cashier or a cleaner?" He touches a sensitive spot, hitting on exactly the work I was looking for.
"I'm a single mom, I don't have time to study," I dismiss the idea.
"I'm not saying you'll enroll in medical school," he doesn’t give up, "but there must be something else, evening classes you can try. You're good with numbers, maybe accounting?"
"Really, Colin?" I roll my eyes.
"I, personally, hate accounting and pay someone to do it for me."
"You've always hated numbers." I smile a little.
"All the reports that need to be submitted, and keeping invoices." He laughs loudly. Don't you keep invoices? Is it just me who thinks it's not funny?
"Colin!"
"I'm bad at it, balance sheets, statistics."
"You can always start a modeling career if you have no other choice." I regret deeply my words one second too late. He doesn't have to know what I'm thinking about his new, compact look.
"Do you think?" He smiles smugly, not trying to hide that he is very pleased.
"Look at you." I gesture with my hand at his body.
"Do I have a new fan?" he raises an eyebrow again. Oh, shut up.
"You're photogenic, I'll admit that." Only that, and nothing else. A second later he puts his hand to my cheek, and the touch of his fingers on my skin is burning. I blush and my lip begins to tremble. Fuck.
"You're so beautiful." He strokes with his words as much as his fingers. "I didn’t leave to find someone else, I always knew I would come back."
"I wish you never left." I don't stop him, I don't want him to move his hand, hugging the forgotten feeling. "I wish you'd stayed."
"I know."
"I'm trying to imagine it." My head sinks into his big palm. "You, in the desert."
"Don't." His voice turns cold and he pulls his hand gently away from head, and the touch is gone, gone as if it were never there. "Don't try to imagine it."
"Was it as terrible as it is on the news?" I can't let it go.
"Sometimes." All I get from him is a short and laconic answer.
"You lost friends?"
"Yes."
"I'm sorry."
My mom's words echo.
That child suffered loss after loss, and now you want to take away the only thing he has left.
"That's the price of war." He refrains from elaborating, doesn't want to let me know. He doesn't want me to hear what happened.
"You didn't have to pay it."
"It was my choice," he cuts me of. "I've learned a lot about myself, I learned to take responsibility and fight for what was important to me. I love Vivian and I'd do everything for her, but she is not the only reason I came back."
"I don't know if I can forgive you." The pain in my chest increases. "Five and a half years is a very long time, and I spent them hating you."
"Do you still hate me?"
"Sometimes," I reply sheepishly.
"And other times you don’t?" I hear a glimmer of hope in his voice.
"Some nights I lie in bed," I wrap my fingers around my cup, staring at the steam rising from it, "and I'm so tired that the thoughts just creep in, and I don't fight them, and for a moment I allow myself to dream of another life. For a moment we're a happy family, but then I wake up, in this cramped and crumbling house, and get into my car that starts up only miraculously…And I hate you again."
"I don't blame you," he hastens to answer, "I hate myself. I lie in bed thinking about us, but I don't fight it. I believe that if I imagine it hard enough, it will happen."
He has to imagine it really hard, for both of us.
"What are you thinking about?" He breaks the silence.
"About Lauren," I whisper, "About you moving on."
"Tell me to wait for you."
I breathe heavily. Since his return, I have been living in two worlds that only seem to collide. Suffering from a split personality that throws me from side to side like a ship swinging on the waves. The seventeen-year-old girl begs me to forgive him and to believe him, to see again the man who promised to lay the world at her feet. But the woman and mom that I am refuses to let the walls collapse—she has too much to lose.
"I can't." The heavy responsibility on my shoulders defeats the dreamer. "It wouldn’t be fair, I can't promise you anything."
"I don't need promises," his voice is quiet, "I need a chance, I just need to know we have hope, maybe . . ."
"I can't," I whisper back.
"Tell me to wait for you."
"No." I shake my head. I won't do that to him. I won't make him wait for me as I waited for him. I know how despairing this hope, this expectation can be, and I won't drag him through the ordeal I've been through. "You need to go."
"Think about what we've been talking about," he almost pleads with his voice. "Accounting sounds like a good idea." He rises from the chair and my heart starts to pound at an uncontrollable pace. He's leaving, taking this normality of the last hour and leaving my house, and I want to scream.
"You can come again this afternoon." I raise my eyes from the coffee cup to the man towering over me. "I mean, if you have no other plans, I'm sure you're busy, but Viv will be happy."
"I'll come at five." He grabs the invitation.
"Good." My lip curls into the twinkle of a tiny, almost invisible smile. He reaches out and his thumb touches the tip of my mouth, stroking my lips gently.
"Look at that," he doesn't take his eyes off his inquiring fingers, "A smile."
"Hardly," I whisper.
"It's called a start, Elizabeth," he mutters, "one day I'll kiss those lips again."
The words he says and the way he lets them play wake the sleeping monster and a wave of heat runs between my thighs all the way to the connection between them. For a brief moment I can feel everything throbbing, how my blood is rushing through my veins. His insolent finger teases me, taunting me. Our looks lock and knot in bonds that can't be untied, and I catch his thumb between my lips, let it slip into my mouth and meet my tongue, playing with it.
I know what he's thinking. I see the hungry look in his eyes, and after five and a half years I know that my look is the same. My body wants it.
But he'll change his mind the moment he sees how much I've changed. He doesn't know how my body looks, what remains of it after the time that has elapsed.
I incline my head sharply and pull his thumb out of my mouth.
"You need to go," I gasp in panic, getting up quickly and collecting the coffee cups to the sink, turning my back to him so that he won’t see the pain in my eyes. "Come back at five."
"Lizzie," he doesn't take the hint, or deliberately ignores it.
"Don't make me feel more stupid than I already do, okay?" my voice cracks.
"Don't be mad."
"You think that's what I need now," I turn to him in an outburst of rage, "your finger in my mouth? What next, we fuck?"
"Watch your mouth," he shudders. "That's not you."
"Don't play games with me," I turn a warning finger to him, "and don't make me want you!"
We freeze at the sound of my words and then, in unison, we move, unable to stop ourselves. His body collides with mine and now it's not his finger in my mouth, it's his tongue. He wraps my hair around his fist, his hunger knowing no bounds. Neither does mine.
He presses my back against the marble and I grab the collar of his shirt. Five and a half years of longing find the place they we're looking for, falling apart into this kiss that threatens to destroy us. For a moment, during which I'm trapped between the marble and his vast body, the world has no room, and the past hasn't even a small crack to enter through. I'm protected from my thoughts, from my fears, from the next minute. I'm merely a distilled essence of yearning, no more and no less.
Our lips separate, forehead meets forehead, and our eyes remain closed, for neither of us can say what we'll discover if we open them.
Only, Colin's whispered words send shivers over every inch of my skin.
"One day you'll return me my heart."