Claimed for Makarov's Baby

Walking straight over to the counter, he smiled at the woman who stood there, drying coffee cups.

‘It’s Tara, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’m Dimitri.’

‘I know who you are,’ she said flatly. ‘And Leo’s at Saturday morning football, I’m afraid.’

‘It isn’t Leo I’ve come to see. It’s Erin.’

There was a slight pause as she looked around before lowering her voice, as if she didn’t want to put her livelihood at risk by engaging in some kind of showdown with the tall man who had just walked into her café.

‘Erin doesn’t want to see you.’

‘Well, I’m not leaving here until she does. So perhaps you’d like to pour me a cup of coffee and I’ll wait over there while you tell her that? Black, no sugar, please.’

Tara’s mouth opened and closed, before she disappeared into the back behind some sort of curtain and Dimitri walked over to a table near the window and sat down. A woman who was sitting on her own at a nearby table smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. He didn’t feel like smiling—least of all to some bottle blonde who might as well have had the word ‘available’ tattooed across her forehead.

A shadow fell over the table and he looked up to see Erin standing there. Over her jeans and sweater, she was wearing an apron which emphasised her tiny waist—but she didn’t look great. In fact, she looked terrible. Her face was pale and her green eyes were dark and shadowed.

‘Perhaps you’d like to drag your attention away from that woman for a moment,’ she said tightly, ‘and tell me what you’re doing here?’

‘You haven’t brought my coffee.’

‘You’re not getting any coffee.’ Pulling out the chair opposite him, she sat down and leaned across the table and began speaking in a low voice. ‘Look, you’re welcome to come and see Leo any time you want—I already told you that—but you really have to give me some warning before you do. I can’t just have you turning up here out of the blue like this.’

‘Why not?’

‘You know why not. Because it’s too...disturbing. We have to try to learn to be...’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t know. If not exactly friends, then certainly two parents who can interact amicably with each other.’

He nodded, his eyes not leaving her face. ‘But I thought we were friends, Erin. More than friends. Don’t you know that I’m closer to you than I’ve ever been to anyone else?’

‘I don’t want to hear this—’

‘And let me tell you something else,’ he interrupted. ‘Something I’ve never told you before. Something which happened when you came round to my apartment, to tell me about the baby.’

‘You mean when I found you hungover, with the naked woman and the porn films?’

‘And you looked down your nose at me,’ he said slowly. ‘Just like you’re trying to do now, only this time you aren’t making such a good job of it. But back then you didn’t like what you saw and you told me so in no uncertain terms. You told me a lot of home truths that day, Erin. You blasted me and my lifestyle and left me feeling dazed. Because nobody had ever spoken to me like that before. And then you handed in your notice and walked away.’

‘I don’t understand what this has to do with anything,’ she said. ‘We already know this.’

‘But you don’t know what I did next,’ he said. ‘At first I tried to convince myself I was glad you’d gone and that you had no right to judge me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the things you’d said. And the more I thought about them, the more I realised they were true. You left me feeling bad about myself and I had to ask myself what I was intending to do about it. So I went away and cleaned up my act. I quit the booze and the gambling and the women.’ He saw her face and shrugged. ‘Well, maybe not all the women, but I started to be more discriminating about it. And I got off that merry-go-round of self-destruction you’d highlighted so accurately.’ He leaned across the table towards her. ‘You were the catalyst which made me examine my life and turn it around. So I owe you, Erin. I owe you big-time.’

‘Thanks very much. And if you want my congratulations, then you have them—but I still don’t see why you’re bringing all this up now.’

‘Don’t you? Though why should you when I’ve only just realised myself? When it’s taken me all this time to admit what’s been staring me in the face for so long. That you’ve had a profound and lasting influence on me.’ He waited for a minute and then drew a deep breath. ‘That I love you—and I don’t want to spend my life without you in it.’