“Do you want that? Children?” I ask.
He straightens up, resolute and unapologetic.
“Yeah, I do. Someday.”
I stare at the floor, trying to pull myself together and organize my thoughts. But I just end up saying stupid things out loud.
“We were raised differently. We’re different people, you and I. If I was with someone like Riley Bowen who understood what my career—”
“You wanna date Reilly fucking Bowen? Is that really what you’re saying to me?”
“Yes. No—I mean not how you think; I’m not explaining this right.”
I shake my head, rushing out haphazard words to clean up the mess I’m making.
“Someone like Riley would understand the disruption a child will cause to my career. That it’s something separate to be planned with care.”
“Do you hear yourself? You can’t carve your life up into boxes, Abby. A box for your career, a box for me, a box for children. Life is all just one messy fucking box . . . and that’s what makes it beautiful. Can’t you see that? Can’t you try?”
He rakes a rough hand through his hair, like he wants to rip it out. Because he’s too hurt and frustrated to see that I am trying.
And then he’s muttering to the floor.
“Jesus Christ, you’re hard to love sometimes.”
My eyes jerk up, stunned at hearing those words from him—here and now and for the first time.
“You love me?”
Tommy goes still as a shocked statue.
“Are you insane? What the hell do you think has been going on between us for the last year? That last five years! Of course I love you.”
“You shouldn’t.”
I don’t know why I say it. I don’t mean it—not even a little.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Tommy flinches, stuttering back a step away from me—like I’ve sliced him open and ripped his guts out. Then his jaw goes to granite and his eyes turn glacial.
And he rips my guts out right back.
“I was wrong. You’re not so special. You’re scared—no different than anyone else in the fucking world.”
Then he turns and walks out the door, slamming it shut behind him.
Leaving me, just as I asked him to.
* * *
Tommy
Talk about a kick in the balls.
The priests always say our sins will catch up to us eventually. That there would be consequences.
Welcome to Judgement Day.
And my arse has landed square in the center of purgatory.
I’ve always thought purgatory was the shittiest of deals. You can’t move up, you can’t go down, you’re just . . . stuck.
Christ, this fucking girl.
I can’t decide if I want to shake her until some sense falls out or hold her close and promise it will all be okay.
I want to do both—and apparently, she doesn’t want either. The only thing she wanted from me was to get gone.
And it’s bloody hard. Because as frustrated as I am with all that she is . . . I still fucking love her.
Her stubbornness, her fire, and how it blends so perfectly with her fragility.
She’s a designer drug—cut just for me. Those qualities had me hooked from the very beginning, kept me coming back and back for another fix. And now they’ve got me strung out. Scraped raw over her.
It’s completely pathetic. And I don’t do pathetic. Bad poets, they do pathetic—not a man like me.
I walk across town in the early morning light. I don’t go back to my place and I sure as shit don’t go anywhere near my mum’s. I can’t speak a word of this to Janey—she’ll never let Abby forget it if we make it through.
But I need to get my head on straight. I need to shed this anger and sadness, molt it off like a pitiful snake.
So I head to the gold standard of relationships—Lo and Ellie’s.
They’re both in their kitchen, at the stove, when I lumber through their back door, moving slow, like my veins are filled with lead and my muscles weigh a few hundred pounds each.
I hear the happy, high-pitched chatter of Finn and Declan through the monitor, but even that can’t pull a smile out of me.
Logan doesn’t say a word, but I feel his gaze—assessing and probing and understanding. I lower myself into the oak chair at their kitchen counter and Ellie slides a cup of tea in front of me.
“I think this might be it. It might really be over,” I tell them. “Abby says she’s going on a date with that doctor she works with.”
All right, she didn’t say that directly—but it was implied.
So just in case, I tell Logan, “We may have to take this guy out.”
He knows I’m not serious.
Well . . . he knows I’m only half serious. Three-quarters, tops.
So he shrugs. “Okay.”
Ellie’s not so sure.
“No. No, there will be no taking out of anyone.”
She pushes playfully at her husband’s shoulder as he moves past her to the stairs to get the boys.
And then I tell Ellie everything, because she’s easy to talk to—kind and smart and a steel safe of a secret keeper. I tell her about my toxic mix of a morning—about us thinking that Abby might be expecting and her freaking out. And then I tell about how we confirmed that she’s not—and Abby freaked out even more.