“And you know perfectly well that you said that didn’t matter anymore,” I spat. “I was there, Nick. You didn’t fuck me into amnesia that night at Windsor. You decided. We both decided. Let’s at least own that.”
I hadn’t meant to go nuclear, but I was tired of being polite, and we were both past restraint.
“Okay,” Nick said. “Then let’s also own you making the paparazzi chase you through London. Let’s own me telling you about my mother, the reason for everything I’m afraid of, and then nothing changing with Lacey for weeks after that. Let’s own you dancing with Clive at my birthday party and acting like it was the best time you’d ever had.”
“I haven’t been perfect. I know that. But I have been lonely,” I said. “You left, Nick. Every day, little by little, since Klosters. The second our secret started to slip out, you started backing up. Straight into her.”
“There is nothing going on with Gemma!” Nick said, exasperated. “God! I’m so tired of explaining myself.”
“But that’s just it, Nick,” I said, beginning to shout. “You’re not explaining yourself. Not to the people who pick up the papers and see her walking into a wedding on your arm. You’re not explaining anything to the people who used to chase me around London, who are now writing that I’m being deported and that you and Gemma have a secret love nest in Surrey.”
“We’ve been over this, Bex!” Nick said, throwing up his hands. “Talking to them only makes it worse. I will not give them any more ammunition.”
“Your silence is the only ammunition they need anymore! How do you not see that?” I exploded. “I endured those people lying in wait for me, and said nothing about anything to them, because I love you enough to defer to your request. I told my sister to lay off your brother. I sucked it up while they picked me apart, and I’ve kept it together while they’ve laughed at me. I tried to fix what I messed up. I tried so hard to be perfect, to do exactly what you wanted me to do. And apparently I’m still not good enough.”
“That has never been it.”
“You made me look pathetic, Nick. And the worst part is, I let you. I can’t believe I put so much of myself into another person that all this petty shit tears me down, but it does, Nick, it rips away a piece of me every single time.”
“It was never on purpose. Gem was just there—”
“Then why does it keep happening?” I asked. “Explain it now. Explain it to me. Please, Nick.”
“I—maybe that’s why,” he said, running a hand through his hair and staring at the floor. “There’s no explaining with Gemma. There’s nothing at stake. We’re friends, it’s easy. And you and I lately…” He sighed. “Everything has been a battle. All push and pull. Will we, won’t we, what’s Lacey doing, where is Freddie. It got so exhausting, and when the wedding got closer I just didn’t want—”
He stopped himself, realizing what he’d said in the exact instant that I did.
“The disinvitation didn’t come from on high, did it,” I said, stating the fact for both of us. “It came from you. You didn’t want me there.”
In that moment the gulf between us widened without either of us moving. I sank against some decrepit old cabinetry and banged my palms onto my forehead.
“Talk about choices,” I choked. “That is one hell of a choice. You can’t take that one back. You just proved my point. Oh God.”
I wrapped my arms around my stomach and rocked forward, as if to hold myself together. There was a real possibility that I was going to throw up.
“I was arguing with Barnes, and I had barely seen you, and suddenly I just got this vision of us going public and everything falling apart,” he tried to explain, looking and sounding ashamed. “And I couldn’t go through with it.”
I fought hysteria with everything I had. “In baseball they call that a balk.”
“It wasn’t because I don’t love you,” he said desperately. “I do. I just got tired of thinking about everything so much, Bex. I just…”
“Don’t say you snapped,” I said. “Just don’t.”
“Mum’s shadow is over everything I do,” he whispered. “I can’t shake it. I don’t know how not to be paranoid, for me or for you.”
My heart—my stomach, my head, everything—hurt for him. For both of us. Nick was adrift in something, and I couldn’t be his moor anymore. Which meant I was adrift, too.
Nick was sucking on his lower lip hard now, rubbing the floor of the trailer with his shoe, trying to look at me but unable to do it.
“This is it, isn’t it,” he said. “Is this really it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But it feels like it.”
Something dawned on his face. “Our pin,” he said. “You’re not wearing it, are you?”
I think he already knew the answer, but I shook my head anyway. I’d left it on my dresser. I hadn’t worn it in two weeks, and I’d known, on some level, that tonight wouldn’t end in a game of him finding it.
“Did we ever really have a shot?” I asked almost wistfully. “Did you truly think this would work, or were you just hoping?”
He thought about this. “Both,” he said. “I knew—I know—how I felt about you. But once the press got wind, I kept thinking that maybe if we stayed where we were, and kept everyone at bay, I could just…”
“Delay the inevitable,” I said hollowly.
He shook his head helplessly. “I always wanted you,” he said. “But I also just wanted things to be simple for a minute.” I could hear the emotion in his voice. “And they haven’t been with us. They probably never will be, for me, and it kills me, and it ruins things. I hate that we can’t just live the way we did in Oxford, forever.”
“We were hiding there, too, Nick,” I said sadly. “Just because people weren’t chasing us doesn’t mean your demons weren’t.”
He met my eyes. They were red-rimmed and wet with tears. “I don’t regret it,” he said brokenly. “I regret that we’re standing here, right now, doing this, in the stupidest location in the world.”
That got a laugh out of me, halting though it was.
“But I don’t regret trying,” he said. “I just wish we’d tried harder.”
“Not harder,” I said. “Just better. We tried hard enough.”
On the last word, I lost it. I heard him crying, too, so I turned away to give us each a moment and blotted my tears with my wrist. “There isn’t even enough cloth on this stupid shirt to use it as a Kleenex.”
It was his turn to laugh. He pushed off the wall and picked up the helmet, then juggled it between his hands before putting it down again.
“I don’t want to go,” he said. “Because if I walk out of here, I don’t know when I’ll get to touch you ever again, or even talk to you the same way, and I…” He swallowed a lump in his throat. “I don’t know what that life looks like,” he said, his voice tinny and strained.
I nodded, over and over, for lack of knowing what else to say.
“I love you,” he said, picking up the helmet again and walking to the door.
“I love you, too,” I said as he walked through it.
But it hadn’t been enough.
Part Three
Winter 2011