“I. Didn’t. Sleep. With. Ford.” I blinked. “How much more clarification is needed?”
He held up his hand, counting off on his fingers. “You didn’t sleep with him before we were together? After we got together? You didn’t sleep with him the month you got pregnant? You didn’t sleep with him after you got pregnant? Or you didn’t sleep with him as in that’s a bold-faced lie but your way of telling me what you think I want to hear?”
The door. Why wasn’t I throwing myself through it right now?
“How about this? Since you’re having a tough time understanding simple sentences right now.” I made myself look him in the eye, and I lifted an eyebrow. “I didn’t sleep with Ford before, during, or after you and I were together, Boone Cavanaugh. So why don’t you put that in your Book of Facts and see how it cross-checks with the story you’ve been told.”
Boone’s brows pulled together. “What do you mean, you and Ford never slept together?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. I’ve never fucked Ford. He’s never fucked me.” I made myself hold his stare for one more moment, despite the cold sweat I could feel about to break out from the effort. “Any more questions?”
From the way he looked, it seemed as if someone had just told Boone that everything he’d known about life was untrue. That the members of his family were really strangers and that his life had all been a lie. The expression that molded his face made it seem like he was lost in the middle of the Sahara with no compass or map to guide him.
“But you two dated for a couple of years after we broke up . . .”
I couldn’t tell if he was talking to himself or to me.
“And people can date without fucking. You know, in case you weren’t aware of this.”
“But—”
“But what? Just because I was screwing you at sixteen automatically meant I was going to screw any future guy I dated? What kind of a girl did you think I was?” I shook my head and took that first step toward the door. From Boone’s expression, he was still reeling, still trying to catch up to a train barreling down an open set of tracks while he had bricks tied to his feet. “Oh yeah, that’s right. You thought I was the kind of girl who’d screw some other guy behind the back of the guy I loved. I guess it’s not that big of a stretch to leap to the conclusion I’d fuck just about anyone else who came along, right?”
Boone lifted his hands. “Clara—”
“Please don’t try to Clara me in that tone. Please just don’t.” I bit the inside of my cheek and took another step toward the door. “Not after accusing me of what you did. Not after what happened between us earlier. Not after everything we’ve been through. Please just don’t ever say my name again, okay?”
He scrubbed his face with both hands, either not knowing what to say or searching for the right words. “Are you saying the baby was mine?”
My eyes shut. The baby. That was a topic just as, if not more, painful than the one of Boone leaving me. “If it wasn’t yours, then it was immaculate conception. How’s that for an honest answer?”
His hands fell from his face, his gaze lowered to the ground. “It was mine,” he whispered.
“It was yours,” I whispered back.
He spun away from me, clamping his hands behind his neck. “Goddammit.”
A tear fell from the corner of my eye. I’d cried another one. When I closed my eyes, a few more wound their way down my cheeks. I hadn’t cried over this in years. I’d cried so many tears over this during those first few years I could have raised the Gulf another foot. I wasn’t sure what I was angrier over: that I was crying or that it was because he’d brought it all up again. A person couldn’t just bury something, then choose to excavate it any old time they chose to. Buried things should stay that way.
Keeping his back to me again, he paced the room as he shook his head, and I hit my limit.
“I’m kind of relieved, you know? In a weird way.” I barely gave my angels a second look as I passed the dresser. “All this time I thought you left because I was pregnant. I thought the baby and the responsibility and too much too fast drove you away.”
Boone stopped pacing, but his arms stayed curled around his head.
“When really, all along, it had to do with some giant miscommunication. You taking the word of, as you put it, the guy you hated most in the whole entire world, no questions asked, without running his story past me. You believed him. You had so little faith in me that you were willing to accept that I could look you in the face and tell you I loved you in the morning, then slip into his bed that night.” I paused on my journey to the door. Even now, looking at him and having so many of the missing pieces filled in, I still couldn’t hate him. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. My heart wouldn’t let me. “It’s a relief knowing what really happened and why you really left.”