I wiped my face, willing away the tears. “A week after I moved back. I…I waited until you and Kona took the kids to New York for New Year’s. I told Ransom I was going to Portland to meet some of my friends from Ballet camp when he asked if I wanted to meet him in Miami. He didn’t question it. Remember when I had the flu? Nikki and Sabrina taught my classes?” Keira nodded. It had been a month and a half of me refusing company when Keira or Mack called. I’d promised them I was too contagious to see a soul. Keira’s paranoid mommy senses kept her and her kids away, but it hadn’t been easy convincing her I didn’t need her help. “No one…no one but Lettie, knew.” Keira knew my neighbor. Over the past year especially she’d become a good friend. “You know she’s a nurse at Tulane. Lettie stayed with me the first week then came in every day for almost two months after the surgery to check on me until I was able to get around on my own.”
I sniffled a bit, and rubbed another errant tear from my cheek, tried to give her a smile as I looked up, but it was a poor attempt. “You know, that’s kind of why Ethan and I got serious.” My eyes welled up again. “We had gone out to dinner with his sister, and she was complaining about something bratty that her kids had done, and Ethan made the comment that he wasn’t all that eager to have kids. When Steph pressed him, he said that he had plenty of things he wanted to experience first, and he didn’t think it was right to have kids if he was bound and determined to be so selfish.” I smiled at the memory, despite myself. “Later, he asked me if what he had said disappointed me, afraid that he had offended my feminine sensibilities. When I assured him that kids weren’t on my radar, either, well... I think that’s when he might have started thinking about us as a couple...Still, he has no idea that it’s not a question of ‘won’t’, it’s a question of ‘can’t’.... I can’t.... I....” Another tear slipped down my cheek and I looked down, afraid to look in Keira’s face. I felt empty inside, but lighter. And terrified.
Keira’s grip tightened on my arm, then she lifted my chin and brushed back the hair from my face. I chanced a glance up; her smile was shaky, her tears drying, but I saw the frustration there, the sadness. “You should have told us.”
“I couldn’t,” I said, dipping my head to let her kiss me. “I’d rather Ransom hate me for leaving, than to give him some false hope that one day I could give him a family.”
“Aly…he would have…” Keira stopped suddenly with a sharp intake of breath. She didn’t release my hand when she stood, hurrying to dry her own tears.
What Keira thought Ransom would have done, didn’t matter. Nothing did at that moment. Nothing but the shadow that grew larger as he stepped toward us. Nothing but how Ransom looked broken. How he looked betrayed. It was an expression I never wanted to see on his face. One that told me he’d heard everything I’d just revealed to his mother.
Keira left me out there with Ransom, the chilly air blowing between us. We sat out near that fire pit in the cold, the wind kicking up as the afternoon fell. It was colder for October than it should have been and the lake felt like something out of a horror film—the trees around us swaying, the approaching storm giving the horizon an ashy hue.
Ransom slumped into the chair across the flames watching me like he had no idea who I was or why I was there. But he knew me. Ransom knew me better than anyone ever would. And I had hidden myself from him. I’d run away to avoid the disappointment that lay ahead for us.
“You were never going to tell me?” It was the first thing he’d said since walking up on us twenty minutes before. The question felt like an accusation I could not defend.
“I didn’t want there to be a need for it.” His throat worked and Ransom gripped the arm rest like he needed something to keep him tethered to the earth. It went against everything inside me to keep in that chair, to stiffen my back, sit on my fingers. I wanted to comfort him. I wanted him to tell me he understood. Moving my gaze down, back at that ring, I closed my eyes, willing my heart to slow. “I thought you hating me for leaving would be easier. That way I could keep my secret. But you never did. Hate me. Not once.” When I opened my eyes it was to find Ransom leaning forward, watching me, mouth tense, fingers trembling. “Why didn’t you just hate me?”
He was kneeling in front of me inside of three seconds—standing, slipping around the pit and on his knees faster than a snap. “How could I?” There was no point in telling him to back away, to keep his hands to himself. I’d depleted my energy, exhausted my caution. “You were mine. Every inch of your body. Every single bit of your soul. I owned it completely.” Ransom kept me from flinching with his hands on my shoulders, his thumb against my cheek. “Those eyes, that mouth,” he moved close, shifting his touch to my bottom lip, “this body, all of it—the parts that don’t work just right, the ones that do—all mine. I loved every inch. And everything I had, every bit of me, it was yours. You knew that. It isn’t in me to hate you, Aly. Not then, Christ, not now either.”
He released me, breath fanning across my neck as he rested on his haunches. The wind had slowed and in the distance one of the neighbors played some awful twangy country song too loud. Ransom kept one hand resting on my thigh, like he needed to touch me, but he didn’t try to kiss me or get too close. “You should have told me.”