Page 94 of Push

Toby’s eyes rounded. Why? Oh. Tears. Hot streaks were running down my face. I roughly swiped them away.

Screw this.

I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of seeing just how much he’d hurt me. I started scrambling to my feet. He was almost as quick and tugged me back before I could get my hand on the door.

“No,” he said softly. “Let me see, Gwen.”

I shook my head furiously from side to side.

“I need to understand.”

I lifted my chin. If he needed to see how much damage he’d done, so be it. What did being strong mean now, anyway?

“You want to see how much you hurt me?” My voice was shrill even though I desperately wanted to sound calm. “You want tosee that you broke my heart? Look. You did this.You.” The world blurred behind the tears. “Is that what you want?”

“Yes. I need to understand what I did. I want it to rip me apart…right down the middle…and it does…but…” Toby seemed to cave in on himself. He looked to the sky before his palm covered his face, but I could see what was happening. The jokester was gone. His tears were raw. Real. “But I don’t know how to fix us.” Emotion spilled out of him in rough gasps. “I don’t know what to do to make this better. I just keep fucking everything up.”

It had always been the two of us. Toby and Gwen. We depended on each other. Somehow, that made the hollow in my chest ache more. I was the determined strength that soldiered us on. He was the laughter, our light at the end of the tunnel.

But, at that moment, we both plummeted into a dark pit without our lifelines. Neither of us had anyone else. I wished hatred could numb my heart, but I could never abandon him the way he’d abandoned me.

Burying my teeth in my lip, cautious, I reached for him. My hand slipped around his waist.

His eyes went wide. “G–Gwen?”

I ignored his shocked protest. I curled my other hand around his shoulder and burrowed my face against his chest, the thump of his heart frantic against my ear. That hint of affection was like waving a bottle of water in front of a dying man crawling out of the desert. Toby clung to me. His cheek nuzzled against my hair, and his arms crushed me until my lungs were flat. I could barely breathe. I wriggled.

“Please, Gwen. Let me hold you for a minute,” he pleaded in a whisper. “It feels like forever since you’ve been this close to me.”

It had been forever.

A bit of my heart splintered off. It was the bit that would always belong to Toby no matter what. He was more than myhusband. For half my life, he’d beeneverything. I wished I’d shared that with him more before he’d made choices I wasn’t sure I could forgive.

And even if I could forgive him, would Ieverforget?

30

He Made Some Progress

Toby

Gwen tiptoed around melike I was broken glass. Not scared, just cautious.

Good ol’ reliable Toby wasn’t so predictable anymore. I’d screwed up the Ian situation. I’d squeezed her way too tight in the first hug she’d blessed me with in longer than I wanted to remember.

That hug.

Gwen gave a damn about me. It was a shock from a fully charged love defibrillator. She’d zapped me back to life. But rocking up on her doorstep to create more drama was the last thing she needed.

I hadn’t planned it that way. My brain had switched to autopilot after Judy had shoved me in the front seat of my car. I hadn’t even registered the trip across the bridge until I’d shifted into park on our driveway.

And it wasn’t like I had anywhere else to go.

Tanya was living her own life in Canberra, and even if an asteroid hurtled toward Earth, I refused to be in the same room as my mother. There was no one I trusted more than Gwen, but I was supposed to prove to her that I was changing to be a better man, not stacking another burden on her shoulders.

So, when she’d insisted that I come inside, I’d said no.

Twice.

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