Page 72 of Lilly
“I meanit.”
“Iknow.”
Another silence falls upon us. It was never this awkward between us before. It was one of the things I loved about spending time with him. I was always comfortable in his company—even at the beginning, when I thought he was a pretentiousprick.
“I’m so sorry, Lilly. I never meant to hurt you. I just…I panicked and freaked out. There is no good enough excuse for what I did. It’s just…my mother was…” he looks around to see if anyone is paying us any attention. They’re not, of course, but he still pauses, which makes me think he really is uncomfortable discussing this inpublic.
“It’s okay, you can tell me the details another time,” Isay.
“That’s why I suggested yourplace.”
“I can’t have you there yet. I don’t trust—” I stop myself before he gets the wrong, or right, idea. It’s too late though, because I see his eyes lightup.
“I read about that too,” he admits with a sudden sparkle in hiseye.
“You left, Lucas. I was waiting for you to come up and you just disappeared. How do you think that felt? I’d just received the most shocking news of my life and the one person I needed upped and left,” I say, reminding him of why we’re here. My libido might be raging with hormones, but I will not allow him to think everything is okay. “I had no idea if you were mad because of me, whether you thought I’d done it on purpose or if you just didn’t want anything to do with them and were too weak to tell me to my face. I was a mess, Luc, and you just left me.” I don’t mean to lay it all out there like that, and the look on his face makes me feel awful for bringing it all up in one go, but I was annoyed by his earlier hope that I’d allow him to pick up where we left off. “You left me, and everyone else had to pick up thepieces.”
He scoots his chair closer to me when he sees me start to get upset, but he doesn’t reach out to touch me. “Lilly, I’m so sorry. Trust me, it wasn’t anything to do with you or these,” he admits as he tentatively reaches out a hand and places it on my belly. He looks up to my eyes and he relaxes when he realises I’m okay with his hand there. “It was me, my fears for what kind of father I might be. I’m so scared I’ll turn intoher. I freaked out. I should have talked to you, I know, but the thought of telling you all that ugliness when you should have been happy…I just couldn’t doit.”
“And you thought leaving would hurt me less than you telling me allthat?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking straight. I was just thinking of the damage I could do to them,” he says, rubbing my belly gently. “Toyou.”
“You can’t hurt me more by being here, Lucas. We needyou.”
Hope flares in his eyes and his lips quirk up at the corners in the beginnings of a smile. I feel the same hope begin to bubble up in my belly. Maybe this is all going to be okay and I’m not going to have to choose between living as a single mum in my flat or with my parents. Maybe my babies will have two parents who are together. That’s still a few too many maybes for my liking, but it’s better than an hourago.
