Page 138 of The Hookup
“I pushed you away, Kay, because I didn’t want to get hurt again, and you threatened me more than the others.”
“Threatened?” she asked. She didn’t want to give him the time of day, but she was curious to know how he’d felt threatened.
“You understood me more than anyone.”
She slid her fingers towards the cocktail glass, and circled the stem. “I tried to understand you.”
“But by the end you did, and you put up with my foul moods, and all those nasty things I said. You understood what I was trying to do and you didn’t let me. You should have walked away, but you didn’t.”
“It was Marie’s fault.”
He shook his head. “I think we both know that—as subtly persuasive as Marie is—you and I aren’t the type of people to go and do something if we don’t want to. You looked after me because you’re a nice person. You have a big heart. You cared for me.”
“You’re a hard person to care for,” she said, lifting the cocktail glass. “It hurt to be around you, sometimes. It hurt to care for you, to—”Love, she almost said. Then put down the cocktail glass without lifting it to her lips. “To try to get close to you.”
“And yet you stayed, right up until the end.”
“I was always ready for a good time, remember?” she said. “And before you got ill, we did have some really good times.”
“That’s not true, and you know it. We had good times, but that’s not why you stayed around, after I got ill. Don’t pretend you did it for a reason other than because…”
“Because?”
“Because I meant something to you,” he said.
“We exchanged bodily fluids,” she flung back at him, “So yes, we had a connection.”
He looked defeated, as if she’d thrown a knock-out punch at his face. “Don’t make it sound vulgar. We were starting to become more than that.”
He’d realized, had he? He’d realized to damn late. “But that’s what it was,” she insisted. “You told me many times. You pushed things too far, and maybe I’d had enough. And I deserve more.”
“Ididpush things too far, and you were right to have had enough, and you do deserve so much more. You deserve all the good things life has to offer.”
“Is that why you’re here?” she asked sarcastically. “To give me a few good things, for old time’s sake?”
He didn’t like that. Oh, she was loving this. Making him be the one to chase, to want more, and to feel the hurt. “I’m here because I saw it as my last chance to explain myself to you. I figured you’d have nowhere else to run on an island. No Dr. Santini to whisk you away.”
She peered at his face. “Is Dr. Santini as big a threat to you as Dean was?”
His hands went to his hips. “Iamworking through my issues. Maggie cheating on me was bound to have an effect. I was completely head over heels in love with that girl.” His confession felt like a thousand pin-pricks across her skin. “But I’m over it. It took me meeting you to realize that.”
She turned away. It was all getting too heavy, and too much.
“Please listen, Kay. I was a douche bag to use you as—”
“As your bullet-proof vest,” she said.
“I was going to say riot-shield.”
“Neither of them are complimentary,” she pointed out.
“But they serve a useful purpose. They save people. You saved me.”
She wasn’t sure what to make of it—his appearance, and what he was saying. But, like last week, it was nice to see him again, to be talking again, to address things.
Get a handle on it,she told herself. She couldn’t let the shock of seeing him unexpectedly move her to into doing something irrational. Out here, under the starlit sky, with the silver sea just behind her—well, it was the type of place to make her not think straight. She had already suffered enough with him. She had wrongly believed she could make him love her, and she was afraid of making the same mistake again. “If you think you can win me back, you’re wrong. You can’t.”
“I know,” he said, taking a step towards her. “I don’t intend to make you do anything you don’t want. I never have.” There was something in his expression she had never seen before, not even when he had been lying in his hospital bed. It was vulnerability. Not quite defeat, but a letting of the hardness which had been such a big part of him.
