Page 34 of Daddy's Christmas Elf
“Would you like him to come round? I mean, do you miss him?”
Grey’s reply fell from his lips before he could give himself time to think. “If I’d been asked that just a week ago, I’d have said yes. Or I think I would. But there’s no way back for us. In the end, he didn’t want what I had to give. But all that’s in the past.”
In the past. The words thumped into Grey’s chest. It was exactly where Peter was, and where he was going to stay. It wasn’t the first time he’d said those words but it was the first time he’d meant them.
The impulse, sudden and overwhelming, pressed down on Grey. Jumping up and wrenching open a cupboard door beneath the bookshelves, he pulled out the framed photo which had once taken pride of place in the living room.
“Meet Peter Carr, the former Mr. Peter Gillespie.”
CHAPTEREIGHTEEN
Eli stared down at the photograph of Grey and Peter, faces pressed together as they grinned for the camera. It was a beautiful photo, black and white with an arty vibe. The grooms were handsome, they looked ecstatically happy and in love, and Eli’s stomach knotted in a jealousy he had no right to feel.
“He’s stunning.” It felt like such an understatement. Like Grey, Peter could have graced the cover of any men’s style magazine.
“He did some modelling in his teens and early twenties. He started to get noticed, but he stepped back. It wasn’t the life he wanted, he said.”
A model, with the world at his feet and who gave it up for—What? For love? For Grey? As Eli stared at the beautiful man whose face shone with joy on his wedding day, why it had all gone wrong clawed at him.
“Why did you split up?” The words that were not his to ask, however much he wanted to know the answer, burst from Eli. “I’m sorry.” Eli’s cheeks throbbed with embarrassment. “It’s not my business, I shouldn’t—”
“It’s okay. It boils down to what I said a couple of minutes back.”
Eli scrunched his brows together as he tried to remember, and then it came back to him….He didn’t want what I had to give.
Grey took the framed photo back and placed it on the coffee table. He leaned forward and rested his arms on his knees, leaving a few seconds before he turned his head to look Eli square in the face.
“In the end, modelling wasn’t the only life he didn’t want.” Grey snorted. “I, however, wanted to give him everything I believed he did want. Not only materially, which I could easily do because putting it bluntly I was the one with the money. It was more than that, way more.”
“More? What do you mean?”
Deep inside Eli, the answer stirred. Because he knew, in every fibre of his being, and it warmed a secret part of him, a secret, shadowy, craving part of himself.
Grey turned his head away and stared into the fire, now smouldering red embers. Silence filled the room. There was no awkwardness, no embarrassment, only a kind of hush as Eli waited for the answer he knew would come.
“I wanted to care for him and keep him safe. Every second of the day. I wanted to protect him.” Grey huffed a laugh, and shook his head. “What it was I wanted to keep him safe from, I don’t know. All I know is that I did. It’s who and what I am, it’s not something I can switch on and off. He knew that, and he accepted all I offered him. From the very start. I really believed it was what he wanted, too. Until the day came when he didn’t.”
The muscles in Grey’s face tightened as his brows pulled together.
“He said he felt smothered by me. And powerless. That knocked me sideways. What Peter wanted and needed — or what I thought he did — I was committed to giving him. Willingly. His happiness was my priority.”
Grey exhaled a long breath, and Eli’s heart squeezed with all the sadness it carried.
“What it all came down to, in the end, was that he’d fallen out of love with me.”
A lump lodged deep in Eli’s throat. His mouth was dry and his heart thundered in his chest, crashing into his ribs. Care and protection, to be the undisputed centre of another’s world, it was the deep, warm bath Eli had dreamed so many times of sinking into where all the aches and pains of life would be soaked away. It was what he’d so often longed for, when all life seemed to give him were freezing cold showers.
“Then the man’s a fool. He didn’t deserve you, still doesn’t, and you’re better off without him.”
Grey turned his head, his eyes shadowed, the set of his jaw stiff as he pushed his lips together in a thin line.
The only thing Eli could hear in the warm, still room was the hard thud of his heart and the rush of blood whistling through his veins. He’d said too much, and it was too late to grab the words back, but he didn’t want to, because the former Mr. Gillespie, the man who’d been honoured to take Grey’s name, didn’t deserve as much as a hair from Grey’s head.
Grey’s face softened and he shifted, revealing the soft light shining in his eyes.
“I’ve been trying to tell myself that for the last six months, but here and now is the first time I’ve really believed it.” Grey picked up the photograph, and ripped it from its frame.
“What—?”
