Rafe blinked at him. “Don’t much feel like celebrating.”
“Really? I’d never have guessed. You’ve been such chipper company this evening.”
“I’m never chipper.”
“I’d have agreed a couple of months back, but ever since a certain someone came back to town, I’d go so far as to say you’ve been downright giddy!”
Rafe shot Bear a look. It took his brain a few seconds to catch up to his eyes.
He was sloshed. Well and truly. Not something he’d let happen in a very long time, considering his father’s predisposition for drowning his sorrows. But right then, numb was better than the alterative.
Stunned. Sideswiped. Laid to waste. And so damned angry at himself for letting it happen all over again. By the same woman. And he’d been ready. He’d been waiting for it to happen. Not that telling himself I told you so made him feel any better.
“She’s gone,” he said, barely recognising his own voice.
“That so?”
A pause, then, “I’ve told you already?”
“Once or twice.”
“What else did I tell you?”
“Not much.” Though Bear’s eyes flickered away, meaning there had been plenty more.
Rafe figured he was unlikely to remember the conversation the next day as it was, so said, “You know we were...trying to fall pregnant.”
Bear smiled, a sad smile. “Whole town knows, mate. It’s the way these things go.”
“Well...it didn’t take.”
“Ah, man. That’s rotten luck.”
It was worse than rotten luck. It was soul-crushing.
When he’d told her he thought they could be happy if it was just the two of them, he’d been telling the truth. She was it for him. She was the one. Consuming and confounding and crazy-making as she was.
But once he’d crossed that bridge, he was in. All in. He’d wanted to have a baby with Sable. Not to donate sperm. He’d wanted to be with her as her belly grew. To fall out of bed exhausted at three in the morning to get her whatever weird food she craved.
To hold her hand, her gaze, her heart, as she gave birth.
To look into that baby’s face—he’d pictured his dark hair and Sable’s witch eyes—and feel the kind of love he could barely imagine. The love of a father and child. The love he knew he had within him, despite the lack of an example to look to.
He’d dreamed of them all together, snuggled up in a big soft bed. Sable more beautiful than ever, despite the dark smudges under her eyes from lack of sleep. He’d imagined baby gates and pet guinea pigs and presents piled under a real pine tree at Christmas time. While Sable took photo after photo after photo.
A life laid out before him like an old home movie. A life he’d craved so ravenously as a kid he’d have given a limb to even glimpse it.
“Sable saw it as more than bad luck. She saw it as an out. Wasn’t as keen to go the distance as she’d first intimated. So that’s the end of it.”
“But you don’t see it as bad luck.”
Rafe’s instinct was to go still, self-protect. But the gin had loosened up his usually rock-solid inhibitions. “I do not. I see it as...an experience shared. The kind that binds. That deepens.”
“You love her,” said Bear.
Rafe did not deny it.
Bear put his mug down, leaned on the counter, and looked out into the middle distance. “Life can be wholly unfair at times.”
“Preach,” said Rafe, reaching for his mug, only for the scent to make his stomach turn. He pushed the thing away.
Bear gently replaced it with a very strong, very black, very sweet coffee. “So what now?”
Rafe breathed. And hardened. Adding yet another mental layer to the hard shell around his person. “Learnt from a very young age that life goes on. I wake up tomorrow, slide under the chassis of a beautiful old car and I do what I do.”
As he said the words he waited for the usual relief that came with work, and routine, and accomplishment to come with it. The counterbalance to the erratic instability of his childhood.
He waited to feel that sense of closure Sable had insisted they’d both been looking for.
But it didn’t come.
Sable. Miss Erratic. He’d never been sure if she’d turn left or right. If she’d say yes or no. If she’d stay or go. She should have been the last person to make him feel at home. But with all that came a huge heart. Emotions so close to the surface there was never any mistaking how she felt. An abundance of vulnerability that slayed him.
It must have hurt her like crazy, finding out she wasn’t pregnant.
Rafe had been too caught up in his own hurt to imagine how devastated she must have been. To wonder how much that had affected her decision to push him away.
Rafe ran a slow hand over his face, the callouses on his palm catching on the bristles on his chin as the heavy truth filtered through the fog filling his head.
The first time Sable had left had been on her. Her youth, her inexperience, her desperate desire to make her mother happy. She knew it. She owned up to it. Said this is me, this is how I roll, take it or leave it.
But this time? That was on him.
Do you trust me? she’d asked.
And he’d all but said, No.
He’d fallen into the trap of believing that the constant ache in his chest meant he didn’t trust her. When the truth was he had been in panic mode. In free fall. Falling in love with the woman in his bed.
Not the love of a messed-up teenaged boy, but of a man who knew the import and the rarity of such a connection, with the innate stubbornness to mess it up.
Rafe had always looked to his father as the anti-example of how to live a life. Doing everything not to be like him. But he’d neglected to realise the impact his mother’s leaving had had on his make-up.
Stubbornly holding back on starting up with Sable
