Anticipation (35 page)

The battle for Blue’s heart wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.

For a long time Blue had no idea where she was going. At first it was simply away — away from Eddie, away from the terror that had gripped her when he’d laid her heart’s desire at her feet. Home wasn’t safe — she knew instinctively that he’d come after her there — so she’d driven onto the nearest freeway and put her foot down. It didn’t take long before the city was behind her as she sped north. Darkness fell, and still she kept on driving.

She’d been on the road for nearly two hours when she saw the turn off for Heathcote come up on her left, and she understood why her subconscious had pointed the car in this direction and ordered her to drive.

She signaled, and took the turn off. Thirty minutes later, she turned off again and followed a smaller, narrower road into the town she’d once called home. The small strip of shops that formed the commercial heart of town was silent and dim, not surprising at this time of night. She drove past the bakery, the hundred-year-old sandstone pub, the war memorial. It had been twenty-four years since she’d been in Rochester and childish memories vied with present-day reality as she cruised slowly down the main street, the two images stubbornly refusing to meld.

Main street might have changed, but the geography of the town hadn’t and the way home was still etched in her memory. Right at the post office. Second street on the left. Third street on the right.

Her father had made her practice the route in her mind over and over, in case she got lost. She could still remember him coaching her, making a game of it.

The irony was that he was the one who never made it home, along with her mother.

She leaned forward over the steering wheel as she turned into their street, straining for the first glimpse of their house. She could remember it so clearly — the glossy, dark green front door, the roses lining the pathway to the house, the birch tree that shaded the living room window.

She’d had a tree swing in the backyard, hand-made by her father from an old car tire and hung from the thick branch of the willow tree that encroached on their yard from next door. On warm summer days, she’d threaded her body through the hole and dangled and spun while her father tinkered in the shed and her mother read a book on the back porch.

Houses slipped past, neatly painted, their gardens clipped into orderly geometric shapes. She slowed twice, but the first likely house had a stained-glass front door, the second an ancient, leaning brick fence instead of the timber pickets she remembered. Frowning, she continued to the end of the street, an odd sense of disorientation coming over her as she tried to remember what their house number had been.

Nothing came to her, and she wondered how she could know the route so well but not remember the house number.

She did a second slow crawl of the street, but none of the houses matched the image in her mind. There was no house with a birch tree, no roses. At least, not in the configuration fixed so firmly in her memory.

She rubbed her forehead, perilously close to tears. She didn’t quite understand the impulse that her brought her to Rochester in the middle of the night, but now that she was here, the need to find some evidence that she’d once lived here, that her parents had existed, that they’d been happy and whole in this place, was imperative.

After a few minutes of racking her brain for more details and coming up empty, she consulted Google maps on her phone, then left the residential part of town and drove toward the outskirts. The street lights were few and far between out here, and sealed roads gave way to gravel as she made her way to the town cemetery.

The countryside was very quiet when she exited her car, the only sound the ticking of her cooling engine and the faint, far off sound of a dog barking.

She used the flashlight function on her phone to light the way to the front gate. It was locked, a mint-condition padlock shiny against the rust-pocked wrought iron. The fence itself was only waist-high, however, and it was easy enough to boost herself on the gate’s cross-bar and clamber over the top.

She had never been here before. It had never seemed important — or maybe something had stopped her from coming. It was hard to know, she was so churned up right now.

The neat rows of gravestones and tombs were well-maintained, the grass clipped short around them. It took her a few minutes to work out that the older graves were nearest the gate, and she widened her search. Ten minutes later, the cool blue light from her phone illuminated a simple stone marker etched with her parents’ names: Ruth Anne Sullivan and David Terrence Sullivan.

She scanned their birth and death dates and realized with a small start that she was older now than her mother had been when she died. That struck her as being indescribably sad and she sank onto her knees, the dry grass prickling her through her jeans.

She had no idea why her headlong flight from the city had brought her back to this town. There was nothing for her here, hadn’t been for a long, long time. There was only this headstone, and the names of two people who had died far too young.

Pretty cold comfort, if that was she was looking for.

A tear slid down Blue’s cheek as it hit her that that
was
what she was looking for — someone to reassure her, to make things better. Someone to put their arms around her and tell her that everything was going to be all right. Someone to make the hollowed-out feeling in her chest go away.

Which just went to show how stupid she was, because the only people who might have wanted to do that were lying six feet underground, and had been for the past twenty-four years.

A sob bubbled up in her throat, and she tucked her chin into her chest, trying to get a grip on her emotions, trying to keep the memory of what had happened with Eddie at bay.

She couldn’t stop his words from echoing in her head, though. Couldn’t stop herself from seeing his face, eyes shiny with unshed tears as he laid his heart at her feet.

I want to be the one who makes you happy. I want to be the one who holds you when you’re sad. I want to love you, with everything I’ve got, instead of just the parts of me that you’ll allow. I want in, baby. All the way.

The memory alone was enough to make her stomach churn with anxiety and nausea all over again.

God, she was so fucked up. Comprehensively and profoundly.

All her adult life she’d prided herself on how strong she was. She’d worn her toughness like a badge of honor. Secretly, she’d even been a little contemptuous of people with thinner skins, people who let life chew them up and spit them out. She was a survivor. She could take anything anyone threw at her, and then some.

Except love, it turned out.

Friendship she could handle. Friendship didn’t demand anything she wasn’t prepared to give. Friendship didn’t require intense intimacy, or high levels of trust or commitment. She could dip in and out of it without risking anything.

But love… love took a part of your soul. Love meant that a phone ringing in the middle of the night could change your life. Love got its hooks into you and never let go. It made you bleed. It made you weak. It made you hurt.

Love was loss, pure and simple. It was risk. It meant casting yourself on the universe’s mercy and hoping against hope that you were going to be one of the lucky ones.

And when love failed, when it was stolen away or broken, it left you with nothing but pain and memories.

Tears dripped from her nose and chin as she acknowledged something she’d never let herself admit before — losing her parents had almost destroyed her. It had left her defenseless and alone and utterly vulnerable, and there had been no one to step in and make the world right for her.

She couldn’t do it again. She couldn’t give herself over to loving Eddie, couldn’t abandon herself to the dream he represented, knowing what might be waiting in the wings if she wasn’t lucky.

If things didn't work out.

Last time, it had nearly broken her, and she simply didn’t have the courage to go through that again.

Her chest and stomach hurt so much she wrapped her arms around her herself and bowed forward, sobbing her heart out as she acknowledged the ugly truth: she was too scared to risk Eddie’s love. Too much of a chicken. Too frightened and small and scared.

Too broken.

It was why she’d been content to love him from afar for so many years, and it was why she’d fought so desperately to control things once he’d become her lover — because deep down inside she’d known she couldn’t handle his love.

Chapter Twenty-Three

After a while her tears slowed and she used her jacket sleeve to wipe her face, blinking in the darkness, trying to get a grip on herself and the rawness of her emotions. Her legs had gone numb, and she shuffled onto her backside, drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them.

She was going to have to quit Brothers Ink. She hated even thinking it, but she didn’t see what else she could do. She couldn’t work with Eddie every day feeling the way she felt. She didn’t trust herself where he was concerned, and she knew him well enough to know he wasn’t going to simply let things drop after today.

When Eddie wanted something, he went for it. He used whatever weapons were at his disposal, and he didn’t stop until he’d either won the day or exhausted ever option available to him.

“Jesus.” She could feel the tears welling as she thought about Eddie waging a campaign for her heart, and she reached up and pinched the bridge of her nose until it hurt.

The pain helped distract her, but only a little. Realistically, things probably weren’t going to get better until she’d retreated to a safe distance. New York, maybe. At least she’d have Lena there. They could be messed up together, Lena over her mysterious guy and Blue over Eddie.

What a cheery household they would be.

She went through the steps she needed to take in her mind — give notice, pack up her apartment, book a ticket to New York. All things being equal, she could probably be gone within four weeks, six at the most.

It would be hard saying goodbye to Maggie and Raf and the guys at Ink, but it would be impossible saying goodbye to Eddie. He’d been the center of her life for so long, the center of her dreams.

The shaky, nauseous feeling came back as she tried to imagine life without him. There were so many things she would miss. The sound of his laughter. The way he described the world with his hands. The wicked, mischievous light that came into his eyes when he was feeling particularly reckless and wild. The way he danced. The way he made love to her. The way he cared for her.

It was going to be like losing a limb. Like losing half of herself.

An owl hooted nearby, drawing her out of her thoughts. She became aware that she was cold and stiff, her arms and back sore from sitting in one position too long. Feeling like an old, old lady, she rolled onto her knees and pushed herself to her feet.

She activated the flashlight function on her phone again and picked her way back to the gate. She started the engine and bumped the heater up to high, waiting until she’d stopped shivering before she put the car into gear and reversed. Gravel pinged under the car as she made her way back to the main road, and then back onto the freeway.

The clock on the dash said it was nearly ten, and she realized she’d been sitting by her parent’s graveside for a long time. That would explain why she was so freaking stiff and cold, at least.

She punched the radio on and tried not to think too much as she drove back to Melbourne. She’d made all her decisions. She simply had to follow through on them now.

It was past midnight by the time she pulled into the parking garage beneath her building. She felt tired and suspected she looked like crap, her eyes red and puffy from too much crying.

Get used to that look, girlfriend
.

She walked slowly up the stairs, her thoughts gravitating to Eddie now that she was back. She’d turned the ringer off her phone when she’d left town, but she’d half expected to find a message from him when she checked it. He hadn’t called, though, and she told herself that was a good thing.

Might as well get used to not having him in her life, since it was going to be the reality soon enough.

It wasn’t until she on the second last step that she registered the man sitting against her apartment door. Eddie rose to his feet as she stepped onto the landing, brushing the seat of his pants. The expression on his face was a perfect mix of hope, trepidation and concern, and her heart squeezed in her chest so painfully that she actually lifted a hand to her sternum.

It hit her then, with the undeniable force of a freight train — there was no way she could walk away from this man and his love, not while she was still breathing and her heart still pumping. Not while the earth still turned and the sun still shone. She might be terrified of loving him, but standing in front of him, her heart thrashing around her in her chest like a wild thing, she understood that that ship had sailed a long time ago.

She loved him, so much, with everything she had, and it was suddenly blindingly clear to her that running away wasn’t going to protect her from the hurt she’d feel if she turned her back on that love. He already owned her heart. There was no turning back for her, no running away.