Page 57 of Wanting Mr Black
“For you. You said she wanted to be with you.”
“And like I’ve said, that’s not what it was about for me …” He heaves a sigh. “And it was complicated.”
“How could it possibly get any more complicated?”
He doesn’t answer me.
“How?”
“She was married.”
I can’t help the laugh that falls from my lips. “This just gets better and better.” I sag against the wall and draw in a deep breath as an uneasy feeling takes hold of me. “So, that’s what stopped you from being together? The fact that she was married.”
“No.” He fixes me with a determined look. “You’re wrong. I didn’t want a relationship with her. It was about control and sex. Call me a cold-hearted bastard, but that’s all our arrangement was to me. I’d see her once a week for a therapy session and one night a week at the club.”
“Where you’d fuck her.”
He presses his lips together. He doesn’t need to reply.
“And she got off on all that kinky stuff.”
“She enjoyed being controlled.” He pins me with his gaze. “It was so far from what we have; it doesn’t compare.”
I scrape my bare heel against the cold marble floor.What do we have?
“I’m sorry for not telling you about the accident.”
I tilt my chin up in defiance. “It’s easy to say you’re sorry; it’s harder to be truthful from the start. I asked you if there was anything else you hadn’t told me, and you lied to my face and said there wasn’t.”
He stands up. “There’s nothing more. I promise.”
“How can I believe you?” I shake my head. “How can I believe anything you’ve said? Your talk about marriage and kids and our future … how do I know it’s true?”
“I meant every word.”
“I’ve given my heart to you. You’ve not given yours to me.” I sink my teeth into my bottom lip to stop myself from welling up.“I love you, but after a while, it becomes really hard not to hear it back.”
Art draws his head back a fraction, as if I’ve wounded him. “You don’t get it, do you?” He shakes his head. “I can’t … I can’t love you.”
Twenty-Nine
I’m on the back foot. Tears swim in my eyes. “What? Why can’t you love me? What do you mean?”
Art scrapes a hand across his jaw and walks across the room. He stands in silence for a few seconds, staring out onto the balcony, as if mustering up the right words. “You don’t know what it’s like to be rejected by the one person in the world who should love you. Who’s too busy sucking guys off to even notice that you haven’t eaten in two days or that you’re naked, cold, and starving. Then, just like that, you’re taken away and told everything will be better because you’re going to live with some other people who are nice, and you hope they’ll want to be yournew mum and dad, but it turns out, they don’t like your anger. You’re angry because you don’t know what the fuck’s going on. Your world’s turned upside down. So, you move on to the next and the next, and each time, you really hope they’ll be the ones who love you back, but they’re not. You don’t understand them, and they don’t understand you. They try and make you stick to their rules and behave, but you won’t because anger and swearing and fighting are all you’ve got. So, when they beat you and starve you for misbehaving, you stick with it because it’s the only way you know how to survive. Then, when you finally find a mum and dad who love you back, it’s too late. You’re already fucked up, and it’s fucked up your views of sex and relationships. You’re pretty sure you’re going to stay single forever. Because you don’t want to let anyone in. Because that just leads to fucking heartache, which you’ve already had your share of. So, you just fuck women around, stringing them along, until one day, everything changes. One day, you meet the one who makes you second-guess yourself and think maybe you’ve got it wrong. She makes you throw caution to the wind and go with your heart because she’s so fucking perfect that you’d do anything for her, and you’re determined no one else is going to have her. But your entire life has been such a fuck-up to date that you’re too scared to tell her all the shit that’s happened in case it makes her another one of those people who doesn’t understand or want you. Because if she did, there’d be no bouncing back.”
Tears run down my cheeks as the weight of his words hit me. I’ve wanted him to open up to me for so long, and now that he has, I don’t even know where to start. I think back to his defensive reaction when Barbara showed me his childhood photos and when he found out I knew about his birth mother. He’s not usingmypast as an excuse to keep things from me.Hispast is the reason. He’s really scared of losing me.
“Is that … is that why you don’t like me knowing stuff about your childhood? You’re worried I won’t understand or … or I’ll think less of you in some way and leave you?” I say softly.
He slowly turns to face me. “Why wouldn’t you? Everyone I’ve ever loved has fucked off and left me. My birth mother, Dad, Barbara will at some point, and you … you keep running away. I feel as if I’m cursed. That if I tell you how I feel … how I really feel, then everything will fuck up, and you’ll end up leaving me too.”
I bring a hand up to my chest to rub the twinge of pain I feel at the thought of my life without him. “Art, people who die don’t leave us even if it feels like it.” My head’s a mess, and there are so many things I want to say. “I won’t leave you.”
His throat works as he steps towards me. “Say it again.”
“I won’t leave you. I love you.”
His eyes sweep up the length of my body. A shimmering glint of need has replaced the wounded look from seconds earlier. As he strides purposefully towards me, a stab of panic shoots through me. He shows no signs of stopping; he’s going to bowl me over. I instinctively step backwards and feel the wall against my back as his hands cradle my head and his mouth crashes against my lips, his body colliding with mine.