Page 41 of Not Yet Yours

I don’t answer, which I think is answer enough. We walk across the tarmac and out to the waiting limo. My driver greets us, loads the bags into the trunk, and we get into the car. I confirm with my driver to go to Harriet’s place first. I had been planning on asking her to come back to mine for a while, but I don’t bother now. I put the partition up and make sure the microphone is muted and then I pull my cell phone out and unlock the screen and show Harriet the photo.

“This is from Friday night. I asked you to have dinner with me and you told me you were busy,” I say.

“Yes. I was busy. I had a night out with my friend planned,” she says, barely glancing at my cell phone.

“Your friend. Right. And is he a friend with benefits as well?” I ask.

“Excuse me,” Harriet snaps.

“You heard me,” I say. “Answer the question, Harriet. Who the fuck is he?”

“For the record, he’s not the friend I went out with. That was Sam who I believe you’ve met. He’s just someone we got to talking to in the club,” she says. “But who he is and what did or didn’t happen between us is none of your damned business. We’re not a couple. I can see and do whoever I want to, whenever I want to.”

“Do whoever you want to?” I clarify and Harriet nods, looking at me defiantly as she does so. “No. I can cope with us not being a couple, but while you’re fucking me, you fuck only me. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly,” Harriet says. “So, I guess I won’t be fucking you anymore then.”

That hurts and I’ll be honest; it wasn’t what I was expecting her to say at all. Hopefully she just lashed out in anger, and she’ll come around, but can I cope with the idea of sharing her? The idea of us not being a real couple is hard enough to swallow, but I really don’t think I can do the friends with benefits thing if I’m not the only friend of hers with those kinds of benefits.

I don’t want to lose Harriet though and I search my mind desperately for something to say to make this right, or at least to get us talking again, but there’s nothing that isn’t going to come out as angry or as an ultimatum and I’m not ready to give her one of those because right now, I don’t think I’d like her choice. Her last answer shocked me, and I don’t want to be caught out like that again.

We reach Harriet’s place and neither of us have said a word to each other. My driver gets out of the car to get Harriet’s bag and she goes to open her door, but I grab her hand.

“Wait,” I say. She turns to me. “I shouldn’t have said what I said. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you for a nice night. See you around,” she says, completely ignoring my apology and letting me know that as far as she’s concerned, this thing with us is still done.

I open my mouth to beg her not to get out of the car, to just talk to me, but it’s too late. The door is open and she’s out of the car. The door closes again, and I slam my fist off the seat. How the fuck has this gone so wrong?

I don’t even know where to start tackling that one. I sit back, rest my head against the headrest and close my eyes until wereach my apartment building. My driver gets my things from the trunk. I thank him and go to my apartment. I leave my stuff in the hallway and go and lay down on my bed.

All I can see when I close my eyes is Harriet. I try opening them, but I can still see her there, turning her back on me. I can’t let things end between us like this. I just can’t. I have to win her back, but I don’t know how to. I don’t know what to say to make her see that we’re meant to be together, that I love her.

It all keeps on coming back to Harriet’s insistence that she doesn’t want a relationship. If she followed through on that, I would back off, but everything she says and does when we’re together screams the opposite of that. I might not be the world’s leading relationship expert, but I know when a woman is into me and I know Harriet has feelings for me, I just don’t know how to convince her to let those feelings in and embrace them.

That feels like too big of an ask right now though. Right now, the most important thing is me working out how I’m going to get her to forgive me for accusing her of sleeping around and then laying a claim to her that I have no right to try to claim outside of my deepest fantasies.

I lay down and try to come up with something, anything, but nothing is coming to mind. I have to think of something though. If I can only ever have the watered-down version of a relationship with Harriet, I will take it over no relationship with her. I know she’s going to end up breaking my heart, but as long as she’s around to do that, I will be ok. I just need to come up with a way to make her hear me out and forgive me. God it’s hard to know what to say when the one thing I want to say is the one thing that will send her running for the hills. I just want to be able to take her in my arms and tell her that I’m in love with her.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Harriet

Idon’t know how this happened. I don’t know how I went from having a fun night away with Liam to losing everything. I don’t know how I kept it together in front of him either, but I couldn’t cope with the idea of him seeing me crying and knowing how much he means to me.

I walked up the path and let myself into my house without looking back once, although doing it killed me. I closed the door behind me and then I let my true feelings loose. I leaned back against the door and slowly slid down it until I was sitting on the ground, my knees pulled up to my chin and my arms wrapped around them, and I finally let myself cry my hurt out.

I must have been sitting here sobbing for a good twenty minutes now and I wish I could say that having a good cry has made me feel better, but it hasn’t. I don’t know why I’m so upset. It’s not like this should have come as a surprise to me. It’s ended exactly as I thought it would. In tears. At least they are only my tears, and I haven’t done anything to ruin Liam’s life.

But maybe this doesn’t have to be the end of things for us. Maybe there’s a way for us to get past this. But no. Realistically, that’s not going to happen. Even as I think it, I can hear myfather’s voice in my head reminding me that I am poison and laughing that Liam has left the moment he got to know who I really am deep down inside.

For a moment, I let that simmer inside of me, making me feel worse than I already do, but as I nurse the words, clinging to them although they hurt me so much, I realize something. For the first time, I see that those words just aren’t true. Liam didn’t leave me because he saw the real me. He left me because I let him think I was fucking around. I fucked it up, yes, but not by being myself. By lying to make it seem like I had done something to hurt him instead of just telling him the truth.

And when that thought hits me, another one follows on its tail, one I hardly dare to listen to, but the voice inside of my head that is my own now instead of my father’s is insistent and I have to listen to what it has to say whether I want to or not. The voice whispers to me that Jake knew the real me. And he loved me. He didn’t kill himself because he was with me. He did it after I ended things with him. He did it because he couldn’t be with me anymore, the opposite of what my father claimed would happen.

Is it possible that I self-sabotage? Ruining things by ending them instead of letting the relationships develop. Is it possible that I am not the problem, but that my father is the problem? Or at least his perception of me and how I have allowed that to shape me. Is it possible that my parents got divorced because my mom finally saw my dad for the asshole he is, and because he couldn’t accept that it was his fault, he blamed me, the one person in life who was utterly defenseless and would have no real choice at the time but to take his shit?

I don’t know for sure if any of that is true, but it definitely feels like it could be. It actually makes more sense than me being toxic to those around me without me even knowing about it. Because despite everything, my mom has never abandoned me, although I have kept her at arm’s length since I grew upbecause I didn’t want to hurt her. And Max. Max has been a constant in my life since, well almost forever, and although I tell myself I keep her at arm’s length too, I really don’t. The only thing I haven’t confessed to her is why I don’t want a boyfriend. Everything else, she knows. She knows the real me and she hasn’t left. Her life hasn’t imploded. She is happy.