Page 88 of Love… It's Messy

He shakes his head and closes his eyes for a beat before opening them and looking at me. “I’m not scared of Huntington’s anymore. I watched my mother battle it and my sister fight it. If that’s the disease meant for me, I can take it.”

I hug my sweater to me, protecting myself from the evening chill.

With a tentative step forward, he continues, “When I woke up with you in Aruba, it was before the sun rose. I just stared at you for an hour, gazing at your soft, porcelain skin and the red hair on the pillow. God, you’re so beautiful, smart, funny. You weren’t just a perfect ten. You’re a one in a million. I would have been an asshole to not realize how lucky of a bastard I was to have made love to you the previous night. I made a vow that morning that I was going to figure out any way to make you mine. It sounded crazy, but after three days, I felt something. Some spark. Hell, I knew I was falling in love with you.”

I gasp at his admission. My hand rises to my mouth, yet I don’t say a word.

I let him speak.

“I went back to my room to change my clothes and charge my phone. I was going to bring you breakfast in bed. Coffee with French vanilla creamer and a croissant. When I got out of the shower, I had these text messages on my phone from Peyton. I called back, and she was frantic. I mean,screaming through the phonefrantic. My mother was in the hospital. She had taken a fall at home and hit her head. It wasn’t the first time, but it was the worst. She was in intensive care; the doctors didn’t think she was gonna make it. I’ve told you how I feel about my mother, and I mean it. She was my whole world. Her health was declining, but this was the first time I thought I would lose her. I threw my things in a bag, hailed a cab, and I ran to my mother.”

Family is everything,I recall the Incendio mantra.

He runs his hand over the back of his neck and then down to his chest, clutching his shirt, as if his heart is about to beat out of his chest.

“There were two flights leaving that morning, and I got a seat on one. I left so damn fast. I texted you on the way to the airport because I didn’t want to wake you. I stared at my phone all morning, and when I landed, I saw you had called, but you didn’t pick up when I called back, so I left you a message. I needed you to know what you meant to me, but I didn’t want to say too much. I was scared as shit for my mom, and yet I wanted to hear your voice. That sweet, sultry voice that makes my whole damn chest vibrate.

“When I arrived at the hospital, we spent hours worrying about my mom, and when she came to, we were all saddled with an even greater pain. The results from the Huntington’s test came in. I didn’t even know she had taken it. I didn’t know what it was. When I found out, I felt like the ground had been swept out beneath me. It didn’t just sound like one disease; it was a million terrible ways to die at once. The Devil’s Disease.

“My plans to be with you vanished when the doctor said the odds of each of us inheriting the gene were great. Peyton wanted to find out, but Lauren begged me not to. I wanted to, but I was too damn scared. Scared of what my mother’s future would look like, of losing her, of possibly having the same disease.

“You called. Jillian, I saw your calls, and I couldn’t pick up. I didn’t want to fall in love with you and then have to give you up. I hated my family. I hated myself. I was too much of a goddamn chickenshit to take the damn test. I went into a downward spiral. I drank so much. Not because I didn’t want you. I didn’t believe I deserved you. I couldn’t risk you telling me you’d be there for me, no matter what, because I would have been too weak and let you, possibly ruining your entire life.

“When you called to tell me you were pregnant … fuck. The horrible words I said to you on the phone, the guilt that I told you to get rid of the baby over the goddamn phone, it kills me. There was no time for me to take a test because time was running out foryou. My mind was a mess; my body was a fucking earthquake. I was convinced I had the disease. Drove myself mad with every second that passed. I was convinced our baby had the gene too. I didn’t want the baby, and in that moment, I meant it.

“No amount of whiskey can be blamed for the reaction I had. I woke up the next morning with a clear head, realizing what an idiot I had been, and I ran to you. You said you were going to a clinic, so I looked up every one near Greenwood Village. I took a chance on where you’d be. Three fucking hours, I sped to you. I tried to call, but I shouldn’t have been surprised that you’d blocked me back. That’s what I get for being a fucking idiot.

“I didn’t want you to do it. I was going to ask you to wait. To let me take the test before you decided. I was going to fall to my knees and beg for forgiveness. Beg you to keep the baby, no matter what. When I got there, the receptionist said you’d already left. You took a cab home. I thought … I fucking thought you had gone through with it.”

The breaths in my chest are erratic as I feel his story in my bones. He was cruel, and he was mean. He was also scared.

“I couldn’t do it,” I say. “I sat in that back room and saw the equipment and the posters and the sterilization, and I couldn’t do it.”

“I thought you had,” he cries.

“You should have told me, Luke. I should’ve been able to make an informed decision.”

“You should have. If you had called at any other moment and I wasn’t half a bottle deep in Jack Daniel’s and deep in woe, I would have told you.”

“I wish you had,” I say.

“When I left the clinic, I looked up your address. An apartment building in Greenwood Village. When I got there, I saw you on the fire escape. Your head was in your hands, and you were sobbing into your palms. I thought that meant you had let the baby go. Let me go. My beautiful, full-of-magic girl, who I was falling in love with, was destroyed because of me. I had done that to you. I’d made you destroy the life we’d made together.

“I made a second vow in that moment. I’d stay away from you forever. I thanked God you hated social media because I tried to find you over the years, and it would have killed me to see you with another man. Kissing another man. Having his babies. I couldn’t bear to see you in the life that I’d imagined us having just two weeks before.

“It’s why I came here that night all those weeks ago, after the fire. The night I met Ainsley, I came here to tell you the truth and never did because I was so thrown off by her existence. I came here because you had asked a question and I’d lied to you. You asked if I had any regrets. The answer was always yes. There is no excuse for what I did. I just …” He hesitates and swallows hard.

Luke closes the distance some more. “I’m not just scared. I’m fucking frightened because I made so many horrible choices in a short time frame, all because I was half a man who couldn’t do the right thing. I ruined your life. I ruined Ainsley’s.”

He falls to his knees.

On the pavement before me, Luke Incendio collapses to the ground and looks up at me with eyes so remorseful and pleading that I feel like I’m the altar on which he prays as a man of immense sin. His hands rise to his lips as his eyes water with conviction.

“I love that little girl so much, and if I take that test and I’m positive, I’m petrified that she’ll be at risk of having it. If I do, I don’t want her giving up her life to take care of me. I’ll kill myself before I lade her with that burden.”

“Luke—”

“I love her, Jillian.”