Almost Mine (29 page)

He strode around the bar and gripped my elbow, too tightly for my liking. ‘Come with me.’

The minute we stepped outside and away from prying eyes he let me go as if I’d burned him, and the manic expression on his face became once again controlled and emotionless.

‘What are you doing?’ I said.

‘I’m getting you out of there before you make a scene — more of a scene,’ he corrected himself. ‘This is a place of business, Cate.’

‘I wouldn’t know that, would I? I believe I’ve never had a forkful of food in that establishment.’

A voice called him from the restaurant but he ignored them. He grasped my elbow again, this time a little less roughly, led me into the office and closed the door. He let me go but didn’t put any more distance between us than the metre already there. He stood barely a step away and he waited, I guessed, for me to say something. But not this time; he could do some talking for a change.

Seconds passed without a word and the silence between us was beginning to feel awkward. Still, I refused to say anything unless it was an answer to a question. My squared posture remained strong and steady as I watched his slacken, and then my traitorous tears fell in response. Despite my empathy, I refused to back down.

‘Do you know what I want?’ he finally asked.

I wiped my wet face with the back of my wrists. ‘More than anything.’

He went on with the same emotionless tone. ‘I just want to be left alone.’

‘What?’
WHAT!!!!

‘I can’t be around you anymore.’

Keep your shoulders back and your head high.
‘What about last night? I thought—.’

‘I was saying good-bye.’

‘But you didn’t say good-bye; you said that you missed me. You said that you loved me.’

He stood like a robot in front of me; detached from any feeling. ‘I just can’t do it anymore.’

‘Why?’

He hesitated.

‘Why!’

If he reacted to my anger he didn’t show it. ‘Because it’s hopeless, Cate. Because you’re a constant reminder of the failure that I am.’

For the longest time I had wanted him to talk and now I all I wanted was for him to take it back. ‘I don’t mean to be.’

‘I know you don’t. Maybe I—’ he cut himself off.

His shoulders finally gave way, and I turned into a marshmallow in front of him. ‘What, Nick?’

‘There’s no hope.’

‘There’s always hope.’

‘Not this time.’

‘So you’re leaving me?’ He said nothing as I waited for an answer that I didn’t want to hear. Then it hit me like a bolt of lightning, and with it came cascades of frustrated tears at the realisation. ‘Or am
I
supposed to leave
you
so that you don’t have to feel guilty for rejecting me like my mother did?’

For the first time since entering the office he met my eyes. He stepped closer and reached for me but I stepped back without thinking and tripped on a crate of empty bottles behind me. Nick reached for me again and caught me before I tumbled to the floor. The smell of his aftershave made my insides quake with wanting and it was depleting my will to regain control of myself. ‘Please don’t cry,’ he said.

Straightening myself to stand on my own two feet, I brushed myself down and pulled my shoulders back, regaining a facade of composure. ‘What do you care if I cry?’

He seemed offended by my bluntness. ‘I care.’

‘It’s become apparent within the last few minutes that you do not give a crap about me.’

‘I…’ he trailed off as I feigned composure while underneath I had turned to jelly. I stood and waited for him to take it all back, but instead he shocked me with something that I was not expecting. ‘I don’t want to know where you went last night.’

I crossed my arms giving nothing away.

His mouth moved in an odd way as if trying to speak but swallowing the words down; he needed to ask but it would kill him if the answer to his question were yes. ‘I do want to know if you’ll be going again, though.’

I searched his face with curiosity. ‘Where’s my king of a husband?’

He squeezed his deep blue eyes closed in an effort to banish his threatening emotion, because God forbid he should show a semblance of something other than restraint. ‘I was never that. I was always gladly a slave to my queen of a wife.’

Shame gnawed at my words. What could I possibly say to that? There is not a single word in any language that could express to him how sorry I was. I had created this life for us, but there was no way to change the past. The future was all I needed to focus on.

As always he indulged me. ‘I can’t be your king again. He’s gone.’

Keep strong.
‘I don’t disagree, but he’s still in there somewhere, Nick. Just fight for him. I love him whichever way he comes.’ I stepped up to him and lifted myself onto my toes, and then I kissed his mouth though he didn’t return it. ‘I need him; I need you to make the right choice here.’

He crossed his arms.

‘Come on, Nick. One minute you’re ready to spill everything and the next you’re clamming up.’

‘I need to go to work.’

‘And there it is: your favourite answer. One day your work is going to be all you have. Is that what you want?’

‘It keeps my mind off—’ he censored himself.

‘Don’t stop there. It keeps your mind off what — off losing me?’

He shrugged.

Determination built in me again; I couldn’t control what my mother did to me back then but I was damned sure that I was not going to let him slip through my fingers. Last night I’d had a glimpse of the husband that I once knew, and just now when he’d stopped breathing at the close proximity of me like he always had, I knew that he wasn’t completely lost to me. My fighting flame was reignited. I stepped past him and opened the door.

‘You’re very good at pushing me away, but I can push back harder, Nick. I have some work of my own to do, too’ I said as I slowly closed the door behind me.

It was mid-morning and the sun was shining; though it wasn’t as stifling as it had been for the past week it was still warm, which was odd considering it was the middle of March. Typically by this time of the year it should now, at least, be ready to snow. When it’s hot we want snow and when it snows we want the summer sun.

It was Wednesday and I hadn’t left to house since the dreadful Monday-morning fight with Nick —who I didn’t think could bury himself deeper in his work, but who had succeeded at doing so with flying colours. Our house, our bed had remained occupied only by me, and not a word had been spoken between us. But, the business was thriving so there was an upside…for him at least.

Today I would implement my next plan of attack: lunch with Blake, who had called in sick from work in the vineyard. It was a low blow to Nick, to leave him short-handed while another man took his wife out to lunch, but, after all, it was Nick who had said that desperation can make people do desperate things…

I waited in plain sight by the letterbox at the bottom of the driveway. The restaurant did not face the road; it faced the line of pink blossoms and the vineyard beyond and to my right, so anybody walking in and out of it could clearly view the comings and goings of the property.

Blake arrived at eleven and couldn’t have timed it better, because as I began to climb into his car, Nick stepped out onto the deck of the restaurant and saw us. My head spun with exhilarated fear while my heart raced and I thought that I might pass out, but I held his gaze. I wondered if he’d sprint the long length of the driveway and pull me out, demanding that I belonged only to him. It seemed as if the world spun on its axis and flipped upside down, because as I lowered myself into the passenger seat, he slowly turned and walked back into the restaurant.

‘That wasn’t the effect we were going for, was it?’ Blake said as he pulled out onto the road. Tears once again dampened my face and I shook my head. ‘I think you might be making a huge mistake, Mrs Mathieson.’

‘No,’ I sucked my pain back deep inside. ‘He loves me. I know he does.’

‘I’m not so sure—,’

‘It’ll work!’ I interjected. ‘It has to.’

‘Ok…’ he said dubiously. ‘I just hope that I still have a job tomorrow.’

‘Oh,’ I belatedly realised that he had sacrificed his job for me. ‘I’m too busy thinking of myself aren’t I?’

‘It’s ok. I’m a bit of a vagabond, actually. I’ll find another one if I need to.’

‘Vagabond?’ I scoffed. ‘You’ve worked for Nick for three years.’

He glanced at me as he drove, but looked slightly uncomfortable at the direction the conversation was heading. ‘I’ve had good reason to.’

‘Am I really that likeable?’

‘Yes, Mrs Mathieson. You really are.’

I eyed him curiously. ‘Back to that, are we?’

‘What?’

‘You know, as much as we are doing this to get Nick’s attention, he can’t actually see us once we’ve left the property. There’s no need for “Mrs Mathieson”.

‘Actually, there is. I’m worried that I’m getting too used to this whole arrangement. If I call you something other than your married name, I’d have to stop the car and try something completely reckless. So, Mrs Mathieson, I repeat, you really are that likeable.’ He gave me an odd look. ‘I can’t believe that Nick has forgotten how lucky he is.’

‘He’s just stubborn. I love him, you know, and I’m terrified that I don’t have what it takes to make him believe that.’ I didn’t mean to cry, I was actually quite fed up with being this upset over something easily fixable, but these days it happened without warning.

‘Would you like me to take you home?’

I looked out of the window and watched as the trees flew by the car. I rested my elbow on the door as the wind whipped my hair around my face and bit my thumb nail as I tried to focus on something other than my life. ‘No. I need to be away from here for a bit.’

‘Sure thing, Mrs Mathieson.’

I was brushing my teeth before bed that night when Nick scared the life out of me. I was thinking about my plan, revaluating its effectiveness or whether I was just shooting myself in the foot. I turned off the tap and wiped my face and when I turned to reach for the light he came around the corner of the bathroom.

‘Bloody hell,’ I breathed and my hands flew to my chest, and then I laughed because in times gone by he would have thought that it was funny to see me so gorgeously startled…and he’d be my hero and catch me in his arms and kiss me and tickle me and throw me over his shoulder and carry me to our bed to have his way with me… In the millisecond between my shock and my eye contact with him I craved for that man to return to me. I sobered, though, when I noted his expression. I’d never seen him look so mean.

‘I’ve made a choice,’ he said in a low, fuming voice that I could tell he was fighting to keep control of. Though my insides had turned to jelly, my outer façade was quickly restored; I was the picture of unaffected poise.

‘Oh?’ I dared him.

‘What you did today…what you did the other night, I really don’t want you to do that again.’

‘Why?’

He said nothing and continued to look at me with the same don’t-think-that-I-won’t-hunt-him-down-and-kill-him expression.

‘I’ll tell you why; it’s because you love me.’ His silence infuriated me; he was nothing if not consistent. ‘Just let go, Nick. Come back to me.’

‘You know that I love you,’ he said through his clenched jaw. A sarcastic, humourless laugh left me.

‘As lovely as that was, I’m sorry if I don’t believe you.’

It took too long for him to say anything else and tonight I was just too exhausted to go through another pointless, one-sided conversation. I flicked the bathroom light off and squeezed past him, even though he tried to block my path as he stood unmoving in the doorway. I climbed into bed and turned off my side lamp leaving him standing in the dark.

‘Good night, Nick,’ I said.

All I heard was the closing of the bedroom door and his footsteps as he, yet again, walked away from me. For the first time the distance was not painful; I didn’t cry. I smiled,
instead, because it was working. A few more outings with Blake and I would have succeeded; I’d have lured my husband out of his own private hell.

The next morning I showered, dressed, but skipped my usual tea and toast, too impatient to find out whether Nick’s behaviour had improved, to find out if yesterday’s lunch with Blake had made a difference to his neglect of me.