Falling For You (41 page)

They are still nowhere near here.

They are going to take
ages.

God, I wish I hadn’t even said anything to Carlotta now. I wish I’d saved it all for later. I didn’t tell her the one thing they really needed know, did I? I didn’t tell her that I’d been staying up here with the man who hurt Dad.

I rub at my eyes, which have begun to feel itchy and sore. Maybe it’s because I was crying so hard earlier on, but it feels like I’ve rubbed sandpaper over my eyeballs.
Shit.

Everything hurts. Even my leg which Lawrence stitched up, that has not hurt once in all the time I’ve been up here – that’s feeling sore. My head is like an egg-shell. My fingers and toes are frozen to the point of burning and my stomach is cramping with hunger. I turn to look out over the battlements and I stare at the tractors for a long time,
willing
them to start up again but the men must have stopped for their break or something.

For the moment, everything is quiet, again.

I must be going mad.

I just let my best chance of getting help for myself, slip right through my fingers. I just let Dad’s best chance of apprehending his assailant slip away too. Why? I can’t say. I look down at my red hands, blowing on my fingers, desperately trying to get some warmth back into them. Trying to make them work so when I get somewhere with a signal at least I can dial. There’s no signal out here just now. No way to contact them again. When it came down to it, I couldn’t give Lawrence away, could I? Not without... without giving him the chance to do the right thing.

Even though - the thought slips uncomfortably into my mind - he seems to have left me up here alone. Despite him knowing I’ve got a hurt leg. He’d be aware that - even with the farmers out now, clearing the lanes - I’d find it difficult to get home by myself. He took his backpack with him.  If he cared about me, he wouldn’t have left so easily, would he? I frown. Has he really left this place now so he can complete his mission for Sunny? I like to imagine so, but... I pull a wry face, pulling my stiff gloves back onto my frozen fingers - the fact is,
I know his identity now
.  

It could be that is why he left.

He didn’t want to be caught, I suppose. He’s been on the run all this time, in effect. No matter what else he’s achieved in his life, he’s still been on the run. A renewed surge of frustration courses through me at the thought. Now I know who he is, he must imagine the game is up. That I’d tell. When I get back home eventually and the truth comes out I know everyone will think that I should have told on him. I
know
that’s what they will say, how they will react. It’s what’s making me feel so nervous right now, because I can’t be sure I have made the right call.  It’s what’s making me feel maybe I’ve been conning myself all along.

 ‘Rose...’ when Lawrence speaks my name out loud at last, the shock of it makes me spin round. It makes me drop my phone.

He’s standing some way behind me, at the foot of the tower ruin. I didn’t see him come back from anywhere. I didn’t hear him arrive.

Where did he come from?

I take a step back, even though I am not afraid of him. I am afraid of my own reaction to him, seeing him there again when I thought he had gone for good. Seeing his face look so white, his eyes haunted, remorseful and at the same time so full of...
desire?

I turn from him, not wanting to see it, wanting to be mistaken because it would be easier to believe he has no real feelings for me. Much easier. If all he’s been doing is using me all along then I can walk away from this knowing for sure what I need to do next. What’s right to do. That will be easier than drowning in this whirlpool of disgust at what he’s done mixed with my own regret and desire for a man I can never be with. 

‘Rose I know how you must feel,’ his voice sounds gravelly. I know his throat hurts. I know it’s costing him to speak. To be here, in this space.

I can’t do this.
No
. A sudden panic overtakes me, that we are even speaking to each other again. We should not be speaking, surely, not now I know who he is? He is
verboten
. I don’t want to even look at him. I mustn’t. I march right past him, ignoring him, but he follows me to the chapel and part of me is glad that he does and part of me is very, very scared.

‘Don’t follow me, Lawrence.’

He stops, already inside the chapel door. I hear him close it, gently. I hear the small click as it shuts. The small movements he makes remind me of someone who is aching, someone whose every muscle is being held in check, moving quietly and gingerly lest they take up too much space. His presence, so familiar, in the corner of the room, helps my breath to calm a little now. Even though he should not be here. I should not want him here.

But somehow, I do.  

I still want what I should not be wanting.

I move a little closer to the fire and the contrast between the cold outside and the heat from being so near to the flames makes my body immediately overheated, the skin on my face feels taut as if it’s toasting. I step back a little but my hands are so cold. I remember when he held me before, how everything was perfect. I remember feeling the warmth of his chest against my face. How I was so acutely aware of the strength of his muscles, holding me; how I felt so safely held that I wished I might never have to leave his arms.   

I want him so much.

‘How could you do this to me?’ After such a long time of silence it feels strange to hear my voice again.  The wide space between us yawns and closes down as he does not make any attempt to answer that. What possible answer could he give?

‘How could you
be that person?’ I stumble. I turn to look at him at last. ‘How could you have done what you did and never stayed behind to see what damage you’d caused...’

‘Rose, I would give all the world for things not to be like this...’ something - a guard Lawrence has put in place to protect himself - has collapsed, I feel it.

‘It doesn’t matter
what you would give
,’ I carry on over him, my words jarring in the fragile air. ‘It’s what you
didn’t
give that I can’t understand. You didn’t give a damn about the man you injured, did you? What you did to his life, his family...’   

‘It wasn’t like that...’ he whispers but I carry on over him.

‘How is it you never stopped for a moment to see
who
you’d done it to, even?’ My throat hurts but the words still keep on coming out because now I want...
I want an explanation
.  I want an acknowledgement. I see Lawrence is hurting because he’s suddenly realised the connection between us, he knows it’s
me
he’s wounded. But why did he never come back and put this right before?

‘Because I couldn’t.’ I sense Lawrence shifting in discomfort.

‘You couldn’t?’ I bite my lip. He couldn’t. Maybe that’s true; a small realisation, like a wave lapping right up to a dry bit of sand on the shore, makes inroads into my mind.

‘What about
now
, though?’ I’m trying to keep the hope out of my voice, not to project too far into the future. He steps out of the shadows a little. I sense him, all of him, wanting something from me, needing something that he almost dares not hope for.

‘
Now
?’

‘Are you willing to turn yourself in, now?’ He makes a sound in his throat, like a gasp. It is so quiet after that I think maybe the world has stopped turning for a bit. I think maybe I’m not even breathing anymore. Maybe he isn’t.   

‘I know you’ll think I’m a coward,’ he says into the terrible stillness. After the long silence, his voice echoes strangely against the stone walls, bounces around the corners.

‘You think so too, don’t you?’ I say without thinking.

‘I’m not a coward, Rose.’ He takes another step forward. Then another. He stops when he is still three steps away from me. Not so far away I cannot see the rapid rise and fall of his chest. Not so far I cannot hear the sigh as the breath leaves his lips, or ignore the supplication in his eyes. ‘I have faced death many times.’ So softly, it’s almost a whisper. He has risked his own life to save the wounded on many occasions, I remember now. I have gathered that from what we spoke of in the early hours of the night. No coward would have visited the places he’s been to, I know that.

‘
Rose
,’ he moves in tentatively, just touching my elbows, ‘no coward would have risked the despair of loving again when love has only brought them pain and unhappiness in their lives.’      

I pull a wry face, hardly daring to believe him.
Don’t Lawrence, because I cannot bear to want you, to believe you, only to be disappointed again...

‘I love you, Rose.’

I cannot answer him.

‘If I’m a coward, it’s because ...’ he stumbles on, crushed, ‘after all this time, I still can’t bring myself to face my father.’

‘Or the part of you that is so like him you could lash out at someone and nearly kill them?’

‘Like him?’ He looks at me, shocked. ‘I am not like him, Rose. I never set out to hurt your father...’

‘You never went back to find out how he was, either.’ My words come tumbling out, cold and to the point and laced with a deadly cocktail of the truth and I see that bit goes in. I see that hurts him but he’s got to hear it. ‘You never went back to tell him that you didn’t mean to hurt him. Have you never thought... that it might be something that he needed to hear?’

‘For who to hear?’ He’s looking at me, dumbfounded. It
has
never occurred to him, I realise, not in all this time.

‘
My dad
,’ I frown furiously at him. ‘The man whose life you were aware you had ruined, whose dignity you stole away. Your victim. Didn’t it ever occur to you that he might still be living his life, every day - every moment of every day - in dread terror that maybe you’d come back sometime and finish the job
?
That you’d hurt him again.
That you’d hurt me
?’

‘No!’
H
e comes back as I pull away from him forcefully.
I can’t bear you to touch me, Lawrence. I can’t bear you to be near me. You
have
hurt me!

‘No, Rose. Because I put your dad out of my mind years ago.’ I look up at Lawrence in surprise, despite myself. ‘I had to. I put him amongst the debris of all the other things I couldn’t bear to remember; like the wasted life of my beautiful Kahn, the shattered dreams of the life I’d hoped to spend with my family elsewhere. The fact that I haven’t seen my mum in five years
.
’
H
is words tumble out, shining and honest and raw and they silence me. ‘The fact that I’ve never had any contact with her or my little brother in all that time.
My victim
,
’ Lawrence steps up to me now, his face twisted with regret and frustration, ‘...if I ever stopped to remember him it was with regret that he was ever even there that night, because he got in the way. He stopped me doing what I had intended to do, which was to show my Dad that there was
someone
who’d stand up to him. He saved Rob Macrae’s filthy hide.’