Don't Speak (A Modern Fairytale, #5)(72)
“Are you crazy? It’s cold as the North Pole out there!”
Erik whipped open the door and stepped onto the pool deck, looking back and forth, but there was no one there. No boat moored at the dock. No sweet, soft girl telling him she still loved him. Nothing but the faint smell of his mother’s cigarette, black and smoky at his feet.
“I thought . . .,” he choked out, his insides twisting with disappointment. “I thought I saw . . .”
“There’s no one out here,” said Van from the doorway. “Come on back inside before you catch your death.”
She didn’t come.
She didn’t come.
It was nine o’clock on Thanksgiving night.
She wasn’t coming.
He stared out at the empty pool deck, at the empty dock, getting his ragged breathing under control. She wasn’t here and she wasn’t coming. They were over—Erik Rexford and Laire Cornish were over—and it was time for him to face the truth.
His heart was broken beyond repair, and he didn’t want to repair it. He wanted it to stay broken forever. It was the only way to protect it from ever shattering like this again. Reaching up, he pressed the palm of his hand over the broken mess of tissue and blood within, pledging to let it stay broken.
Hillary’s words returned to him: It’s time to pick up the pieces and finally move on.
Okay.
Yes, he’d move on now.
But he would never, ever let himself fall in love again. Never. If he couldn’t trust Laire, who’d seemed so earnest, so honest and true, then he couldn’t trust anyone. He turned back to the house. Stepping into the living room, he caught sight of his mother across the room, flirting with one of his father’s friends, feeling his blood run from hot and hopeful to dead and cold.
Women were deceitful and two-faced, false and dishonest.
They were executioners of hope, assassins of faith.
They could be used, as he’d been used by Laire for a summer fling, but that would be the extent of their purpose to him from now on.
From now on, he hated women.
That was Laire fucking Cornish’s goddamned Thanksgiving gift to him: a legacy of pain and destruction, a future full of hate for and distrust of the opposite sex.
“Erik?” said Van. “Did you hear me before? What do you think? About givin’ us a try? A real try?”
“What?” he asked her, looking at her with new eyes that didn’t see her as an old family friend, but as an enemy.
“How about givin’ us a try?”
“A try,” he said softly, as something once soft calcified inexorably within him, unreachable, unfixable, untouchable, dead.
“Erik?” Vanessa whispered. She scanned his face, staring at him warily, her hopeful smile fading.
He looked her body up and down with cold eyes. “No, thanks.”
***
Laire walked blindly through the night, her tears making the way blurry as the cold wind, hitting her from the Sound and the ocean, bit at her wet cheeks. Making her way to Route 12, she simply walked, aimlessly, trying to process everything she’d just seen and heard.
Even though she’d seen him standing there with his arm around Van—Vanessa—part of her still couldn’t believe it.
How many times had he told her he loved her? Insisted she was beautiful? Assured her that he wanted her in his life?
How could it have all been lies?
“Rotten, fucking lies,” she sobbed, hearing Kyrstin’s voice in her head: Because those people ain’t our people. They don’t live their lives the same way we do, Laire. They got different values, different priorities. You know that. You can’t expect nothin’.
She was right. Kyrstin was one hundred percent right. And Laire was a fool of epic proportions. A pregnant fool. A fool who refused to go home and trick a local boy into marriage. And couldn’t go home, because the ring that should have been hers was on another girl’s finger.
After twenty minutes of walking, she found herself standing in front of the Pamlico House, blinking in surprise as more tears welled in her eyes. There was only one person in the world she wanted to see, who could—possibly—help her.
She went to the back door of the kitchen and knocked, asking the dishwasher if he could find Ms. Sebastian and send her outside.
She caressed her belly through her black skirt, whispering softly, “We deserve better than him, li’l bean. You deserve better.”
“Laire?” said Ms. Sebastian, stepping out of the kitchen, smelling of warmth and turkey and cranberries, such a contrast to the bleak cold of the night. “Laire, honey? What a surprise!”
“Ms. Sebastian!” she sobbed, hurtling herself into the older woman’s arms and crying torrents on her shoulder.
“Laire! Oh, dear! What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
She had no words. The depth of her sorry and fear, worry and exhaustion, were so profound, she couldn’t answer.
But thank the Lord for small mercies because Ms. Sebastian, on what was likely the busiest night of the year, held a desperate, distraught Laire close, rubbed her back, and—without knowing anything—promised her that everything was going to be all right.
INTERLUDE
Laire’s Christmas Journal
The First Christmas
Dear Erik,