The Space Between Us(76)
“What do you mean by ‘until the end’? How long had you been in contact with him?” He looked down at the floor and my heart dropped. “Asher, answer the question.”
“I’ve always been in contact with him, ever since you disappeared.”
Well, f*ck. That stung.
“I think you need to leave,” I said as I turned from him, trying to go anywhere else in the house besides where he was.
“I think we need to talk about this,” he said calmly. There was nothing calm about me, but I tried so hard to pull it off. I didn’t want his pity or his sympathy. I continued to walk down the hall, headed for what once was my bedroom. I planned on avoiding this room, planned on staying away from a room that would bring back the worst and most vivid memories of being with Asher, but at this point I had nowhere else to go. “Don’t you think you’ve hidden long enough?” His words were like ice down my spine. I froze. Indeed, I felt like hiding, but for the first time in years, all of a sudden, I felt more like fighting.
“How dare you come into my father’s house and talk to me about hiding. I am not the one who ran the very second we hit a road block. I am not the one who left my girlfriend for weeks after finding out she was pregnant.” I marched over to him with every word I spoke and I felt my face reddening with rage, a flush spreading up from my chest. When we were chest to chest, I pointed a finger right in his face. “You, of all people, do not get to judge me. I left because it was time to move on. My absence didn’t hurt anyone.” I turned again, set on disappearing, leaving him with those last words, hoping they hurt him even one tiny fraction of the amount of hurt I had acquired due to him.
“It hurt me,” he said quietly, stopping me mid-stride. I knew, deep down in my soul, in the depth of my being, that I didn’t owe him one damn thing. I should have kept walking, and I should have written him off years ago as the stupid boy in college who broke my heart, but the majority of my self, of the person I was, wouldn’t deny him.
“I never got the chance to apologize to you,” he continued. I heard him walking towards me and I knew he was getting closer. I just wasn’t sure how close I’d allow him. “Please,” he said, not two feet away from me. “Please let me talk to you. We can talk about what happened, talk about your father, talk about anything you want. I just want the opportunity to spend a little time with you.”
There were so many things running through my head at that moment. Could I spend a little time with him? I wasn’t short on time. In a few weeks I had to be back in NYC for an art show – my art show – but until then I was free as a bird. Did he deserve to spend any time with me? Did I want to see him? What could we possibly do besides talk about painful memories? Or talk about memories that were so sweet and special that it made them painful?
“Why?” I whispered. I heard him move again, and I felt him inch closer to me. I couldn’t tell if he wanted to touch me, but I knew I’d crumble if I felt his hand on me anywhere.
“Don’t you think we owe it to ourselves?” He paused and I could tell he’d inched even closer. I could smell his aftershave he was so close and I began to tremble. “At the very least, we owe it to our child.”
In the one conversation we’d ever had about our baby, he’d only used the term “it”. To hear him say “our child” broke something in me I’d been trying to hold together for so long. My hands came up to cover my face and I tried to cry quietly as emotions I’d tried to bury were brought to the surface by his words. Something inside of me needed to hear him acknowledge that there had been a baby, and once I heard it, I couldn’t contain the rush of relief. But even as I cried, even as my heart tried to put itself back together again, I was nagged by a new guilt. He still didn’t know there were two. Two babies. Two lives that I lost – that we lost that day.
My father was the only one who knew about the miscarriage – besides Reeve. Reeve knew because she was in the room with me, but my father knew because he could see the pain I was in and knew something was wrong. When I came home after the miscarriage, after one week of realizing that my life was no longer at college, I told my dad what happened. I told him I’d gotten pregnant, that Asher was the father, and that I’d lost the pregnancy. I cried and sobbed as I explained there were two babies, that I’d lost his twin grandbabies, and he held me through my cries. That one tiny piece of information was something I treasured, something I knew that Asher didn’t, something I felt like, at the time, he didn’t deserve to know. Immature? Perhaps. Warranted? Absof*ckinlutely.
I was certain that Asher didn’t know there’d been two babies. One thing I wasn’t sure about though, was whether he knew that I’d seen him with that girl. I played that scene over and over in my mind a million times. In my head, I opened the door and saw that girl on top of him, his arm wrapped around her waist, my name staring back at me as his arm held her to him. But I didn’t make a sound and she never turned to look at me. And even though that was the worst day of my life, even though I saw him with another woman and hated him entirely too much, I always thought that if Asher had known I was there he would have come after me. Maybe now was the time for honest conversations and answers – for both of us.
I wiped the wetness from my face, appreciating the fact that he let me cry without trying to comfort me physically. It seemed that he at least understood my need for space. I don’t know if I was in denial or just lying to myself, but I should have known that if I came to this house he’d find me here. Maybe even my subconscious wanted me to talk to him. I turned back to him, trying not to look him in the eye.