Gentleman Sinner(113)

My gut tells me to stop him, so I do. I lift my hand and place it over his mouth, preventing him from finishing. I get it. I don’t need to hear the rest. ‘Enough.’

Theo has other ideas. ‘I lashed out,’ he mumbles against my hand before pulling it away. ‘Every punch he’d ever given me and Mum, I returned tenfold in that mad few minutes until he was unconscious. But I kept going. I couldn’t stop. Didn’t want to. I wasn’t going back to those days again. Not ever. So I made sure I finished the job.’ He drops his gaze, ashamed. ‘Mum found us.’ Theo’s jaw rolls. ‘From that day on, every time someone touched me, I jumped. I reacted. I had flashbacks and saw my father cuffing me, trying to groom me into a fighter. People were wary of me. It became instinctual to react, like a defence mechanism that I couldn’t hold back.’ His face twists in agony, his eyes closing. ‘But honestly, I liked it. If people feared me, they didn’t come close. They didn’t dare touch me.’ Blue pools full of awe gaze at me. ‘But you did. You dared.’

I can feel his pain. It’s potent, penetrating me to my bones. ‘I knew you weren’t a bad guy.’ He was forced to be this way. He can’t help it. But under the iron body and hard face is a soft, loving heart. I have that heart. It’s mine. ‘Were there no questions asked about your father? From the police?’

Theo shakes his head. ‘Andy covered for me. Or probably more for my mother. I knew she’d been involved with him for some time. As I got older, Dad’s punches seemed to get harder. Andy hated him. One call to him from my mother had everything dealt with. Dad had a lot of enemies. It wasn’t hard.’

My mind goes to another crime Andy has taken care of. Trystan. It’s been months since he disappeared, and not one person has come forward to report him missing. I had Andy check the records back in Manchester, too. Nothing. And he assured me, not for the first time, that Trystan’s body will never be found. Once again, he’s covered for Theo. And I’ll never be able to thank him enough.

Lifting my finger, I trace over the beads of the rosary cascading down his shoulder. ‘You got these as a reminder.’

Theo hums, relaxing under my touch. ‘I believed in God as a boy. Once I stopped going to Sunday school, bad things happened. My life wasn’t good any more. I still said the Lord’s Prayer every day, but I don’t think it was enough for him.’

‘You went back to the village you grew up in,’ I say, bringing the conversation round a full three-sixty. ‘That’s where you were.’

He nods mildly. ‘I went to church every morning. And I confessed my sins every evening. And still the guilt was there. It was too late for me. I’d abandoned him for too long.’ He blinks and laughs a little under his breath. ‘So I went to the club. I wanted to feel pain so intense I could feel nothing else. It didn’t work.’

I cave on the inside for him. His desperation, his pain, his crippling guilt. Nothing in the world could make me feel any sorrier. Pushing myself up, I straddle his lap and give him my hands to take to his shoulders. I hold on to them tightly, purposefully, as he regards me carefully. And I stare at him, determined. ‘I love you,’ I say, quickly placing my finger over his lips when they part. ‘If God thought it was too late for you, I wouldn’t be here. He wouldn’t have sent me to you.’ I take his hand and place it on my tummy, deciding that now is the time. I’ve held off for weeks, mainly to wrap my own mind around it, but also because I was worried about the gravity of it all. Babies are unpredictable. They have flailing limbs and they grow into toddlers that like to climb all over you.

Theo looks down at my tummy with a frown, and I go on, pulling in air to help me. ‘If God thought it was too late for you, he wouldn’t give you a new life to take care of.’

His eyebrows pinch in the middle. ‘What?’

‘I’m pregnant,’ I say, plain and clear, as I push his hand into my tummy. Theo’s eyes become progressively wider, his mouth dropping open, and I hold my breath, sitting back and waiting for it to sink in. While he stares at my stomach, I watch, fascinated, as his expression changes a hundred times, through countless emotions. There’s wonder, there’s shock, there’s definitely happiness, and a million others, but the most acute of them all, the one I have considered the most and prepared myself for, is the fear.

‘Izzy, you need to get off me.’ Theo pushes his back into the couch, distancing himself from me. ‘Please, you need to get up.’

I do what I’m told quickly and jump up from his lap, and Theo follows slowly after with a few uncomfortable hisses, starting to half stalk, half hobble around the lounge. ‘But I haven’t touched you in months.’ His hands come up to his hair and have a little tug. ‘Months, Izzy.’

‘Nine weeks, if you want specifics.’ I perch on the edge of the couch, my nervous hands wedged between my knees. I knew he would be shocked, but is he suggesting something here? ‘Theo, I hope you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.’

‘I don’t know what the fucking hell I’m thinking.’ He swings around aggressively, and he pays for the sharp movement, hissing and clenching his ribs. ‘Damn.’ He starts breathing deeply, straightening back up. ‘Izzy, I thought you were on the pill.’

‘I am. Was.’ I correct myself.