My Best Friend's Girl (27 page)

chapter 34

T
he after-work crowd, people who stumbled out of offices, shops, train stations, other places of employment and into the nearest bar, was something I used to be a part of. Betsy, Ruby, me, and a few other people from Angeles would often head to a bar near the store and drink our hard-earned wages. Since I’d inherited Tegan, the circle of friends whom I saw outside of work had been whittled away to…Luke.

I pushed my way through the huddle of bodies standing in the trendy bar Paragon, in central Leeds. Some of the people I sidled past still had their winter coats on, most stood protectively over their bags, and everyone had some kind of drink in their hands. I’d forgotten how packed these places got, how the air hummed with conversation and the atmosphere was tinted blue by smoke. I searched through the gaps in the bodies for Nate. We were having a quick drink because he was meeting friends in Leeds that evening. I spotted him, sitting at a table in a corner, staring into a half-drunk pint, a glass of white wine for me opposite him. It took me back to the times we used to meet after work. He’d get there first, buy me a drink and then I would show up, buy Adele a drink, and then she, who finished work last, would arrive.

I’d barely swallowed the first mouthful of the first glass of wine I’d had in ages when Nate asked, “Are you going to tell Tegan I’m her father?”

His question reminded me why I liked being around Luke. Luke was normality. There were no big swooping loops of emotion with Luke. Normality didn’t carry a kick of excitement, but when your life was a constant plunging spiral of emotion, where one minute you were in a side-clutching fit of laughter and the next you were digging your fingernails into your palms to stop yourself from sobbing, there was a lot to be said for normality. Ordinariness was a sought-after commodity. One that Nate and I didn’t trade in anymore. With us, it was something big and dramatic, like this.

“I don’t know,” I replied. I set down my glass on the table, traced the grain of the knotted wood with my finger. “Tegan’s a smart girl, she’s knows you’re hanging around for a reason.” Twice Nate had dropped round to our place since his unexpected visit last Saturday—first of all to give me the details of the bank account he’d set up for Tegan. He’d deposited three thousand pounds in it as promised. Two nights later he’d brought round the cash card that came with the account. Tegan had been cautious around him, stared at him with guarded eyes as she asked him tentative questions about his job, warily answered his inquiries about school. Luke hadn’t been happy about Nate’s visits, but he hadn’t complained because he was desperate for Nate to sign himself out of our lives.

“Is that how you see it, me hanging around?” Nate asked. “Like a bad smell?”

“Don’t be like that, Nate. I just don’t know if she’s ready to hear that you’re her father.”

Nate drained his pint, but made no move to get a refill. One drink always meant one with him.

“For Tegan, ‘Daddy’ is something she didn’t have for the first years of her life and now…”

He didn’t raise his eyes from staring at his pint glass. “Go on, say it.”

“And now, ‘Daddy’ is Luke. Not that she’s ever said that, he’s just stepped into that role in her life. She’s completely devoted to him.”

Nate raised his head, pinned me to the spot with his navy blue gaze. He was going to ask me about Luke; he was going to ask if I was devoted to Luke too. If I loved him. But instead of saying anything, Nate sat back suddenly, stretching out his muscular frame. His mouth was a line, his face a blank, the only part of him that did anything were his eyes, which bored into me. I swallowed, felt my heart rate skip up a couple of notches. It was unnerving how he was able to do that to me. Very few people could unsettle me like Nate did. “I’m seeing someone,” he said.

I’d been bringing my wineglass to my mouth and this revelation caused me to accidentally bash it against my teeth. I wasn’t expecting that. In my mind, I’d always hoped he’d never go near another woman, in the vain hope that I would return. I lowered my glass, unable to put any kind of spin on my distress that he’d moved on. I had moved on—I had a boyfriend and a child—you couldn’t move on any further than that, could you? “Oh,” I uttered.

“I’ve only been seeing her a couple of weeks,” Nate revealed.

Since he saw me again. Oh God. Did that mean seeing me must have reminded him that reality doesn’t match fantasy; that I wasn’t everything as he used to believe?

“She’s one of the producers at the radio station.” She saw him every day. They probably flirted over the kettle while making coffee, snogged when they went to lunch, shagged after evening drinks. “She’s nice, you’d like her.”

“Let’s not play this game, Nate, it makes us both look pathetic,” I snapped.

“All right,” he agreed, dropping his gaze.

We sat in silence, the buzz of our fellow drinkers vibrating over us. I hadn’t asked Nate what he’d gotten up to in the preceding years. I’d assumed he was single because he’d tried to kiss me the night we went to dinner, but what had he done in the years since we’d parted? Had he shagged around, or settled down with someone else? I had no right to ask. It wasn’t my business. I was seeing him for one reason only—to get him to sign away his rights to Tegan. Not to torture myself about who he slept with. “Why are you doing this, Nate?” I asked, nudging the conversation in a safer direction. “Why are you so interested in Tegan?”

“Well, it’s not for the reason that you and no doubt everyone else thinks.”

“And what’s that?”

“That I’m using her to get to you.”

“I don’t think that.”

“Right, and that never crossed your mind, did it?”

I lowered my gaze as shame burnt up my face. He was right, of course. That thought had occurred to me—more than once—because Nate was usually so uninterested in children. The reality was, I knew Nate wasn’t like that. He wasn’t devious by nature. That was why I had been destroyed by what he’d done. I couldn’t comprehend, couldn’t compute how Nate—solid, dependable, adoring Nate—had cheated on me. It just wasn’t him.

“I’m doing this because she’s my responsibility,” Nate enlightened. “You know I take my responsibilities seriously. I even take responsibility for that night with Adele. She tried to blame herself but I was there too. I…” Nate stopped talking, probably because I was trembling. The thought of Adele had set me off. I was lurching into grief, teetering on the edge of falling into the abyss of pain. I hadn’t realized until this moment that today was a bad day. A pain day. A day when even the slightest thing would dismantle me. Days like this were rare; most of the time I could put that debt to grief to one side and carry on, but on days like today, even thinking about Adele could paralyze me. The memory of her lying still and cold would crowd out all other thoughts and I would start to shake, while my stomach was crushed with nausea and my eyes would moisten.

“Sorry,” Nate whispered. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Did you talk about it a lot, then?” I asked, calming myself.

“No, it wasn’t like that. I was going to…” He stopped again but his expression—shocked by what had come out of his mouth—revealed all I needed to know.

“You were going to leave me.”

“We have to put this into context, Kam. Ryn. Emotions were way off the scale; my head was all over the place. Me and you were…”

“You were going to finish with me? For Adele? You wanted to be with Adele?” My voice rose with every word, people around us glanced over but I didn’t care. She never told me this. When she asked me to take on her child,
his
child, she never said that Nate wanted to be with her instead of me.

“Kamryn, stop it,” Nate commanded, his voice stern with barely restrained anger. “I was going to finish it because you were in love with someone else. Or have you forgotten that?”

I was like a rabbit caught in headlights: unable to move, unable to believe what he’d said. “This is why we need to talk about this properly,” Nate said gently. “You don’t want to right now, which is fine, but we can’t discuss things out of context. There were so many things going on, and I was so low at that time.”

“But…” I began, then realized I couldn’t deny it without lying.

It was a stupid flirtation with someone from work. He (I can’t even remember his name now, he was so insignificant) was someone who came from our Edinburgh branch to work with us for six months. We clicked almost instantly, had the same sense of humor and shared a lot of views, and so we became friends. We went to lunch together, had drinks after work and flirted with each other, but nothing more. When he returned to Scotland, we didn’t even keep in touch. It meant nothing, and I hadn’t realized that Nate had picked up on it. That he had any clue I’d had feelings for someone else. “I didn’t do anything,” I reassured him. “I never cheated on you.”

“I know you didn’t,” Nate replied. “It was never about that. I thought I’d lost you and I wanted to cut my losses and get out. Adele convinced me not to.”

What, by sleeping with you?

“And no, not by sleeping with me, I know that’s what you were thinking. She said some simple but truthful things. And that made me decide to keep trying with you, to not give up. She’s so wise…She
was
so wise.
Was…
I keep forgetting she’s gone. That she’s…”

Dead. That cold, heavy word that was so brutal and final. “Passed away” and “gone” were transitional words. They said that she’d done something to not be here anymore, she didn’t just stop. End. Become “dead.”

“So do I. Not when I’m at home, but you know, at work and stuff. I’ll be carrying on as normal, and then I’ll get a call from Tegan and I’ll remember and I’ll want to stop. It doesn’t seem right sometimes to be carrying on life as normal. To laugh, to enjoy myself. Even to be able to go to work when she can’t. I don’t know how to describe it…I don’t get to speak to her ever again. And you don’t realize how long forever is until you can’t do something. Especially when it’s…”
When it’s my fault,
I should have added. When I caused so much heartache by not speaking to her, when I got my wish and didn’t have to speak to her ever again.

I had right on my side when I cut her out of my life. She’d hurt me and I couldn’t speak to her. Adele had no one else, though. And I knew that. I had my family who, for their sins, loved me, would support me if it came down to it. But Adele didn’t. I’d robbed her of the one person she relied upon. Adele’s last few months were empty and lonely when they shouldn’t have been. That was my fault.

Anguish settled on Nate’s face. “I have to tell you something…” he said gravely. He sat forward, rested his elbows on the table, hiding his face in his hands momentarily. “Adele texted me six months before she died, asked me to come and see her. I wouldn’t, I was settled up here, and even if I wasn’t, there was no way I was going to see her after everything. She rang me then, and I avoided her calls. She ended up blocking her number and ringing me. She asked if I could look after Tegan for a while because she was going into the hospital. She said Tegan would stay with me because she knew me and there was no one else. She was begging me and I wouldn’t.” He paused, swallowed a mouthful of emotion. “I said there was no way on earth I’d do anything for her, especially not look after her child. Even while I was doing it I could hear how horrible I was being but I wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t. She kept saying she was sorry and that if I’d give her a chance she’d make it up to me, she just needed me to do this one thing. That’s when I told her I’d hate her till the day she died.”

I couldn’t imagine Nate being so nasty. He had the capacity for it, obviously. We all had the capacity for it. When he and I had fought he’d said evil things, but he’d never meant them. He and I were nasty to each other because we were certain it wouldn’t break us up. But to be so vicious to someone and mean it…I couldn’t imagine that from Nate.

“That’s the other reason I’m doing this. I don’t know what I would have done if Adele had told me she was dying, but I want to make up for how much I let her down. We were like a family once, the four of us, and now I’ll do anything I can do to make her daughter’s life easier.”

“You’re not doing this because she’s your flesh and blood?”

Nate cast his eyes to the table. “I’d love to say it was,” he admitted. “And, you’d think that having seen her again and spoken to her and knowing we’re related, I’d feel something, but no. I do like her, she’s a good kid, but there’s no genetic pull. I don’t look at her and feel the miracle of life has moved from me to her…But that might change, the more time I spend with her.”

“So you’re sticking around?”

He nodded slowly. “For now.”

I drained the last of my wine, put the glass down as Nate pushed his chair out. “Hadn’t you better be getting back? Tegan and Luke will be wondering where you are.”

As I watched Nate shrug on his coat and wind his black scarf around his neck,
inamorato
flashed into my mind. I was jolted. The thought of the word was followed by the memory of the first time we’d slept together. The slide of his lips, the shape of his blue eyes, his slight ski-jump nose all still gave me a kick deep inside, and even though he wasn’t, he still felt like
inamorato
. Lover. I bet his new woman felt this too. I bet she got that jump of excitement every time he walked in a room. Every time she thought about their first kiss, I knew her knees turned to mush. When they made love, I was sure she felt deep in her soul that he was The One.

Was it the same for him? Was he in love with her too? Actually, I realized, that’s probably why he wanted to meet me for a drink, he was killing time before a date. Before he scuttled off to make love and a new set of memories with his new woman.

“So, you’ve got a hot date tonight, then?” I asked with a laugh. I managed to make it sound genuine, that I didn’t mind being a space filler.

“I wouldn’t exactly call it hot, we’re going to dinner.”

“Oh.”

“Just dinner. Not all dates end back at my place, you know.”

“OK, have a nice time.”