My Best Friend's Girl (32 page)

“you can call me tiga if you want”

chapter 40

O
ne of my favorite parts of the day was the time right before Tegan went to bed, when she had her bath.

We’d often have a random chat as I sat on the floor beside the bath, handing her a washcloth and waiting to shampoo her hair. Luke never gave her a bath, and never offered to either; he didn’t want me to get the wrong impression about him and why he spent so much time in our company, I suppose. Even if he did offer, I would have turned him down because bath time was Kamryn and Tegan time, the most precious twenty minutes of our day.

Two months after Adele Day, Tegan and I had settled into a routine. We were used to each other. It’d been seven months since she’d died and Adele Day had cemented in both our minds that she wasn’t coming back. Beautifully written letters, her scent in her clothes, funny pictures, all of them lovely, all of them precious keepsakes of this person called Adele Brannon, but not her. Just fragments of the impression she’d left upon the earth. Tegan and I could look at those things as much as we wanted, but she wasn’t coming back, we had to get on with life and with each other.

Normality had settled on our lives. Luke spent more time with us with each passing week; he’d had a key quite early on, but now he spent almost every weekday here and even at weekends he didn’t go to his place in Alwoodley. Nate also came around a bit—despite the drive from his place to ours, he would drop by for half an hour or so, have a cup of tea, chat to Tegan, ignore Luke’s seething in the corner. Luke asked me a few times if Nate was going to sign the papers, which in my boyfriend’s mind meant Nate would then disappear. I’d always reply that I had no idea. I hadn’t asked Nate what his plans were because I didn’t want to push him and, since our confrontation in the street, we didn’t talk about those sort of things.

We had a good routine worked out, even if my heart did skip every time Nate walked in, but I knew that would stop as time went on and I got used to seeing him again. There was only one fly in our ointment. Or rather a huge elephant sitting on the table that every adult pretended they couldn’t see, especially since it tripled in size every time Nate dropped by.

Tegan scooped up a handful of white bubblebath foam and dumped it on my outstretched hand. I’d lowered my head to blow the bubbles at her when she decided to point out the elephant by asking, “Is Luke my daddy?”

I struggled to keep my voice steady while panic streaked through me. In all this time I hadn’t worked out what to say to her. The truth? Unveil Nate as the sperm donor who had brought her to life? Or lie and say I didn’t know him? That had been true until a few weeks ago. I hadn’t known the Nate who slept with Adele. He’d explained now. I did know him and I did know why. “Why do you ask that?”

“Regina Matheson said that everyone has a mummy and a daddy. And I said I only had a Mummy Ryn and a mummy who was in heaven and she said I had a daddy too. And then she said maybe Luke was my daddy. And I said no because he’s my friend. But then she said he might be. Is he?”

I am going to hurt this Regina Matheson, if I ever meet her. Or, as is most likely, give her parents a mouthful.

“Luke isn’t your daddy.”

“But I do have a daddy, don’t I? My teacher, Miss Lewis, said everyone has a daddy.”

“Yes. Yes, you do, Tiga.” My mouth dried, my heart buffeted itself against my ribcage.

Tegan stopped chasing bubbles with her hands and splashing with her feet, she sat very still as the bubbles disintegrated, pooling into oily patches on the cooling water. My shaky voice had alerted her that something was wrong and she asked, cautiously, “What’s his name?” Tegan’s face was flushed from being in the hot bath, while clumps of wet hair hung in tendrils around her cheeks as she waited for my reply.

I sighed, feeling my body tremble down into the breath as I bit my lower lip. “Nate,” I said quickly.

Tegan’s little hands came up and she wiped them across her eyes in surprise. “Mr. Nate?” she asked, blinking at me.

I nodded. “Yes, Mr.—I mean, Nate is your daddy.”

“Not Luke? Luke isn’t my daddy?”

I shook my head. “No, sweetie.”

“Really and truly?” She was disappointed.

I nodded again.

“Do I have to live at Mr. Nate’s house?” she asked after a tense silence.

“God, no!” I screeched. “You’re with me forever, Tegan. Never forget that. It’s always going to be me and you.”

“And Luke.”

“Erm, yeah.” Not as convincing as I would have liked.

“Are you going to marry Luke?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it.”

“If you married Luke, would he be my daddy? Would he be Daddy Luke?” She didn’t hide her happiness at that prospect.

“I suppose so,” I replied.

“Are you going to marry Mr. Nate?”

“No.” I was sure about that. Nate and I were not getting married. Or back together. It wasn’t even a possibility, no matter how much my heart skipped when he was around. It was over with Nate, really and truly, as Tegan would say.

“Why not?”

“Because Luke’s my boyfriend.”

“But you had the pretty dress.”

“I know.”

“Why is Mr. Nate my daddy?”

Did I really have to do the birds and the bees? Shouldn’t she be allowed a few more years of innocence? Shouldn’t I? That’s what I paid my taxes for, so someone else could go through the embarrassment of explaining the physicality of sex. I didn’t even know how birds and bees came into the whole reproduction thing.

Tegan blinked her wet eyelashes while she waited for an answer.

“Erm…” I began. I had to do the only other thing I did in these situations. “Do you mind Nate being your daddy?” Ask a diversionary question.

Tegan twisted her lips into a thinking pout and looked down at her bubbly water. She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. Mr. Nate is funny.” She scrunched up her nose and shook her head. “Luke doesn’t like him.”

“Did he say that?” I asked, ready to bawl him out for pushing Tegan into something she wasn’t involved in.

She shook her head. “No. He talks funny to Mr. Nate.” Tegan lowered her chin to her neck and deepened her voice. “Nate, you’re here again. How nice.” She started talking like Tegan again. “That’s what he says to Mr. Nate, all the time. That’s not very nice, is it?”

“Men are silly sometimes,” I replied.

“Mr. Nate looks at you. Sometimes, he smiles at you. You don’t see him or nothing. He likes you more than he likes me.”

“Nate likes us both.”

“Do you like Mr. Nate or Luke more?”

Now if I knew the answer to that question, I’d be sleeping better at night. “I like them both,” I informed Tegan. I put my hand under her chin, lifted her face, turned it left and then right. “But I like Tegan the most.”

She broke into a smile. She had such beautiful features, that cute little ski-jump nose, the big royal blue eyes and the exquisitely curved mouth that made her the image of Adele when she grinned. She took her head back, and scooped up some bubbles, blew them at me, covering my red sweater in bubbly white spots.

“Mummy Ryn, I’ll think about this,” she said, as serious as a judge at sentencing time.

“OK,” I agreed. If it wasn’t Tegan talking I would have scoffed at the gravity of her tone, at her precociousness. But I didn’t laugh because all she was doing was reminding me that she was a thought-filled child and she needed to examine this new information properly.

“I don’t know if I want Mr. Nate to be my daddy,” she explained. “I’ll think about this.”

I nodded my agreement. And I would have to think about how to tell her, that, like it or not, want it or not, Nate was her daddy. That was something neither of us could change.

chapter 41

N
ate was hunched over a cup of coffee in the Horsforth Coffee House on Town Street, his head resting on one hand, his eyes staring into the depths of the white coffee cup. When I’d rung to arrange this meeting, I’d suggested we meet in central Leeds but he’d said he didn’t mind driving over to my neck of the woods. When I walked in and found him sitting with his coffee as though he’d been there for hours, I was reminded of our first date.

I arrived at his table and he raised his head. My stomach flipped in horror. He looked like a ghoul, a hideous shadow version of himself. The dark scores under his eyes told me he wasn’t sleeping, his cheekbones starting to poke through his skin meant he probably wasn’t eating. The dark stubble on his chin revealed he hadn’t bothered to shave in days. His fingernails were picked into a ragged state. And his slow, lethargic movements showed that just sitting up was an effort.

He wasn’t taking care of himself and that hurt me. He was precious to me. He was Tegan’s father after all. I was getting used to that. Starting to accept that what happened, happened. I couldn’t change it. I wasn’t sure I would change it if I could. Like Adele said in her letter, Tegan wouldn’t be Tegan if Nate hadn’t fathered her. But he was also precious to me because he was Nate.

“I’m not late, am I?” I asked.

“No, I was just excited about seeing you, even though you did sound very serious on the phone, so I got here early.”

I sat down. Close up the devastation was more marked, more ingrained into him. This wasn’t an overnight occurrence, this had been building up for some time.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

He nodded dismissively. “I’m fine, gorgeous. So, what was the serious tone on the phone about?”

I hesitated, wanting to question him further about his health instead of starting this conversation. The state he was in, this was the last thing he needed to hear, but I had to do this. He was important, but Tegan was number one. Everything I did had to be for her benefit. “Nate,” I moistened my lips, scared of how much this would hurt him, “it’s been nice having you around, seeing you, but I want you to sign the papers to allow me to proceed with adopting Tegan.”

Nate sagged in his seat, staring at the table in misery.

“I know you like her, but not enough to be her full-time dad. And she needs the stability that will come from me adopting her. She’s six years old in a few weeks and in this past year she’s lost her mum, moved to another city, discovered what having a dad is like, discovered who her real dad is, and that’s on top of all the daily things she has to contend with…I just want to give Tegan the sort of stability where she knows that I’m not going to leave her. You understand, don’t you?”

Nate nodded his tired head, stared into the depths of his cup as though he might find solace there.

“So you’ll sign?”

Another tired, dejected nod.

“Can I still come and see her?” he asked tentatively.

“Of course,” I said. “You have to stick around, you’re part of her life now. It’d traumatize her if you disappeared. I mean, she’s still freaked out that you’re her father, that’s why she looks at you a bit funny, but she constantly talks about you. She likes you, Mr. Nate. A lot. I don’t blame her.”

“Don’t,” he muttered with a shake of his head. “Please don’t be nice to me. It just reminds me how much I screwed things up.”

“I never thought I’d see the day when you asked me not to be nice to you. Phrases you never thought you’d hear, or what?”

“Ryn, do you really think I’d have stuck around if you were as nasty as you seem to think you were?”

I shrugged at him. Who knew how the male mind worked?

“You were so incredible to me. You were always looking after me—making sure I ate properly, you did my washing, came to every one of my work functions even though you hate those things. I remember how many times you’d stay up until I got home from work when I was on the late shift. You were always encouraging me, I believed I could do anything when I was with you. I sometimes used to wonder why you didn’t want children when you were so good at taking care of people, not just me, Adele too…” He closed his eyes, dug his hands into his hair. “Even when you wanted someone else you weren’t horrible to me. You just stopped relating to me in the same way. That’s how I knew. Every day was just flatness.”

“Nate, let’s not…What you described was this perfect relationship and it wasn’t. I drove you into someone else’s bed. I made you—”

BAM! Nate slammed his hand onto the tabletop, making me jump. “Stop it!” he snapped. “Stop being so hard on yourself. That was what drove me crazy about you. You were so hard on yourself. Always blaming yourself for things you had no control over, thinking anything bad was down to you. You didn’t make me do anything—I cheated on you. It wasn’t your fault.” He calmed himself with a few deep breaths, softened his voice. “It wasn’t your fault. I did it, I screwed things up. Not just with you, with Adele too.”

“Anyway, I’m meeting Tegan and Luke down at the park,” I said, injecting sunshine into my voice while I changed the subject. I wasn’t talking about this now. I couldn’t. If I carried on thinking about these things, I’d start to crack up again. Before Christmas I’d been on the verge of a breakdown; crying in Nate’s arms had been a part of it. Thankfully I’d been able to shut the door on my emotions again before they took over, before the deep scores of grief on my mind were allowed to overwhelm me. I wasn’t going to risk opening myself up to all that hurt by talking with Nate about it. “So I’d better be off.”

“OK,” Nate replied. “Do you want me to drive you?”

“Sure.”

We left the café, and walked under a gray sky mottled with rain-swollen clouds toward the car park where Nate had left his car. This probably wasn’t the best time to be going to the park, but Luke and Tegan were convinced they’d have at least an hour to run around before the heavens opened. As we reached his silver Audi, Nate’s footsteps slowed to a halt, then he spun to me. “I…” he began, then stopped. His arms reached out, pulled me into a hug. His hands stroked down my back, then slowly caressed their way up again. “Do you ever think about us being together?” he murmured against my ear.

I more than thought about it, I fantasized, I hoped, I wanted…Nate’s mouth grazed against my neck as he snaked a hand around my waist. His lips against my cold skin increased in pressure. More neck kisses. He knew I had no resistance to kisses on my neck. My knees weakened and he pressed my body closer to his. I lost my mental footing and suddenly I was tumbling into an emotional time machine. Back to the days when we’d stand at train stations, in the street, sometimes even in supermarket queues, necking and not caring what anyone thought. Kissing like we’d only just met. Laughing when people shouted “Get a room!” at us. Nate’s free hand went into my hair as he kissed my neck harder. “I won’t leave a love bite,” he murmured and reality and the present slammed itself against my head.

“Stop, stop,” I said, pushing him away until he stepped back, creating a safe distance between us. We stared at each other, both of our chests heaving as we gulped down air.

“No more. This can’t happen,” I announced breathlessly.

“Not ever.”

“I know this can’t happen.” He closed his eyes, his face scrunched up. He pressed the heels of his hands on his eyes. “I know. It’s all going wrong…Everything…It’s going wrong…I’ve been forced to take two weeks off work because I was stuffing up. Not concentrating.” My heart lurched for him. He was always professional, no matter what was going on in his life, nothing stopped him working…I hadn’t realized how fragile he was. “I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time,” he blundered on. “Instead of sleeping I lie awake at night thinking about us.” He kneaded his face with his knuckles, leaving white marks on his sallow skin. “Wanting us to be together again…I know you’re with him. And that’s the worst part. I like him. He hates me, I know, but I like how much he cares about Tegan…” Nate collapsed into a crouch, his hands still pressed onto his eyes. “Do you remember our first huge fight? You went storming to Adele’s. Remember? I came round after you but she was having none of it. Do you remember? She went, ‘If you two split up, neither of you will get custody of me—I’ll go live with Kam’s parents.’ Do you remember?” I nodded to his bent head, I remembered. “It doesn’t seem right that you’re back in my life and she’s not around.”

Nate was grieving. I hadn’t even thought how Adele’s death would affect him. If I did give it one second’s thought, I’d have known that there was no way he could be over it because he had been bereaved too. She was like a member of his family and she had died. Of course he’d be mourning. I was still blaming myself for what happened before her death, and we’d made the first tentative step toward peace before it happened. The last words Nate had said to Adele were that he hated her. That he’d never forgive her. The guilt of that must have been consuming him; burning him up from the inside out.

How had I missed that? Especially when he’d been trying to tell me he was suffering. He’d told me the night we went to dinner; he’d told me when he offered to pay for Tegan; he’d told me when I asked him why he was making an effort with Tegan; he’d told me the night we had our confrontation in the street. Nate had been asking me for help, begging me to see his pain, and I hadn’t heard him. I was meant to know him and I hadn’t seen he was falling apart. My baby was falling apart.

“Tegan is so like Adele. I look at her and I see Adele, staring at me. But she’s like you too. She says things like you do. And she has your mannerisms. Have you seen, she plays with the lock of hair by her ear if she’s tired, like you do? Have you noticed that?”

To be honest, I hadn’t. It wasn’t important right now, though. He was. I bobbed down beside him, slipped an arm around his shoulders. “Why didn’t you tell me you were feeling this bad, Nate?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said, with the same intonation as Tegan when she was upset.

“Come on, let’s go to the park, have some fun and take our minds off all this.”

“OK,” he whispered.

“What’s he doing here?” Luke demanded in a low angry whisper.

His eyes had doubled in size when he saw me arrive at the park with Nate and once he’d helped Tegan off the swing he’d glared at me until I went over to him, leaving Nate and Tegan together. Nate sat on the red swing Tegan had vacated, staring at the ground.

“Nate’s in a bad way. He’s had a bit of a breakdown,” I explained.

“This is meant to be our time, I can’t believe you’ve brought him,” Luke hissed.

“He’s suffering! He’s not coping with Adele’s death very well.” At that, Luke’s glower softened a fraction. “I didn’t realize how much pain he was in until earlier—he’s not eating or sleeping. He’s having trouble at work. He’s falling apart, I’m really worried about him.”

Luke sighed, then reached out, pulled me into his arms. “I’ve got you to support me,” I muttered into Luke’s chest. “Nate hasn’t got anyone. So I have to be there for him. He was one of my best mates once, I can’t let him down.”

“I know,” Luke conceded. “I don’t like it but I do understand.” He kissed the top of my head, then kissed my mouth. As we returned to the swings, we both halted when we saw Tegan staring at Nate with big earnest eyes, as though viewing an exhibit in a zoo. She often found adults curious objects of study because they were so different to her. Other children were intrigued by other children, Tegan was always staring at big people, trying to uncover their secrets by observing their behavior.

Eventually, she reached out and patted Nate on the knee until he turned his head to look at her. “What’s the matter, Mr. Nate?” she asked quietly. “Are you ill?”

Nate smiled at her and shook his head. “No, I’m just tired.”

“Oh. Do you want to sleep in my bed? It’s very pretty.”

“Thanks, but I’ve got a bed at my house.”

Tegan twisted her mouth together and chewed the inside of her lower lip, then her forehead crinkled into a frown; she was thinking very hard. “You can stay at my house, Mr. Nate,” she eventually declared. “You can wear Luke’s pajamas and sleep in my bed. I’ll sleep in Mummy Ryn’s bed. Mummy Ryn won’t get cross. She never gets cross.”

Nate smiled at her. “Thanks, Tegan, but I think it’s better I sleep at my house.”

The weather started to break, a few spots of rain falling down on us, which gave me an excuse to interrupt. That moment, sweet as it was, was probably wrenching for Luke because she was relating to Nate how she related to him; and making Nate feel guilty for the fact that she was like Adele. “All right, I think it’s time we went home, boys and girls. It’s going to start raining,” I said.

“O-OK,” Tegan said, rolling her eyes theatrically at Nate.

“Are you going to come to my house for your dinner, Mr. Nate?” she asked. Nate looked up at Luke, who was standing beside me. Luke shrugged and glanced away, that was as close to “Come over” as he’d get.

“OK, Tegan, I’ll come.”

She grinned. “Come on, then.” She held out her hand to him. He took it and stood up. “You can call me Tiga if you want,” she informed him, nodding to emphasize her point.

“Not T, Luke calls me T. But you can call me Tiga.”

“OK, Tiga, thanks.”

Tegan grinned another wide grin at him and then started off down the path, pulling Nate along with her. I slipped my hand into Luke’s, our fingers interlacing closely, as we followed Nate and Tegan home.

Things could work out between us four,
I thought as we headed home.
They really could.
If I didn’t keep touching my neck, running my fingers over the echo of Nate’s kisses. If I didn’t have the distinct feeling that I was falling for him again.