“Here!” I burst out, lunging forward to grab at the back of the driver’s seat. Judging by the way he muttered shit, I think I scared the poor guy with my sudden excitement. “Here, turn right here.”
A few yards later – and a few nervous glances from the cabbie – we pulled to a halt outside Amanda’s apartment building. I looked up at it, my gut clenching. Was Amanda living here because her father had shunned her? Had he disowned her because she’d fallen pregnant with my child? Was that why she’d called me? Because she had no support here apart from her sister?
If that was the case, I really wanted to have word with Charles Sinclair. To tell him he needed to stop being a dick about me. To tell him to get over the fact I wasn’t good enough for his daughter.
Pushing open the door of the cab, I noticed Mrs. Garcia was still in the window of her apartment. She watched me climb from the backseat. I smiled up at her. She didn’t smile back. In fact, she narrowed her eyes, turned her head to the side and made a spitting action.
Okay, so I didn’t have a fan there.
Despite that, I smiled up at her again as I walked the path to the entry. The eternal optimist. I was in a weird mental place. I was about to face the girl who had, let’s be blunt, lied to me via omission for the last eighteen months. Maybe even longer. A woman I’d believed with absolute conviction. A woman I loved.
Did I still believe that?
I didn’t know.
Did it have any bearing on what was about to happen when Amanda opened the door to me?
I didn’t know that either, but my gut said no. If there was another life in this world because of me, if another life existed because of me, then what I felt for Amanda, what I thought of Amanda, had no impact.
I climbed the stairs to her floor. Normally, I run up stairs. When you run up stairs full tilt, it’s a great cardio workout. Go hard or go home, remember? These stairs, this ascension . . . I focused on each individual step, each footfall, each planting of the ball of my foot on the concrete rise. For the first time since storming from Amanda’s home a lifetime ago, it dawned on me I was barefoot. My joggers were still in Amanda’s bathroom, along with my socks.
Rattled. Yeah. I was rattled. But ready. Ready for whatever came next.
When I knocked on her door, my heart smashed into my throat with enough force to K.O. a guy. I stared at the brass number and letter screwed to the wood as I waited for her to answer. 4C. Foresee. There was something prophetic about that.
Or perhaps life was just playing with me? Laughing at me? Perhaps life had a twisted sense of humor? Ha, you think you know what’s going to happen in your future, Brendon Osmond? You think you have some control over it? Didn’t foresee this, did you? Ha. Now who’s the optimist? Now who’s gravy?
I was about to knock again, my heart pounding harder in my throat, damn near deafening me with each thumping beat, when the door opened.
Amanda stood on the other side of the threshold. Her eyes were red and puffy. Her cheeks were wet. The tip of her nose pink. She caught her bottom lip with her teeth, studying me without saying a word. Haunted grief swam in her eyes. I couldn’t help but notice she didn’t release her grip on the doorknob, as if ready to close it again.
“So . . .” I began. And stopped. I had no fucking clue what to say. Maybe I should have planned this? My gut wasn’t coming to the party at all.
Amanda pulled a slow breath and let it out with a soft hitching whimper. “I’m sorry.”
I let out my own breath, a shaky sigh. “Think I should come in.”
She nodded, opening the door wider and stepping aside.
Walking into the living room, I cast my gaze about the empty space. “Where’s Chase?”
“She went looking for you. I suspect she’s always wanted to be in a high-speed taxi pursuit and you gave her the chance.”
A laugh hiccupped out of me, a nervous sound I’m pretty damn certain I’d never made before in my life. “So it’s very likely she’s out there at the moment chasing down some random taxi?”
Amanda’s answering smile was as nervous as my laugh. She nodded, hugging herself as she leaned her back against the closed door. “It is.”
I looked at her. Noted she’d replaced the towel with faded cut-off denim shorts and a loose black T-shirt while I’d been gone. Her hair hung about her face in damp strands. The makeup was gone from her face. She was beautiful. So beautiful. Gorgeous.
And she’d lied to me for over two years.
Another sigh tore from me and I crossed to the closest sofa and dropped into it. I met her gaze across the small room. “Okay, you need to explain things to me.”
She nodded again. “I do.”
“Firstly,” I said, mouth dry. “Were you pregnant when you told me we were over?”
“Yes.”
My chest tightened at the anguish in her whisper, even as a cold finger of anger traced up my spine. I looked at her, waiting for her to say something else. She didn’t.
My fist balled before I could stop it. Dropping my stare to my clenched fingers, I willed them open. “Is that why you ended us?”
“No.”
The answer cut at me, a physical pain I didn’t know how to deal with. “Did you know you were pregnant?”
“No. I found out a month later.”
My head roared, a storm of questions I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to hear the answers to them. But wanting and needing can be two very different things.
Raising my head, I looked at her again. “Why did you end us?”
Confusion flickered across her face. She rubbed at her arms, as if she was cold. “You’d just told me you loved me. You were the first guy who’d told me that who I actually believed. You were also the first guy I wanted to say I love you back to.”
I frowned. My gut churned. “So you ended us because we loved each other? Excuse me a moment for falling back on what may be clichéd thinking, but isn’t mutual love the reason to stay together?”
A wry laugh fell from her. “Bren, you were twenty-two. I was twenty. We were both still students, from opposite sides of the world. How were we meant to stay together?”
I ground my teeth. “We would have figured that out.”
“Do you remember when you told me? That you were in love with me? Do you remember that night?”
“I do. A guy doesn’t forget the first time he tells a girl he loves her. And when I’d told you I loved you, it was the first time I’d told anyone I loved them. Anyone. We’d been at La Jolla, on one of the beaches there, lying on a picnic blanket under the stars, listening to the waves break on the shore, doing nothing else but being relaxed, contented in each other’s company. It’d hit me, being there with you, that I’d never been more at peace, more happy and centered and present in my life, and it was because of you. Just that – a simple realization of a simple, undeniable fact.”
The memory flooded me with pain and mocking happiness so absolute I couldn’t draw a breath. The realization had rendered me equally moved that night. I’d laid there, looking at her, overwhelmed by the truth of what I felt for her, and said “I love you, Amanda.”
She’d studied my face for a long moment, the darkness of the night hiding her eyes from me, and then had pressed herself against me and kissed me until I was that fucking hard I was in pain.