Mind Lies (24 page)

I sigh. “That’s just it, P. They’re words. They’ve always been just words, and I don’t for even a minute think that I can get over how I felt that day when he was in the hospital. I don’t think I can get over not being wanted.”

“Babe, listen to him. It sounds like you guys haven’t done a lot of actual talking, and I think that if you do, you might gain a whole new perspective.”

Placing my hair into a knot, I mutter, “I’m letting you go now. Not because I don’t love you, but because your practicality is starting to scare me.”

“Cheese and rice, just talk to him. Love you.”

“Love you too, Lady.”

Chapter Thirty-one

I feel as if I’ve sat here for fucking ever waiting for Jerri to come out of the house. I don’t mind waiting for her, but I’m anxious.

I need her to talk to me.

I need her to hear me out.

If she doesn’t, it’s just going to take that much longer to get her to see that I’m dead fucking serious about wanting her in my life.

I’ve always wanted her in my life.

But my actions spoke louder than words: I had been absent too often for too long.

Never again.

When she finally comes out showered and dressed almost an hour later, I’m nearly lost for words. I used to sit and watch her sleep before leaving in the middle of the night. I know how beautiful she is. In the daylight, she’s as beautiful as ever.

The day is cloudy, as are most in Ireland. I wait for her to take a seat next to me, but she continues down the steps toward the path leading to Paddy and Nessa’s house.

“I’d really like to talk with you, Lass,” I tell her as I stand. She barely slows and responds, “Then you’ll have to talk on the way to the house. If you haven’t noticed, I barely fit in the shirt I have on and my pants won’t button up. Ness called and said the clothes I ordered online are here, and I’d rather not walk around with my pants undone.”

I look down Sure enough, her small, round belly is poking out the bottom of her shirt, and the button on the pants she’s wearing is being held together by what looks like a hair tie.

“I can drive us,” I tell her as I jog down the steps.

She doesn’t stop. “I walk there every day. I like it.”

Clearly ending the discussion, I follow in step behind her. It isn’t lost on me that I’m following another woman, but the difference this time is that it’s not toward danger, or death.

It’s toward the very person who can give me life.

We walk in silence for the near-mile to the main house, where Paddy and Nessa greet Jerri with welcoming arms. I’m not near as fortunate with the two people I consider parents.

“Ye pull yer head outta yer arse?” Paddy asks from where he stands in the doorway, arms crossed, blocking my entrance.

“I’m workin’ on it, ol’ man.”

Nessa slaps him on the arm. “I would never keep ye from yer home, Locklin. But mark my words, me boy: ye upset Jerrilyn while she’s carryin’ that bairn, ye’ll be seein’ what’s on the other side of my wooden spoon. And I ain’t talkin’ about the handle; I’m talkin’ ’bout the cast iron pan that sits under it.”

Raising her eyebrows to drive her point home, I nod and say, “I won’t upset her, Ness.”

I’m going to upset her. That’s a given. But if I told Ness I’d try, that wouldn’t be good enough. She nods and puts her arm around my shoulders. “Come on in. I just made some tea.”

Paddy watches me, as though I were about to steal something, until we settle at the kitchen table. Nessa begins piling a dinner-sized amount of food on our plates, and it’s not even lunch.

“So much better,” Jerri says when she comes out of the bathroom dressed in a loose paisley-print shirt and those tight, black, stretchy pants all women seem to fucking wear these days.

She turns around to grab a cup, and my eyes zero in on her ass, which has grown at least two sizes. I love every extra inch of it.

“Fuck!” I curse when Paddy slaps me on the back of the head.

Hard.

“Ye don’t look at ’er like that,” Paddy grumbles.

“Watched you look at Ness like that for the past twenty-seven years, you horny, old bastard,” I shoot back.

He smirks. “Nessa’s mine to look at. Jerrilyn quit belongin’ to ya the day ye broke her heart.”

I grumble, making sure the women aren’t listening. But they’re too preoccupied going through Jerri’s new clothes. “Fuck’s sake, Paddy. I’m tryin’ to fix it. Until she actually lets me talk to her, there’s fuck all I can do other than what I’m doing now.”

Paddy pops a tart in his mouth and mutters, “So ye just keep playin’ with yer ’gina then?”

“Haven’t got a ’gina to play with, you grumpy prick.”

He nods. “Could’ve fooled me, Lad. Ye called Ness to ask fer cookin’ lessons this mornin’. Think she’s got some extra hair rollers in her dressin’ table if yas are doin’ makeover’s next.”

I sigh and resist the urge to run my hands through my hair, which has grown past my ears. “Jealous, Paddy? You’re gettin’ a little thin on the top. That why you always keep your hat on?”

He scowls and barks, “Mind yer elders, smart arse.”

“You mind yer mouths. I won’t have yas talkin’ like that when my grandbaby gets here,” Nessa chirps before she and Jerri take a seat at the table. Since Nessa’s word is law around here, we talk about mundane things like the boats and the weather as we eat and drink tea. When we finish, I gather Jerri’s things, two boxes full of new clothes, and follow her home.

***

“Why did you go see Cooper?” I ask Locklin later that afternoon. After I put all my new clothes in the wash, I settle in with my feet up on the large sofa as Locklin tidies up his mess from cooking breakfast this morning.

He wipes his hands on the towel and comes into the living room with a beer for himself and a water for me. Taking a seat on the other end of the sofa, he answers, “It’s like that saying, ‘You don’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.’ That’s the best way for me to describe it. I’ve lost a lot of time with you, Jerri. And that’s on me. I know it is. I’ll work hard to get that time back, Lass. But I need to know where you’ve been first.”

I tilt my head, mildly confused. He carries on. “I know you better than I know anyone, Jerri. But those people were a part of you, and I never made the time to care about that. I never made time to dig deeper, to get to know that part of you better—who it is you are with them. I can’t take back what I’ve done and how I’ve acted for the past ten years, but if I learned anything from getting shot and waking up in that hospital, it’s that I need to try harder.”

They’re just words, Jerri.

Placing my water on the table, I clasp my hands together and tell him, “Locklin, I appreciate the effort. I really do. I’m grateful you want to be here, to be a part of our child’s life. But that doesn’t include a romantic relationship with me.”

He closes his eyes, pained. “I was fighting for the wrong thing, Lass.” Then, he opens them again and turns to face me. “The wrong person. I think I knew that before, but the guilt—fuck, Jerri—the guilt eats at me.”

“What are you saying, Locklin?”

Leaning his head back against the couch, he looks to the ceiling then closes his eyes. “She called me that day,” he whispers.

I swallow. “Siobhan?”

He nods. “I hadn’t talked to her and had been avoiding her calls because she was always with the twins, or the gang, stoned out of her fuckin’ tree.” Shaking his head, he adds, “I hated that, Jer. I absolutely hated those drugs because I felt like I wasn’t enough, like I couldn’t give her enough. So she needed to find what she was missing elsewhere.”

Reaching out, I put my hand on his shoulder. “I think addiction effects everyone differently, Lock. If she got that hooked that fast, I don’t think there’s anything you could have done about it. That’s not on you—that’s on her.”

I give him a squeeze and place my hand back in my lap, but he reaches out and places his on my foot, needing the contact to finish his story.

“I answered the call because I always did. I may have turned down hanging out with her near the end, but I always answer when she called. As usual, she sounded fucked up, hadn’t gone to bed in who knows how long. So when she asked me to meet her at the docks, I told her no. I had no desire to hang out with her and those useless fucks she spent time with.”

“You think that if you had gone, you could have saved her,” I softly say.

Nodding, he tilts his head my way, eyes pained. “Yes, Lass. I do. So when I finally did find her later that night, it made it that much worse.”

“Her death is not on your shoulders, Locklin. Did she call you to help her? To get her out of there?”

“No.” 

“Had you have gone down there, do you think she would have left with you?”

“No,” he whispers.

“Then it doesn’t sound like there’s a whole lot you could have done. She made her choices, and though they were shitty ones—and no woman deserves what happened to her—she still chose the path she walked.”

Rubbing his hands over his face, he sighs and lifts his head from the couch. “What I’m trying to tell you is that something broke in me that day, Jerri. I felt inferior, scared, and fucking useless as an eighteen-year-old. What happened played a great role in shaping me into who I am. But, Jerrilyn . . .” He pauses. My eyes meet his. “Never had I known true fear until you left my hotel room that night . . . and ended up in the hospital. It fucking gutted me, Lass. What I thought was fear as eighteen-year-old boy holds no weight next to what I felt when I got that call from Bryan. It hurt me to argue with you to get you to leave that night. But damn it, Jerri, I nearly died from fucking heart failure when Bryan called me.”

He gets up and starts pacing. “And worse, I couldn’t fucking see you because I was on a goddamn ship in the middle of the ocean. Bryan didn’t call any of your friends because we were worried that
they
, Yakov’s cronies, could still be watching you. So we hired the PI and his team to look out for you while we tried to figure out what the fuck was going on, if Yakov’s crew had left Boston. It was one big clusterfuck, and the whole time I was drowning, Jerri. Fucking drowning.”

He spins to look at me. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to look at you and not touch you? Do you have any idea how bloody hard it is to watch the light go out in your eyes, to not be able to put it back there? It’s painful, Lass! But while it was killing me inside, all I could think about was you. And if you knew what I was doing, and that I’d been followed, you’d try to run with me, again.”

I wipe the tears from underneath my eyes and ask, “And you didn’t want me with you. I get it, Locklin.”

“No, Lass.” He vehemently shakes his head. “You would have followed me to the pits of hell, and I didn’t want that for you. You made a family with your friends at the shop. That’s more than I ever gave you, and if I tore you away from that, I knew you’d hate me. It may not have happened immediately, but it would fucking happen. How could I do that to you? How could I ask you to give up everything for me, again?”

He sits on the couch and brackets my legs with his arms. “I couldn’t, Jerri, because it’s fucking selfish of me. And I didn’t want to be responsible for someone else’s death. I didn’t want to be responsible if you weren’t fuckin’ happy, if you were to wake up one day realizing I wasn’t enough for you.”

I let out a humorless laugh through my tears. “You stupid, stupid man.”

Pushing his hands away, I get up from the couch and look down at the man in front of me, a man who has said all the right things but remains completely fucking clueless.

My pretty and reckless.

Or at least he used to be.

“I didn’t stay with you out of obligation or lack of direction. I didn’t follow you, stick by you, and be there for you just because I loved you. Even I’m aware that love isn’t always enough. I did it because
you
were my family, Locklin. You were the first person to make me feel.” Wiping my cheeks, I finish. “You don’t get to pick and choose who you have that feeling with, Locklin. It chooses you.”