Chapter 14
Kane was on his knees, cupping the part of himself which until a few seconds ago had been so happy. She was shouting something from the door, but his ears were roaring from her very professional punches to his head. He put out the hand that was holding the bookshelves to keep him from collapsing to the floor and tried to say her name.
“Get out get out get out!” she was yelling. Farcically, as his hearing came back, he noticed that Van Morrison was singing “Sweet Thing.”
Ellen was at the door, holding it open. His overnight bag was still outside. Was he ever going to be able to lift that thing again? Was he ever going to be able to walk again? He put his hands on his knees.
“Wait a second—”
“I might have known!” she raged.
“Known what?” he gasped. “Agh, shit, I think you—”
“This is hopeless. Just get out. You only ever did want—”
“No, listen, wait—”
“No, just get out, get the fuck out!”
“Ellen, would you just—”
“No! This is what you wanted all along. You never would have taken me out if it wasn’t for—”
Finally, he was mad. “All right, that’s enough!” Even though it hurt to do it, he could shout a whole lot louder than she could, and his voice echoed out of the doorway and down the hall. He made a Herculean effort to stand, even though he wanted to curl into a little ball and weep for a few hours, and hobbled toward her. She flinched, which would have broken his heart if he hadn’t been in so much pain. He slammed the door, at that moment not caring if someone stole the entire contents of his overnight bag.
“It’s time you gave me a little fucking credit, Ellen,” he snapped. He towered over her, leaning heavily against the door. Her face was as red as it had been in his office, her hair crackling around it. “You know damn well I’ve let you in where no other woman has gone. I’ve told you things about my family the press would pay you thousands to find out. I haven’t taken one step toward you without being sure that was what you wanted. You know, or you should by now, that I would never hurt you, or do something you didn’t want, no matter how carried away I got. Don’t cringe, dammit. You only had to tell me to stop. Now, go sit down.”
“Don’t order me around—”
“Don’t freak out on me and then try and shut me out!” She looked a little more sorry and went to sit on the couch. “And quit looking like a wounded bird just because you’re getting yelled at. I’m the one mortally injured here.” He limped over to join her, the blood beginning to re-enter his legs. “Now,” he said. “You are going to tell me who he was.”
She looked up at him, and he could see the terror in her eyes before they slid away from his. “Who who was?”
“Look, I’m tired, I’m in more pain than you can imagine, and I don’t want to take this bullshit from you anymore. I let you in, Ellen. Now you are going to tell me who did this to you, and what he did. I’ve been avoiding it to save you the memory, but I refuse to fight a man I don’t know anything about, and get beat up for something he did.”
Ellen looked at him, at his face, his hair, which was falling over his eyes, before dropping her gaze to her hands in her lap. She didn’t say anything for a long minute. Then she said, very quietly, “He’s nothing like you.”
She took a very deep breath. “He’s blond, slick, the perfect son-in-law material.”
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice said, and I’m not?
“The right parents,” she went on. “The right circles, you know. We were together for two years. He’s a real estate agent; flat in Holland Park, the whole package.” She gestured at the pictures, at the life she’d had. “I was going to marry him. At least, I thought I was. My parents loved him—still do. His mother and mine are very good friends. They lunch a lot.”
Kane nodded. That could explain part of her problem with her mother.
“He was really very nice to me, most of the time. I thought he was... everything I wanted: clean-cut, well-bred, the right schools, the upper-class thing my mother adored. Dad liked him too; they played golf.” She closed her eyes. “He found my brother and sister-in-law their first house; got them a really good deal, especially for London. I loved him for that. It was like he did it to impress me, you know? And I thought that was what we’d do... get married, announcement in the Times, have a few blond babies and fight to get them in the right preschool, you know the kind of thing. Adam didn’t like him, though. I thought he was being overprotective, but... I guess he saw it before I did.” She rubbed her forehead. “Or perhaps he saw... that I...”
She was making lines in her jeans with her fingernail now. “What did I know? I thought the whole thing was kind of messy, and a bit pointless. I hardly knew anything about it before Edward; I just figured that was what it was like... for me.”
“Are you talking about sex?” Messy and pointless? Holy God.
The flush was coming back to her cheeks. She didn’t meet his eye. “Mm-hm. We’d been dating a required number of weeks or whatever it was; it was time. But I didn’t... I mean, we’d read our Jilly Coopers and Jackie Collinses in school, but I didn’t think any of that could be real life. Besides, my mother made the whole thing sound so... icky...” She turned her face completely away from him. “I didn’t know until meeting you.”
Kane held his breath. The admission wasn’t the victory he’d expected it to be. It was just sad, that she’d had all this passion and nothing to do with it, for so many years.
“So what changed?” he prompted when she was quiet for a while.
“He’d gone to a stag night... a bachelor party. I wasn’t expecting him to come over afterward; it must have been three in the morning. I only let him in because he couldn’t keep his voice down. He said... he’d seen some serious action that night, and he was going to show me how it was done.” The lines from her nails must have been going into her skin by now. “He said... that I was just a... dead fish...”
