Page 13 of Always Right

For the first time, I looked away. My stomach churned and my heart burned as he continued.

“So hate me all you want. Ignore me, avoid me--I’ll deal with it. But you will not keep me away from them. And if you insist they’re not mine, I will get a paternity test to prove they are my daughters because I know, I fucking know they are my blood.”

I had signed up for this fight, a fight I was sure I could win and yet as his tight grip surrounded my arm, I wasn’t sure what the hell I was doing. Any fight against him was futile...I would always lose.

My stupid heart always gave up.

It always gave in.

I let my selfishness take the wheel, though, hoping it could get me through the conversation. “You expect me to accept you being here for no other reason than because you came back. Do you think you didn’t hurt me? What a fucking joke. I tried to tell you and—"

“Once.” His hand gripped my chin, forcing my eyes to meet his. I swallowed thickly, holding my breath. “You tried once. You didn’t think to tell Lisa or have Evie tell me. I know I was an ass. I know I was drunk and I take full responsibility for that, but if you would have cared about them having a father instead of dwelling on your anger...instead of focusing on your pain, you would have thought about their future.”

His gaze roamed my face, searching, perhaps...for the woman he knew. For the woman he knew I was shielding.

“You know the person who turned you away wasn’t me. I didn’t even know what fucking day it was, Hannah. So no...you don’t get to put that blame on me, not when you didn’t bother trying. I won’t carry the blame of you not giving me, or for the record, them, a chance to have me in their lives.”

He let me go and I stumbled back, the coldness in his words sending a chill through my veins. I wasn’t innocent, no.

Far from it.

I made mistakes, I hurt others, plenty of people.

This was my karma, I had to believe it.

But was I really turning into my mother? Was I allowing my pain, my anger, to cloud my judgment? My girls cooed in the playpen, and I bit down on my lip, everything in front of me turning blurry. I turned around, running my hands over my face, keeping the tears at bay because I wasn’t going to cry in front him.

He didn’t get to see me falling apart for him, for us again.

“I wish you hadn’t come back.” My quiet words left a deafening silence behind.

His eyes were on me, intense, suffocating. Every second that passed made it harder to breathe, because he was looking right through me. He looked at me like he knew exactly what I felt, like he could feel it, too.

“Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know that from now on, every day, every time you see me I will be causing you pain?”

Little by little, my resolve began to crumble. Derek took all the fucking pieces of the wall built around my heart and tossed them to the side, leaving my heart utterly exposed. I wanted nothing more than for him to take me into his arms, protect me from it all.

But he was the one that caused the pain.

I refused to trust him.

“I would leave, Hannah. If I could, I would walk out that door and never turn back because being around you wears me down. We were always a fucking time bomb, waiting for the second it would all blow up in our faces and it has, several times. We never should have had that dinner together so many years ago. Never should have fucked. We should have kept it professional, but we were damned from the start.”

I’d spent months putting myself together, only to be destroyed in the process of giving my girls a better life.

Self-destruct.

That was what it was.

That’s what I would do.

For my girls, I would do anything.

Even tolerate the agony of being around their father.

Neither of us would win.

What a fucking mess.

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