Page 84 of Stuck in Paradise with You

I clear my throat, which has tightened with his words. I’m not sure if I should thank him. I’m not sure I agree. So I don’t respond. Instead, I focus on Jessie.

‘Scratch that, I’m irate that he’s brought you here and you’ve gotten stuck in this hurricane. I’d never do anything to put you in harm’s way and I want to kick his ass for it.’

I give him my attention now. Without doubt, my presence on this island was a shock to him. Irrationally, it makes me… sad? Disappointed? Maybe I was flattered by that 1 percent of doubt. At the idea that maybeLukewanted me to be here too. Which is stupid, foolish, idiotic, I know.

He inhales deeply, his chest pushing against his damp t-shirt, his eyes piercing mine as he replaces his cap on his head. ‘But I’m not going to say I’m sorry about getting to see you again. As much as it killed me to wake up alone this morning, I can’t regret last night. Being with you again felt natural, unbelievable. Like I was exactly where I was supposed to be, at last.’

With each of his words, the pressure behind my eyes builds, and I dig my teeth into my lip in an attempt to fight against it, because I didn’t expect, I couldn’t have expected, him to feel today exactly how I felt. Like we were back where we began, the way things used to be, as if we fit together in a way that could only mean we were intended to be.

But I shake my head.No. ‘That aside, Luke, what if great sex is all we have, all we’ve ever had, and if we did this again, made the same mistake again, then when the novelty wears off, you’ll go? You’ll run off to something you prefer. Something better. Exactly as you did last time.’

He crouches to my level, a little frantic. ‘Carrie, are you crazy? Is that honestly what you think I did?’

I shrug, uncertain about what happened in our past for the first time ever, because Luke is so bold and so sure of a different version, even if I still don’t know what that is. ‘It’s what it felt like you did,’ I tell him, watching my fingers as I stroke Jessie, glad of her warm weight on my lap.

Luke crouches down in front of me and gently teases my chin until I’m meeting his gaze. He leans his head to one side. ‘Then I’m sorry for that too. I’m sorry that that’s how you’ve seen it all this time.’

I don’t consciously do it but I seem to have slipped to rest my chin, my cheek, further into his palm. My eyelids close for a moment, just long enough for me to gain some perspective. ‘How could I see things any differently? You’ve never given me an explanation.’

His hand leaves my skin and I open my eyes, feeling the loss of his touch, only to see him coming to sit on the ground opposite me, his knees pulled up and his feet touching mine.

He’s going to explain. Finally.

I’m more afraid of this moment than I am of the 285kph gusts of wind outside.

Do I want to know why he hurt me, ruined me for all other relationships? Do I want to relive it all, right here, right now? Hasn’t this week been grueling enough?

‘I assumed you knew some or most of this because I’ve always thought you were the person who opened the first letter I sent to you. I thought you knew but still shut me out.’ He takes off his cap and drags a hand back through his hair, giving me the impression this will be as hard for him to say as I know it’s going to be for me to hear. Maybe that’s why I don’t stop him. ‘I’ll tell you everything; maybe some of it won’t be new, I don’t know.’

He puffs the air from his lungs. ‘The day everything imploded, I found your note on my desk.’ His mouth twitches up. So fleetingly, I could have imagined it. ‘I was so excited to come to you. I remember the way my heart started thumping and every part of me was running from the office in your direction before my mind could even catch up.’

His words make my heart race in response. I remember that feeling. The giddiness, the heat, the desperation. The insatiable desire. I remember how my fingers trembled with it as I wrote that note.

‘As I was leaving the office, my phone buzzed and I thought it must be you. So I took it out and?—’

‘It wasn’t me,’ I say, finishing his sentence. I know it wasn’t me because I never messaged him. Not at five to twelve, not when he was twenty minutes late, not when he was an hour then two hours late. It was Luke who messaged me, while I was lying on a hotel bed, dressed in new lingerie I had bought for his birthday, a bottle of champagne and two glasses on the bedside table.

He rubs a hand down his face, across his chin and two-day-old stubble. ‘I still can’t believe Anya told me by text but she did. I pulled out my phone and found out I was going to be a dad. It stopped me dead in my tracks.’ He looks from his fingers to me. ‘I don’t want to give you a sob story but to say I was shocked doesn’t cover it. I was— It was a total mind screw.’

I have to know… ‘Were you happy?’

I don’t realize I’m expecting him to sayno, maybe hoping he’ll say no, until he says, ‘Yes. On some level.’ He looks back to his fingers, as if he’s said something wrong. He hasn’t, I suppose, only something I don’t want to hear. ‘I’ve always thought I’d have kids. There was a time I thought that would be with Anya. So, I was— I don’t know. I guess that’s the problem. Only more recently, with the perspective of distance and time, can I see I was happy about the prospect of being a dad but not about being the father of Anya’s child. Even now, Carrie, I don’t know how bad or evil that sounds, even when I’m saying it to you and it’s the thing that messed up everything between us. I couldn’t get my head around it in those minutes, not for the six months after that when I was living in Chicago, and not after?—’

He leans his head back against the wall, focusing on the roof above us. Trying, maybe, not to look my way, or to hide his expression. For a moment, I’m reminded of the raging storm outside and the reason I’m sitting here sweating, with a dog lying across my thighs. The fact that I’m trapped in here because Luke rescued me and I can’t get away from his words.

No matter how much I don’t want to hear the story of how and why he left me, it’s what I’ve waited thousands of nights to know.

‘There was a baby but it was never mine.’

‘What?’ I heard his words and saw his mouth speak but… ‘I don’t understand.’

He gives a short, sad laugh. ‘Yep. I left you, I moved to Chicago, I stuck around for six months, decorated a nursery, picked out baby clothes, even tried to convince myself that if I could just fall in love with my son, then I could fall back in love with Anya, despite everything that happened between us. Then he was born and Anya told me she thought we should get a paternity test.’

I feel myself gawping.

‘Honestly, I just didn’t see it coming. I don’t know if I was blind to signs, but it came completely out of the blue for me.’ He shrugs. ‘The baby wasn’t mine.’

I try to compute that, struggling, maybe feeling a shred of what Luke must have been feeling back then. ‘But the timing. I mean, you must have been?—’

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