He reached out and caught her hand. His fingers were so warm, and hers was so cold.
"Let me love you, Blue," he said, his voice deep and low with emotion. "Let me love you."
His words hit her in the solar plexus, stealing her breath, making her knees weak. They were everything she'd ever dreamed of hearing from him, everything she'd ever hoped for. She bowed her head, squeezing his hand tight to try to stop the trembling she could feel spreading through her body. She'd waited ten years to hear him say these things to her, but instead of filling her with joy, they filled her with terror.
Stomach churning, bowel-loosening, breath-stealing terror.
After ten years of friendship, Eddie was asking her to make a leap of faith. He was challenging her to believe in him, in them. He was asking her to open herself to a future that could hold boundless joy - or fathomless loss and hurt and pain.
In that moment, Blue understood herself and her life better than she ever had before. She saw the elaborate rituals she'd developed to create a sense of safety in her world - the neatness, the routines, the lack of investment in material things - she saw the friendships she'd built around herself, good people arrayed around her, bulwarks against the vagaries of life. She saw the distance she kept between herself and the people closest to her, just in case. And she recognized the stories - the myths - she'd created to ward off her greatest fear.
I can't ever have Eddie because he'll never settle down.
I can't ever have Eddie because it will only end badly.
I can't ever have Eddie because he will never love me the way I love him.
Lies, all of them. She was the one with the problem. She was the one who couldn't love fully, completely. She was the one who was so fucked up she couldn't take what he was offering her.
She was the one who was too afraid to love.
She slipped her hand free from Eddie's. Looking him in the eye was the hardest thing she'd ever had to do, but she made herself do it.
"I'm sorry. I can't," she said.
Then she turned and walked to her car, got in and drove away.
Eddie watched Blue's car turn the corner at the end of the street. Belatedly he turned toward his own car, pulling the keys from his pocket. He had a Ferrari, for Pete's sake. He could chase her down in seconds.
Then, of course, he would have the problem of working out what to say to her - because he'd said all the best things in his heart already. He'd given her everything, offered himself up, and Blue had still walked away.
He stared at the keys in his hand, then he closed his fist around them and squeezed until the pain cut through the numbness enough for him to understand that it was probably a smart idea to go into his house instead of standing in the street like a zombie.
He was such a fucking idiot. Only this afternoon - not even an hour ago - he'd been tempted to tell Blue how he felt, what he wanted, and he'd wisely decided to bide his time. And yet the very next chance he had, he'd blown it. Just blurted it all out and pushed Blue too hard, too fast, and made her run.
I'm sorry, I can't.
For as long as he lived, he would never forget the untrammeled fear in her eyes. She had been terrified by what he was asking of her.
His phone started to ring as he entered the living room, but he already knew it wasn't Blue and he didn't want to speak to anyone else. He left it ringing on the kitchen counter and let himself out onto the deck.
He didn't know what to do. It killed him that Blue was out there somewhere, freaking out because he'd jumped the gun and declared himself, but he was also more than a little wounded by her response. He'd been patient, doing his best to show her how he felt, what he wanted. Then he'd offered her his heart and his future and it hadn't been enough.
Or, maybe, it had been too much.
Suddenly he remembered the story Sienna had told him at the wake. Voluntarily giving up everything she valued in order to prevent someone from hurting her again must have required tremendous inner steel from Blue, as well as a good dose of bloody mindedness. That level of self-discipline and control didn't come from nowhere.
Blue had been utterly alone in the world since she was six years old. There had been no one to wipe her tears away. No one to wrap her in their arms and tell her they loved her. And yet, somehow, she'd found the inner grit to survive despite that lack. Not only that, she'd learned to protect herself so well that it had become second nature, as instinctive as breathing.
If people got too close, she backed off. If she felt at risk, she did her best to control the situation and factor in escape routes for herself.
Jesus, when he thought about it, it was a wonder she'd ever let herself kiss him, let alone sleep with him. She must have broken so many personal rules, broken so many boundaries in order to get to that moment in the alley outside the bar.
Haven't you ever wondered? About us? How it would be?
What had it taken for her to say those words? He could hardly imagine.
He let out a sharp bark of unamused laughter as the answer came to him - it had taken a brush with death, that was what it had taken. Blue had had to stare her mortality in the eye before she'd been prepared to step outside of her comfort zone.
She'd been trying to reel herself back in ever since, too, he suddenly understood. Every step of the way she'd tried to put on the brakes, to cordon herself off, to push him away - but she'd kept reaching out to him anyway. She was the one who'd come to his bed when they were in Albury. She was the one who'd broken the one-night-a-week and the no-sleepover rules - albeit with a few nudges from him. She was the one who had lingered today and chosen to come to the street festival.
Blue might be trapped like a princess in an iron fortress of her own making, but there was a part of her that was fighting to get out, too.
The realization gave him hope. It brought him to his feet, and had him searching his pockets for his car keys. He found them on the kitchen table, along with his phone.
The battle for Blue's heart wasn't over. Not by a long shot.
For a long time Blue had no idea where she was going. At first it was simply away - away from Eddie, away from the terror that had gripped her when he'd laid her heart's desire at her feet. Home wasn't safe - she knew instinctively that he'd come after her there - so she'd driven onto the nearest freeway and put her foot down. It didn't take long before the city was behind her as she sped north. Darkness fell, and still she kept on driving.
She'd been on the road for nearly two hours when she saw the turn off for Heathcote come up on her left, and she understood why her subconscious had pointed the car in this direction and ordered her to drive.
She signaled, and took the turn off. Thirty minutes later, she turned off again and followed a smaller, narrower road into the town she'd once called home. The small strip of shops that formed the commercial heart of town was silent and dim, not surprising at this time of night. She drove past the bakery, the hundred-year-old sandstone pub, the war memorial. It had been twenty-four years since she'd been in Rochester and childish memories vied with present-day reality as she cruised slowly down the main street, the two images stubbornly refusing to meld.
Main street might have changed, but the geography of the town hadn't and the way home was still etched in her memory. Right at the post office. Second street on the left. Third street on the right.
Her father had made her practice the route in her mind over and over, in case she got lost. She could still remember him coaching her, making a game of it.
The irony was that he was the one who never made it home, along with her mother.
She leaned forward over the steering wheel as she turned into their street, straining for the first glimpse of their house. She could remember it so clearly - the glossy, dark green front door, the roses lining the pathway to the house, the birch tree that shaded the living room window.
She'd had a tree swing in the backyard, hand-made by her father from an old car tire and hung from the thick branch of the willow tree that encroached on their yard from next door. On warm summer days, she'd threaded her body through the hole and dangled and spun while her father tinkered in the shed and her mother read a book on the back porch.
Houses slipped past, neatly painted, their gardens clipped into orderly geometric shapes. She slowed twice, but the first likely house had a stained-glass front door, the second an ancient, leaning brick fence instead of the timber pickets she remembered. Frowning, she continued to the end of the street, an odd sense of disorientation coming over her as she tried to remember what their house number had been.
Nothing came to her, and she wondered how she could know the route so well but not remember the house number.
She did a second slow crawl of the street, but none of the houses matched the image in her mind. There was no house with a birch tree, no roses. At least, not in the configuration fixed so firmly in her memory.