Heidi Betts - Loves Me, Loves Me Knot

Which only made Jenna feel like more of a heel for having repeated something about her best friend that was meant to be kept in confidence. She nearly groaned as remorse pooled in her gut and threatened to swamp her.

“He’s really torn up over it,” Gage continued as they pulled into the gravel drive beside Charlotte ’s big, white farm house. He cut the engine, but made no move to get out of the car. Instead, he shifted to face her, lifting an arm to rest on the back of the seats. His hand dangled near her face and his fingers toyed with the ends of her hair.

“He’s called Grace a thousand times, at least, but she won’t answer-not even when he tries to fool the caller ID by using different phones. The doorman at her building won’t let him in, and the guards at the television studio have strict orders to call the police if he sets foot on the property. That’s why I thought it was a good idea for him to go over to The Yarn Barn tonight. I was hoping Grace would give him a chance to explain, at least listen to his side before she cut him off at the knees.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Jenna murmured, “Grace isn’t exactly the magnanimous type. Not when she’s hurting and feels so strongly that she’s been wronged.”

He huffed out a breath. “Tell me about it.”

Rather than lowering the level of tension in the tiny vehicle, the revelation that Zack may not have cheated on Grace after all only seemed to ratchet it up several notches. Jenna’s chest felt tight and she could feel tightly constrained emotion radiating from Gage in an ever-growing ripple effect.

Rubbing her palms nervously along the outside of her thighs, she licked her lips and softly asked, “Are you angry with me?”

One, two, three seconds passed without a response. Then, just as quietly, he said, “Why would I be angry?”

For a moment, she thought about keeping her mouth shut. If he wasn’t upset, maybe she shouldn’t have drawn attention to the fact that he seemed to be. And if he was-well, it probably would have been smarter to pretend she hadn’t noticed.

But the stiff jut of his chin told her something was wrong, and she would just as soon get to the bottom of it before they went in the house. Their relationship was stressful enough these days, there was no use tossing added kindling to the pile.

“Because of what happened at The Yarn Barn with Zack and Grace. Because I knew what she’d done, but didn’t tell you.”

“Why would I be mad about that?” he asked carefully.

“Well, it was a lie of omission,” she admitted, “and I know how you feel about that sort of thing.”

He mulled that over for a second before the flat line of his mouth relaxed a fraction.

“I understand why you did it. I don’t even blame you; you were just protecting a friend. If Zack had admitted to an affair, I probably wouldn’t have told you, either. But it did make me wonder…” His words trailed off for a moment and he shrugged. “Things between us were so ugly there at the end, the thought crossed my mind that this might not have been the first time you lied to me-by omission or otherwise.”

Jenna’s heart pounded against her ribcage like a jungle drum and a lump formed in her throat. She knew how he felt about liars. On his top ten list of sins that would send you to Hell, directly to Hell, do not pass Go and do not collect two hundred dollars, it was right up there with child sex offenders and people who talked in the theatre.

Swallowing hard in an effort to dislodge the knot in her chest, she thought back to everything that had passed between them over the years. Had she ever lied to him, be it a little white lie or a big, honking black one?

After a brief silence, she nodded and looked him directly in the eye as she murmured, “I have lied to you.”

His already tense body tautened even more at her admission, every muscle going tight and a tic starting at the back of his jaw. When he spoke, his voice was thick with emotion. “Do I want to know?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a pretty big one.”

Gage’s eyes slid closed, almost as though what she was about to say might be too much for him to handle. When his eyes opened again to settle on her, his mouth twisted into a grim line and he said, “All right, I’m ready. Tell me.”

The confession wasn’t easy to get out, and it took her a minute. A minute to form the words. A minute to decide if this was truly a wound she wanted to open, a part of her heart she wanted to bare and leave vulnerable.

But he was waiting, and looking so earnest, she couldn’t find it in her to back out now. Not just because her pulse was pounding in her throat or her stomach was doing handsprings at the speed of light.

“I lied,” she began in a voice so low and shaky, she wasn’t even sure he could hear her, “when I told you I wanted a divorce.”

For a moment, it was as if all the air had been sucked out of her tiny Volkswagen bug. Neither of them moved, and Gage held himself so rigid, she wasn’t certain he was still breathing. But she’d already started to tell him the truth, so she might as well finish it.

“A divorce was the last thing I wanted, but you weren’t talking to me, were starting to shut me out, and I didn’t know how to reach you. Nothing else I tried had worked, so I thought maybe demanding a divorce would shock you into realizing how much you’d changed since we got married.”

Her gaze dropped to stare at her hands where they were clasped tightly in her lap, and if possible her voice grew even softer, more pained. “I expected you to say No way in hell and agree to counseling or something to work out our problems… not to nod and move out of the house, then sign the papers without a single argument when they arrived.”

She hadn’t intended to cry, had deemed herself well past the point of breaking down every time she thought about that period of her life and how much it had hurt to not only lose her husband, but to have him walk away as though their marriage was no more important to him than a piece of junk mail or an old pair of shoes. But that didn’t stop tears from gathering at her lashes and spilling down her cheeks.

“Why didn’t you fight for me?” she asked, then turned her head to face him full on. “Why didn’t you fight for us?”

The ache in Jenna’s voice, the sadness on her face, squeezed Gage’s heart and tore it into a million tiny pieces. He would rather take a sucker punch to the ribcage than see that expression on her face.

And he’d rather get kicked in the crotch a thousand times than be the cause of it.

But here he was, the main source of her grief and despair, of the tears pouring down her face.

What could he say? How could he explain that leaving her had been the single hardest thing he’d ever done in his life? That it had ripped his guts out and in many ways left him a shell of a man. Or that he’d had to get blind, stinking drunk before he could bring himself to put his John Hancock on those divorce papers.

He couldn’t. Because if he tried, she’d wonder why he hadn’t stayed instead, hadn’t fought the way he now knew she’d hoped and expected him to, and he couldn’t explain the driving force behind that decision, either.

So he did the only thing he knew he wouldn’t screw up. He hooked a hand around the back of her neck, yanked her forward as far as their seatbelts and the miniscule automobile would allow, and kissed her. With his lips and tongue and body, he tried to tell her what he couldn’t put into words.

Jenna’s nails dug into the muscles of his upper arms and she made small, desperate mewling sounds at the back of her throat. Sounds he answered with low groans of his own.