Lucy King - Her Ex, Her Future? - One Night with Her Ex / Seven Nights with Her Ex / Backstage with Her Ex

‘Here with me. Now.’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘It had crossed my mind that you might have used the afternoon to run away.’

Ah, he knew her so well. ‘It crossed mine too,’ she said with a small smile, ‘but then I figured what would that have achieved? Avoidance isn’t the way to deal with any of this.’

Kit leaned back and looked at her, a thoughtful expression flickering across his face in the twilight. ‘What is?’

She gave a little shrug. ‘I’m not sure. Honesty maybe?’

‘Honesty works for me.’

He glanced up and smiled his thanks at the waiter who’d set a glass of champagne in front of her and was now doing the same with his beer for him and her breath caught. Goodness, his smile really was something else. She’d been on the receiving end of it so many times but it had never failed to affect her. Still didn’t, it seemed, because the waiter was looking down at her expectantly as apparently it was time to order and she couldn’t for the life of her remember what she’d chosen.

Indicating that Kit should go first with a wave of her hand, Lily picked up the menu and while he ordered lobster followed by tilapia she found with relief her starter of prawns and main of curried sea bass.

‘I’m sorry about New Year’s Eve,’ said Kit once the waiter had disappeared with their order and they were once again alone.

‘New Year’s Eve?’ echoed Lily, her eyebrows lifting a little. ‘Why? What is there to be sorry about?’

‘What isn’t there to be sorry about?’ he muttered, shifting in his chair as if suddenly finding it uncomfortable. ‘I turned up out of the blue, virtually forced you to let me in and then behaved like a crazed hormonal out-of-control teenager.’

‘Oh, right,’ she said, feeling herself flush at the memory of how out of control they’d both been. How reckless and deluded she’d been. ‘Well, consider your apology accepted.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’

See, they could be perfectly civilised about this, she thought, taking a sip of champagne, which was cold and dry and utterly delicious. Even if she was a total mess inside.

‘I wasn’t surprised you threw me out what with the...ah...way things went,’ he said and went a little red.

She stared at him for a second and then put her glass down. ‘You think I threw you out because I was cross I hadn’t, well, you know...?’ Neither of them was usually such a prude about these things, but then normally they didn’t discuss them in public. At least she didn’t.

Now it was he who raised his eyebrows. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘When you told me that you hadn’t had sex for five years it occurred to me that the last woman you’d slept with was, well, you know...’ She braced herself, then in the spirit of the honesty she’d just claimed she believed was the way forwards, said, ‘Her.’

Kit frowned. ‘I see.’

‘It freaked me out. Brought back a time I’ve spent five years trying to forget.’

He rubbed a hand over his face. ‘Of course. I’m sorry.’

‘I realise now that I might have overreacted a bit, but in my defence it had been quite an emotionally stressful night, even before you turned up.’ She shrugged and shot him a faint smile. ‘Anyway, it’s not your fault.’

‘Isn’t it?’ he asked, his face dark and his eyes glittering in the twilight. ‘Isn’t everything?’

And there it was. The moment she could either agree that it was and they’d stay where they were, with Kit in all likelihood heading home and out of her life first thing in the morning, or she could tell him what she’d come to realise and they could both move on, although God knew where to.

Knowing what she had to do for her own peace of mind as much as Kit’s, Lily took a deep breath. ‘Not really,’ she said and felt the release of a kind of pressure she hadn’t realised had been building up inside her.

Kit sat up, alert and to all appearances in something of a state of shock. ‘What?’

‘There’s no need to look quite so surprised,’ she said, although she couldn’t really blame him given how, at the time, she’d totally laid the responsibility for what he’d done at his door. ‘I’ve had plenty of time over the years to think and I’ve come to realise that what happened between us wasn’t your fault. Or at least not entirely.’

‘Really?’

She nodded and broke off a piece of bread. ‘Oh, I know what I said then, and I know I laid the blame for it all going wrong wholly at your feet, but that wasn’t very fair of me.’

‘Wasn’t it?’ he said, his astonishment fading and leaving the expression on his face totally unreadable.

‘You know it wasn’t. And you told me so, many times. Not that I was willing to listen. At the time all I could focus on was what you’d done and I didn’t think about what might have led to it.’ She popped the bread into her mouth, chewed for a moment and then swallowed. ‘I mean, you’re not the cheating sort, Kit, but I was so blinded by hurt, so wrecked by the feeling of betrayal, I didn’t see that. I didn’t ask myself why you’d done it and I didn’t think about my role in everything. As far as I could see I didn’t have a role other than as the only victim. I’d been going through hell and you didn’t seem to understand.’

‘I tried.’

‘I know you did.’

‘But maybe not enough.’

‘Maybe I didn’t let you.’

He rubbed a hand along his jaw. ‘With hindsight I should have been firmer and I should have made us face things together.’ He let out a humourless laugh. ‘But believe it or not I wasn’t having all that much fun either.’

‘I realise that now.’ She sighed. ‘But the whole IVF thing was so grim and painful and devastating and by its very definition so physically mainly about me that I failed to see it involved both of us. Plus I knew how much you wanted children being an only child and things, and the knowledge that I couldn’t have them just about broke me apart. I didn’t cope with things very well and I shut you out.’

‘I allowed you to.’ Kit shoved his hands through his hair and frowned. ‘I told myself that I was giving you space but in reality I think what I was doing was avoiding something I didn’t have a clue how to handle.’

It was the first time he’d acknowledged his contribution to the collapse of their marriage and it warmed a part of her deep inside that had always been so cold.

‘Really we were both victims, weren’t we?’ she mused, feeling an odd sense of calm spread through her. ‘Of something we didn’t have the strength or maturity or understanding to deal with.’ She paused. ‘Of course you topping things off by going and sleeping with someone else didn’t exactly help.’

As her words hung between them Kit paled beneath his tan. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for that,’ he said, his voice cracking a little. ‘There’s this nugget of guilt that’s always there and I’m so sorry, Lily. For everything. But particularly for betraying your trust like that.’

‘You’re forgiven.’

‘Am I?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course.’ She took a quick sip of champagne. ‘Five years is too long to be angry and resentful and I think I forgave you ages ago. I get now that you must have been feeling lonely and isolated and all those other things you said at the time,’ she said, remembering the endless evenings she’d spent going over it all. ‘That doesn’t mean what you did didn’t devastate me, because it did. But I can sort of see how it happened. I mean, we hadn’t had sex for months, had we? And we were barely speaking. We were virtual strangers. Something had to give at some point.’