Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,105
forgot what it was like to have something for myself. And remembering how good my body can feel... It’s...amazing. I’m glad it was with you.”
“I’m going to tell you something,” he said. “I wasn’t just a disinterested listener, you know. I knew you were married, and I respected that. But... I wanted you from the first time you walked in.”
She shifted back to her side, away from him, her face heating. “I didn’t know.”
“I came here because I didn’t have anything else. And then there was you. And it didn’t matter... Whatever your real life was. Our conversations weren’t real life. They were something better than that.”
“I felt the same way.”
He had been escaping with her, too. It amazed her. Left her in awe. And she wanted to know... She wanted to know why. Even if she shouldn’t. Even if she should leave it alone. Because they had this brilliant, beautiful thing. This relationship that she’d never had with anyone else before. Something that transcended reality, like he’d said. And it seemed like adding real things to it would only cause pain.
“What are you escaping from, Adam?” she whispered.
Silence stretched between them and she rested in it. In the heat of his body. The comfort of his touch. Being in an unfamiliar bed and feeling altogether unfamiliar to herself.
Finally, he let out a slow breath, his fingers tracing a pattern on her hip. “I was in finance,” he said. “In another life. Made a lot of money. I was busy. Very important. But I had everything you were supposed to have. Big house. Wife. Kids.”
Her heart stilled, her breath stopped short.
“You know, I thought I was doing things right. Because you have to support your family. But it was more than that. I cared more about that job than I cared about anything. And before I realized it, my best friend had stolen my wife. And my kids right along with her.”
“What?”
“I mean, not legally. But you know... They’re teenagers, I can’t make them see me. There are court agreements, sure. But—but to force kids who don’t want anything to do with me to come and stay over? Hell. No. And I would go to work and I would wonder...what the hell it even meant anymore, because I had all that money and no one to spend it on. No life to put it toward. Nothing. My grandpa died, he left me this place. I came.”
Rachel didn’t know what to say. She was utterly and completely blown away that Adam wasn’t this solitary, single man who simply stood behind a counter every night. That they weren’t actually so different.
She had assumed all this time that he was single, childless, that he may never have been in a serious relationship. That he was unattached in every way, because that was how he had seemed to her. She had assumed that she was the only person holding back anything of her life, and she’d known full well that he was aware of most of it, whether he spoke about it or not.
Because living in a town this size, there was no way he hadn’t heard some details about her, at least whispered when she walked out of the diner.
And she’d thought...
That he was just there for her. Handsome and safe, and then handsome and not so safe when it had become the right moment for her to have those feelings.
But he had been there all along with feelings of his own, and a past that she couldn’t have even guessed at.
“How many kids?”
“Two,” he said, his voice rough. “My daughter is a year older than Emma. My son is sixteen.”
“Neither of them speak to you?”
“No,” he said, his voice rough. “I believe that the last time my son saw me he said he never wanted to speak to me again.”
“How? How did this happen?”
“I wasn’t around,” Adam said.
“I can’t imagine that. I can’t imagine you...were devoted to a job to the point where you weren’t with your family.”
“But it’s true. It’s who I was. I thought it was taking care of them, and so it was all that mattered. Yeah, I can see it all now, with a whole lot of clarity that I wish I didn’t have, or I wish I’d had sooner. But it doesn’t do me a shit lot of good now. I can’t fix it. I was commuting into San Francisco every day, and my wife was having an affair in my big house up on the hill.