The Piano Man Project Page 0,102

chosen different words. He didn’t want her to say she needed anyone else.

‘It was just about the numbers.’ She stumbled slightly on her words. ‘There’s already more than seventy people down there, more arriving all the time. We’re going to need, umm, a lot of soup.’

Hal wasn’t concerned by the numbers. He’d designed food today to specifically cater for a crowd. What concerned him more was the widening chasm between himself and Honey, and he didn’t know how to bridge it.

‘Honey, about last night …’

‘Soup! Lots of it please!’ she squeaked.

‘It doesn’t have to be like this.’

‘I think we should work on well over a hundred,’ she shot back, still hovering over by the door, ready to bolt. ‘More, even.’

‘We can make enough soup for the whole damn town if they all show up, Honey. It isn’t a problem, okay?’

He heard her swallow. ‘Good. Well, that’s good news about the soup,’ she said, trailing off. ‘I’ll get back then.’

‘Honey. Just hang on a minute, please?’ he said, even though he had no idea what he was going to do or say to make things better.

She didn’t ignore him and leave. That had to be something, right?

‘Come here.’

He needed her closer. She moved quietly, nearer, not touching him.

‘I need to say some things, Honey, and I don’t know how to say them without hurting you,’ he said, reaching out for her, aiming for her shoulder, finding the soft skin on the side of her neck, his thumb on the warm pulse between her collarbones. She’d tied her hair back.

‘Hal, do we really need to do this?’ she said.

‘Yes. Yes, we do,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to think I had a better offer than you. That isn’t what that letter was. It’s a different offer, but I don’t want to ever hear you call anyone better than you again, okay?’ A loose strand of her hair brushed his fingers and he stroked it back behind her ear, and then he just stroked her hair because he couldn’t stop himself.

‘What do you want, Hal?’ she said, and he heard the question she was really asking. Who do you want, Hal?

‘I don’t know,’ he said, because honesty seemed the only way to get through this. ‘I don’t fucking know. I just know that I can’t think straight until we’re okay again. I shouldn’t have leaned on you yesterday, but I can’t say I’m sorry for what happened because it was the most fucking alive I’ve felt since the accident. Being with you, it just feels …’ Hal stopped, sighed. ‘It just feels simple, Honey. It comes naturally.’

Beneath his fingers, her pulse trembled.

‘Listening to you read that letter from Imogen was like scraping nails down my own eyeballs,’ he said, hating even the memory. ‘What kind of fucked-up prick does that to a woman?’

She sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter. You needed to hear it from someone.’

‘Did I? I don’t even know, but even if I did, then not from you. Anyone but you.’

‘What difference does it really make who you heard it from, Hal? Maybe I was exactly the right person you needed to hear it from, and maybe that was exactly the right time for you to hear it. We’re kind of done, aren’t we? You gave me my orgasm, and now you get your life back. We both win.’

Except winners didn’t cry when they delivered their speech, and Honey’s voice shimmered with tears. And winners didn’t feel like they’d been punched in the heart.

‘We both know you don’t mean that,’ he said, knowing he should take his hand away from her face and cupping her cheek anyway.

‘I don’t think it even matters whether I mean it or not, because the fact is that you’re going to decide to go home in the end. You know it, and I know it. There are wedding invitations out there being printed with your name on them, and a restaurant waiting to have your name over it. Your life’s out there, waiting for you to step back into it.’

She was right. It would never be the same, but he could try to pick up the pieces and put them back together again into a similar but slightly altered picture. How had he gone from being certain that his future held no romance to being someone’s lover and practically another woman’s fiancée?

‘I don’t know if I want that life again,’ he said.

‘Well, only you can decide, Hal.’ She sounded tired. Unravelled.

‘What do you think I should do?’