Poison - Jade West Page 0,78

last time, right? We can do it again.”

He was shaking his head as I spoke. “No, Anna. That’s not it. We can’t be done.” He stubbed his cigarette out. “There has to be another way out of this. Maybe I can talk to her. Maybe over time she’ll be able to accept that we’ll never work, me and her. I mean, she’s hurting right now, and I didn’t see that, and I should’ve seen that, and I should’ve seen so many fucking things and I didn’t. But it doesn’t matter.” His eyes were hard on mine, even in the dark. “There’s got to be another way. There has to be a way we can make it through this. I mean, people have to come around to us, at some point they have to accept we’re together. Even Maya. Even your parents. Even Nicola fucking Henshaw. Right?”

I was shaking my head as the tears fell. Because there was no way out of this. There never would be.

“They have to!” he insisted. “Jesus, Anna, at some point they have to!”

But they wouldn’t. I forced my breath to stay steady as I found the words.

I told him how I’d spent the rest of the morning trying to tell Vicky the real, full story of just how and why he’d left me all those years ago. I told him how she’d scoffed at me and told me I was an idiot for believing the bullshit. I told him how I’d called Nicola over after and tried again with her and Vicky in the same room and got the same response.

They didn’t believe him, and they shook their heads at the fact that I had, and they didn’t believe anything other than he was a prick and us being together was one massive pool of shit I was wading around in.

I told him how Yasmin had come out to join me at girls’ night and was the only one with another opinion in the chaos, but even that didn’t matter to my friends. I’d asked Nicola and Vicky to go check with her that what Lucas had told me was true, but they brushed it aside as nothing and said she was already back up in Newcastle and barely in contact. Another great help from the universe.

I told him how the whole world was against us, and people would never buy into us being together, and that was obvious. Especially not the woman screaming for him to choose his future, me or them, and taking his little girl across country.

“Maybe Yasmin will be able to help us convince people, if she knows the truth,” he said, but I shook my head.

“That isn’t what I meant. What I meant is, it doesn’t matter that she does. It will never matter. Even if she screamed from the rooftops that Maya was a total bitch who deserved you coming back to me, they’d still be cursing and scowling and saying I’m an idiot and you need to get back to your little girl.”

“Stop it,” he said, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.

“We’ll never make it,” I told him. “Seriously, Lucas. You can’t let her take Millie across the country. Whatever it takes. You have to make it right for Millie.”

“But I can’t!” he said, and his hands were right over on mine. “I can’t walk away from this, Anna. Not again. I can’t make that fucking choice!”

We sat in silence, because what could we say?

Maya and Millie were likely already holed up at her parents’ place, and I hadn’t even attempted to reason with my parents yet. Everyone was still determined I should get back with the man who’d pulled me up from the floor last time around, nursing me through nights of pissing in the bed and blanking out in random places and dropping down exhausted for hours. And even though my seizures weren’t down to Lucas, that would never be accepted by the people who’d helped me through them in those early days.

I’d been having seizures before he made his idiot mistake, and I’d been the one to let myself wallow, and cry, and work every hour of the day or night just to try to forget he existed. But it didn’t matter. They’d still be cursing him for plunging my brain into one long ping pong of misfiring.

But even that faded to insignificance with the other coal of doom burning in the fire.

Millie.

It was all about Millie.

He had a little girl who needed him to be