Give & Take (Redbeard Cove #2)

40. Lana

Chapter 40

Lana

I close my eyes, letting the roar of the motorcycle fill my ears. If there’s anything that makes you well aware every moment in life is fleeting, it’s being not-even-strapped to the back of a powerful machine, dipping and angling around the curves of the gorgeous pacific coast under starlight, behind a man who’s turned your whole life upside down.

“You okay?” Raph asks through the speakers.

“I don’t know,” I whisper, clinging to his waist. He’s warm and hard under me. Steady and sure.

But he didn’t hear my words. He wraps a hand around my back, checking, holding me close. “You want to turn around?” he asks.

“No,” I say, loud enough for the speaker to pick up.

It feels like a metaphor.

Now, as we lean into another corner, I think that this feels almost as good, the wind sluicing off my bare arms. The cold air is bracing, but it’s a sensation that makes me feel deeply alive .

Not unlike how Raph makes me feel at all times.

It doesn’t take long to reach the end of the highway up north. We pull over before the ferry terminal, which is what you need to use to reach the next stretch of coast.

There’s a dirt road here, hardly more than wagon ruts. It leads to a lookout, where we can see the snaking line of red taillights in the lineup below, the boat coming in, and the sea stretched out like rippling black glass.

Raph kills the engine, but keeps his hands on the handlebars, wrapping and unwrapping his fingers on the rubber.

He’s nervous. He’s spilled his heart, and I still haven’t said it.

“What do you want to do, Sunshine?” he rasps.

“Keep going with you,” I say. “Forever.” I don’t mean on the highway.

But Raph pulls off his helmet and steps off the bike. He helps me off, then pulls my helmet from my head with exquisite gentleness.

He sets them on the bike.

Then he takes a breath. “Don’t mess with me, Sunshine.”

His face has an expression on it I’ve never seen before. It’s concern, but more deeply etched than I’ve ever known.

“I’m so fucking scared, Lana. You have my heart in your hands.”

“I’m supposed to be the scared one,” I tell him. “I’m supposed to let you go.”

He shakes his head. “Don’t. I can’t be any more clear with you. Don’t let me go, Lana. There’s so much out there, but we can see it together. We can make a life for ourselves here, and we can go on adventures out there. Together.” He sweeps his hand toward the lights down below. “If we’re together, I?—”

“I love you,” I say.

He blinks, still for a moment, his face hard in the moonlight, emotion rippling his jaw.

Then his hands come up, grasping my face. “Say it again.” Raph’s eyes bore into mine.

“I love you, Raph. There’s never been any question of that. In six weeks you’ve seen me better than anyone I’ve ever known.” I lower my voice. “Anyone.”

Raph doesn’t wait a moment more. He takes my mouth with his.

This kiss, I know instantly, is the one.

The same way I knew he was the one, each time he saw right through me. Each time I put up a wall and he waited patiently not to smash it down himself, but for me to dismantle it. To look over the edge and see no matter how high I made it, he was there, on the other side.

“I love you,” he whispers against my lips, my teeth, my tongue. “I love you I love you I love you.”

I love this man , I think, as I undo his jeans. I love this man as he lifts me up and sits me sideways on the bike’s seat, bracing his hand against the tree on its other side. He slides my panties aside for the second time in an hour. He’s so hard, so ready and so sure.

I love this man I think, as he tells me how good I feel. As he tells me how well I’m taking his cock. As he wields any shame I have into power .

“You’ve ruined me,” he breathes as he rams into me, bracing his free hand on my back. “Ruined.”

When I come through the front door alone, Mom is on the couch, the TV on silent across from her.

“Mom,” I say, when she blinks her eyes open. “You know I have a guest bedroom!”

She sits up, checking her watch. “I’m fine. I can’t sleep anymore—time change.”

“It’s three in the morning!”

“All the more time to make you a cake.”

I laugh softly, stifling a yawn. “I’m pretty sure Raph and the girls have that sorted. Or at least that better be why the girls have flour and cake pans in their closets.”

Mom smiles and pats the couch next to her. “Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

I fall into the spot next to her, surprisingly emotional as I lean in and feel her familiar warmth. “Thanks, Mom. Forty-one.”

“Such a wee babe.”

“So how long are you here for?”

“Raphael didn’t tell you? Going by what the girls tell me, you two are joined at the hip. The four of you, I mean.”

I swallow, sitting up. “You know, obviously. That he’s not just my nanny.”

“I knew that the moment he sent me an email, a month before your birthday, asking if I’d be available for a video chat. ”

“That wouldn’t be so unusual, would it?”

“The way he worded it…it was clear he didn’t look at you as an employer, honey.”

Mom explains how she had asked for a week vacation to surprise me instead of calling, and they’d offered to let her finish early.

“Wait, so you’re back? Officially?”

“Officially, my love.”

I squeeze my mom, my already wobbly composure tipping fast. She lives in Vancouver, so it’s not like she’ll be here every day, but still. She comes up reliably every month. She’ll be back in our lives.

“So, you going to tell me what’s holding you back from going all in on this man?” Mom asks.

I sigh, flopping backward. “Mom. I’m not holding back. I told him I loved him.”

“So you’re going to live happily ever after? Does he know that?”

“Could I go to sleep before we talk about this, Mom?” I’m suddenly too exhausted by the thought of grappling with my biggest fear at three in the morning to think straight.

“You could. But I think this is solvable in five minutes.”

Leave it to Mom to cut right to the chase. I tip my head back on the couch. “I could just go up to bed you know. You couldn’t stop me.”

“I’d follow you.”

I laugh. “You would, wouldn’t you?”

Mom fixes me with a look that says you haven’t answered the question .

She sees through me. She knows I’m still hesitating. That I love Raphael. I see him as a part of our family. I can picture a future with him.

But it’s tinged with something painful.

A knowledge, like she says, that I’m not all in.

But I can’t say all this. I can’t put a finger on what it even is. “I don’t know,” I say.

“Are you embarrassed?”

“Maybe a little. People are going to think I’m a lonely housewife.”

Mom frowns, and I remember my conversation with Mrs. Brown. With Mac.

“You’re too young to remember most of it, but the people in our lives gave me hell for having you so young.”

“I know.”

“But that’s not really it, is it? You went from lawyer to server, and you could give two shits who thought poorly about you for it. So tell me what it really is.”

I close my eyes. I don’t want to. I really really really don’t want to. Because it’s her I need to reckon with on this.

She did this on purpose, I think. Asked me now, at my most vulnerable. I feel a flicker of anger at her for this, but it’s old and tired. It’s teenaged defiance masking hurt.

“I can’t be someone else’s regret, Mom,” I say finally.

And there it is. That final piece I couldn’t scrape out of me.

The words, once out, feel bare and lethal, like sharpened blades.

But they’re better outside. They’ve been hurting me for so long .

I wait for Mom’s pat response. Like literal pats, on my leg. Or maybe her tears. Because in pulling out the knives, I’ve brandished them at her.

But in an instant, Mom isn’t the soft, gentle mother I know. Her expression turns from one of gentleness to one of hurt.

And then anger.

Maybe it’s because I’m so tired and haven’t yet slept, but I’m slow to register what’s happening. Because by the time Mom stands up, I’m still trying to figure out what it is I said that might have hurt her.

“Lana Bloor. You didn’t just say you were someone else’s regret.”

I’m not proud of it, but I feel myself get defensive. “That is what I said, and?—”

“That someone else is me, you’re talking about, isn’t it? Just to be clear?”

I swallow. “Yes, Mom. It’s you. If it wasn’t for me, you would have lived an entirely different life. You could have done all those things you said you’d always dreamed of. See the world. Go to…art school.” I stand up. “Sing a song in the ruins of the Parthenon.”

She actually said that once. We’d laughed about it. But it had dug a soft finger into the hilt of that knife in my chest. An innocence broken when I was old enough to understand my mother didn’t choose me. That my father didn’t know me, or that he was even a father.

That my mother could have been so much more.

Mom, to my shock, pulls out the shirt she’s tucked into her jeans. She shows me her pale stomach, the silvery lines I used to admire when I saw her in the bath as a young child.

“These are the marks my body made when I had you. When I carried you in my belly.” She drops her shirt and pulls up her sleeve, revealing a crescent-shaped scar on her inner arm. “This is a burn mark from when I made your first birthday cake. All on my own, with a cake mix I’d gotten at the food bank.” She points to the tiny divot in the bridge of her nose. “This is when you accidentally kicked me in the face on the swing when you were six years old.”

She’s so angry, she’s trembling.

I don’t understand. These are all the ways I scarred her.

“These are my badges of honor , Lana. These are the things I look at when life gets hard and I need to remember the one beautiful, perfect gift God gave me. When I struggle, when I’m far away from you, when I worry about anything in life, I touch the bridge of my nose. I rub my thumb over my arm or I hold my belly where I once held you. You are the reason I survived, Lana. And I have told you over and over and over again how important you are to me. How vital you are to my life.”

“But—”

“Yes I could have lived a different life. Maybe I could have even been happy. But you know what made me happy? The moment I slept with that boy at that party. I didn’t know his name, and for a long time, I was ashamed. But I slept with him in defiance of parents who valued me only for my morality. And my fucking hymen. I slept with him and had you, my brilliant, beautiful, perfect daughter. A daughter who chose a whole career because she wanted to show the world what she could do. Who ended up helping people in the everyday moments of miracles in their daily lives by bringing them cakes on forgotten birthdays. Favorite meals at graduations. Maybe a coffee for a person who needed your tired smile in a moment of darkness.”

Mom is crying now, and my heart feels like an open wound. “I’ve hurt you,” I whisper.

“Only for holding on to this your whole life.” She takes a deep breath, then takes my hand. “Come with me.”

I follow her, a mess of feelings in human form, as she brings me up the stairs. She opens the door softly to Aurora’s room.

My youngest looks like an angel on the pillow, her little fist curled next to her cheek. “What would you say if this baby thought she was in the way of your happiness?” she whispers.

We stare at her a moment, that thought feeling more wrong than anything I’ve ever known.

She closes the door. Then she drags me across the hallway to Nova’s room. Nova, too, looks otherworldly, soft and to my stuttering breath, smiling gently in her sleep. She looks like magic personified.

“You are the center of her world,” Mom says. “Your girls are everything to you, and to me, too. They’re my baby’s babies.”

She closes that door too. In the hallway, away from the girls’ rooms, Mom whispers to me, “I have never regretted you, not for a fraction of a second. And that man? You’re a gift to him, Lana. You’re what he’s been looking for. When he looks at you, he?—”

Mom presses a hand to her chest.

“He’s the first person I’ve ever considered good enough to hold the heart of my child.”

My mind reels at all of this. At what she’s reminded me of, of what she’s shown me.

At her choice of words, so similar to the ones Raph used with me as we looked out over the sea at the end of the road together.

When I asked him to stay, all those weeks ago, he said always. And for once, finally, I get it. I feel it, in my very being.

And suddenly, I need him to know it. I need him to know how good he is too, how deserving of love. I need to apologize for all the ways he showed me how worthy I was and I didn’t do it right back because I was so addled with this old fear.

I throw my arms around her. I tell her how much I love her. Then I beg her to stay here please for the girls. “I have to tell him.”

“I’m not going anywhere, sweetheart.” I run out the door, taking all the steps down and up two at a time until I’m banging on the door at Raph’s place.

He’s awake, fresh out of the shower and in sweatpants and a buttery soft t-shirt. “Lana!” he says, alarmed.

I throw myself at him. “Raph,” is all I manage.

“Lana, what is it?” He holds me back, his eyes wide and panicky. “Is everyone okay?”

“Yes,” I blubber. “Yes. I just…I need to show you too. ”

“Show me what, Sunshine?” he asks.

“That you’re everything to me, too. That you deserve to know how much you’re loved. I’ll show you every day if you let me, Raphael.”

Raph looks stunned, but he slides a hand around the back of my head, the other at my back, crushing me to his chest.

“Okay, Sunshine,” he whispers. “Okay. We’re okay.”

And if I’m not mistaken, by the shudder of his shoulders, I think he’s crying too.