‘No idea. Can she trust you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you tried telling her?’ Dan asked, opening his locker and taking out a towel before stashing his bag and racket.
‘Many times and at length. It didn’t make any difference.’
‘Do you want her?’
‘More than I want my next breath,’ said Kit. ‘But five years ago I did something stupid. Something I’ve regretted ever since.’
‘I heard about that too.’
‘And it’s turned out to be too great an obstacle to overcome.’
‘So we all make mistakes,’ said Dan, now armed with a bottle of shower gel as well as a towel.
‘This was some mistake.’
‘Yeah, but it was a while ago, wasn’t it?’
‘Five years.’
‘And has Lily never made a mistake?’
Kit frowned as all the mistakes she’d made filtered into his head. ‘Plenty.’
‘So stop beating yourself up and do something about it. Marry her or something. Bind her to you so she can’t escape and prove it over and over again until she has no choice but to trust you. Bit drastic, I know, but what else are you going to do?’
As Dan strode off and shut himself in one shower cubicle Kit stashed his things in his locker, grabbed a towel and headed for another, his mind beginning to race.
Was Dan right? he wondered, turning on the tap and feeling hot needles of water pummelling his skin. Was he beating himself up unnecessarily about the mistake he’d made? Had he let Lily dictate the way things had gone out of some kind of sense of inadequacy? Had that been totally the wrong thing to do?
Maybe it had, because Lily wasn’t perfect, was she? For the last few weeks he’d been tearing himself apart with remorse and guilt over what he’d done, but what about Lily? Hadn’t she reverted to type when the going had got tough? She had. And while he’d made huge changes and sacrifices for them she’d hardly done a thing.
So maybe he wasn’t blame free in their break-up this time round, but neither was she. Just like before. They were equals. They always had been. Which meant that he was worthy of her, dammit. He did deserve her. They deserved each other.
He shouldn’t have let her get away with ending things between them, he thought, turning off the water and grabbing his towel. That had been a mistake. One he wouldn’t be making again because he loved her and she loved him and he was, well, he was wasting time.
*
Having abandoned Zoe in the pub after her sister had told her to go and then heading straight to the gym, Lily didn’t have a plan. She hadn’t had the time to formulate one. Nor had she had the mental space because her head was so full to the brim with the realisation of what a foolish idiot she’d been and her heart was pounding with so much love and hope and regret at the way she’d behaved that there wasn’t room for anything else.
So when she pushed through the door of the gym and saw Kit striding purposefully across the lobby for a split second she didn’t know what to do. For a moment she just watched him, her heart swelling because he looked so gorgeous, so familiar, and she loved him so damn much.
He also looked like she felt. Drawn. Haggard. Unkempt. As though basic self-maintenance was simply too great a challenge to face these days. Which was something of a boost to her pretty shaky confidence because if he’d looked clean-shaven and crisp, as if he hadn’t been pining for her the way she had for him and was totally over her, she’d have been straight out of the door.
As it was, when he saw her he stopped dead, stared at her, his face totally unreadable, and she didn’t know whether he was glad to see her or surprised or appalled. All she knew was that her heart was thundering so loudly it was a miracle no one else seemed to be able to hear it and her body was straining to throw itself at him and she wasn’t going anywhere.
Literally. However hard it was she was staying right where she was because there’d be no throwing of anything anywhere until she’d said what she had to say, whatever that was.
‘Hello, Kit,’ she said, aiming for breezy nonchalance but, she suspected, failing.
His brows snapping together in a frown, Kit stalked over to her and stopped about a metre away. ‘You’re here,’ he said.
‘So it would seem,’ she said, a bit breathless as her lungs were having trouble functioning in his presence.
‘Why?’