Chapter 39: Loss

TRIGGER WARNING: Pregnancy/baby loss

Aaron and I remained civil for the rest of the evening, although that was easier to do when Lacey commanded everyone's attention, bouncing masterfully between conversations. She was the life and soul of the party, and her energy never seemed to waver. In comparison, Ed took a more laidback approach. He'd interject with a joke at her expense or a rebuttal of some accusation she made, but otherwise he let her lead.

The two of them seemed such polar opposites. Maybe that explained why they'd not worked romantically. Aside from their obvious attractiveness, you'd never expect them to be involved.

I questioned Ed on it as we lay in bed together later that night.

"Is she always like that or was she putting on a performance for my benefit?" I asked.

"How do you mean?" His thumb traced lazy circles over my shoulder.

"Just so... Energetic. Uncensored. Engaging. I don't consider myself particularly introverted, but I couldn't have kept that up for as long as she did. I was sat there in awe most of the time. She's another level."

He chuckled. "She's an actress. There's always a certain element of theatrics with her. She can be loud, though. I prefer her in small doses."

"I can't picture the two of you together."

"That's probably a good thing," he said, amused.

Curiosity tugged at me. I wanted to ask questions, but would it be weird? Would he assume I was insecure? Jealous? Their past belonged to them, and I was fine not knowing details. But when she continued to play such a starring role in his life, I felt like I deserved to know an abridged version.

"When was the last time you and her...?"

"You already know the answer to that. It hasn't changed." His voice dropped an octave, not enough to suggest the question had annoyed him, but I still bit my bottom lip to force myself to tread carefully.

Then he surprised me by voluntarily continuing, his tone much softer as it drifted into the dark air around us.

"The sex was very much a physical arrangement. I cared for her as a friend, but sex was never emotional. Our friendship... It's more than a friendship, but it's not romantic."

An ominous chill crept down my spine. More than a friendship? What was that supposed to mean? Casual sex between friends, I could understand. I'd dabbled in that myself, successfully without emotions—Mac a prime example—so I believed him when he claimed it was purely physical.

But if that had ended, then how could they still be more than friends?

"Oh?" I said, trying not to let my hesitance show.

"We know things about each other that nobody else knows. We've gone through stuff together that nobody else is aware of. It creates a bond. An intimacy that transcends romance or sex or..." His voice had thickened with the candidness of his words.

"You said earlier that part of you will always love her," I said quietly. "As a friend. Is that what you mean?"

"Yeah." He inhaled a deep breath through his nose, then released it in a long sigh. "I swear you don't need to worry about me and her. I do need to talk about it, though."

I rolled onto my side to face him, my toes reaching out to brush against his own under the duvet.

"I'm listening."

Another gentle sigh escaped from him. He was usually so sure of himself, so confident and laidback with his words. Not wanting to rush him, I lay there patiently, despite every second of silence inflating the ball of knots in my stomach.

"Overhearing what you said to Mac, knowing how you feel... I probably should have talked to you about this sooner. I'm serious about you. I see a future with you. I want you to know everything about me, and that includes the full story about Lacey. I just bottled out of doing it before tonight because I didn't want you to look at her differently."

"Please don't let what you heard me say pressure you into doing anything you're not ready to do."

He tilted his head sideways to glance at me. "I'm not. This isn't just about that. With my job, people will always assume they know everything about me. They'll pride themselves on it. In reality, they know next to nothing. So this is about sharing something with you that nobody else in this world knows about apart from Lacey and one other person."

"...Mark?"

"Aaron."

"Oh, okay."

Straightening his neck again, he stared up at the ceiling. Every rise and fall of his chest accentuated the long seconds that passed. Seconds of tension, anticipation, uncertainty. A limbo of time between knowing and not knowing the biggest secret he'd ever shared with another person.

"She was pregnant. We lost it."

My heart came to a crashing halt. Air leaked from my lungs, and only when my chest began to burn did I realise I'd stopped breathing. Questions swirled through my head, but the fear of inflaming his pain, or being inadvertently insensitive or ignorant, stopped me from asking them.

Instead, I reached across the duvet for his hand, threaded our fingers together, and let him speak.

"We didn't mean to get pregnant," he said. "We were careful. So, when we found out, neither of us knew what to do. We weren't even together at that point. We'd broken things off and the sex was just casual."

He sat up and cleared his throat. I shuffled into a sitting position too, crossing my legs but not letting go of his hand.

"We spent a couple of days apart thinking about it. When we met up again, I told her I'd support whatever decision she came to. That obviously I hadn't planned to be a dad in my twenties, but I'd adapt and be as involved as she wanted me to be, if that was what she wanted. She said she did."

I brushed the pad of my thumb over his knuckles. "So you managed to have these conversations in person?"

"Yeah. I was in LA filming the music video for Summer Dreams. I'd have wanted to be with her in person anyway, but it would've been more difficult flying over without Mark and Helen finding out the reason why."

"Was it hard not telling Mark? I know you're close."

"It was hard," he said slowly, "but Lacey didn't want anyone to know, so I kept it to myself for her. She wanted to wait until after the first scan before causing mass panic among our teams."

His spare hand rose to his neck and rubbed at it, eyes fluttering shut. Sympathy tightened my own throat. The first scan. Even as someone who'd never been pregnant, I knew what that scan represented. I'd seen enough ultrasound photos on social media.

"Anyway." He cleared his throat. "Over the next few weeks, we both drew up comprehensive plans for how we'd make it work. Short-term and long-term. I was going to move to LA. I started dropping hints to Helen and Mark about how much I loved California, so it wouldn't come as a shock when I announced I wanted to relocate. But Lacey's plans... They had to be more immediate. Even before the first scan, she had to make decisions based on what her life might be like in several months' time. She turned down roles because she wouldn't have been able to a hide a pregnancy, plus then she'd have needed to take time off once the baby was born, and..."

His voice wavered. One solitary tear trickled down his cheek. My own eyes began to mist, and I shuffled closer, wrapping my arms around his torso and nuzzling my face into his neck.

"You don't have to talk about it if it's too painful."

With a shaky breath, he ran a palm up my back and twisted his fingers into my hair.

"You deserve to know, Soph. You're the most important person in my life now, and I can't have this secret from you. Plus..." His throat bobbed beneath my cheek with a thick swallow. "This is the reason Lacey and I are still close. We share something that's bonded us forever, and that doesn't change how much I love you and want to be with you, but part of my heart will always be attached to what I went through with her. You may not be comfortable with that, and I'd understand if so."

His pulse raced beneath my lips as I pressed a gentle kiss to the underside of his jaw. When I leaned back to look at him, worried eyes stumbled over my face, as if searching for an indication of how I felt.

How I felt seemed so irrelevant in all of this. Him and Lacey had gone through something awful together. I could never make that about me. Quickly, I tried to re-process his words so I could offer some reassurance or sympathy or something other than deafening silence. But in doing so, my brain tripped up on one particular thing he'd said.

It hadn't registered at the time, and even now I pushed it aside, refused to dwell on it. He'd probably not realised he'd said it, and this absolutely wasn't the conversation in which to bring it up.

"Comfortable is the wrong word," I said. "I'm never going to be comfortable that you've had to experience something so painful. But if you need reassurance, I promise I'm not going anywhere, and I promise I'll never come between you and Lacey."

Affectionate fingertips trailed a delicate path along my neck, down my arm, and across my wrist. When he reached my hand, his clutch was firm, needy. I let my head drop forwards and rested my cheek on the hard slab of his shoulder.

"That night you bumped into her downstairs," he said, "and she was upset and angry... Obviously I'd never have said anything to that journalist about the pregnancy, and Lacey knew that, but she was still hurt that I was using our relationship as a bargaining chip. She thought it cheapened what we'd shared. As we were arguing about that, the baby came up, and then we both got upset."

"Mark and Helen still don't know?"

"No. It was Lacey's team who drove us to her personal doctor for the first scan. We told them it was just a routine sexual health appointment. Then we found out we'd had a silent miscarriage."

Sorrow and anguish balled together and clogged my throat. A silent miscarriage. I couldn't even begin to imagine how devastating that first scan must have been.

"God, I'm so sorry, Ed. I don't know what to say."

His lips brushed my forehead. "That's because there isn't anything to say. Nothing will make it better. You don't need to try."

"Did you talk to anyone about it? A therapist?"

"I should have done, but I felt like I didn't deserve it." His chest inflated with a deep sigh. "This happens to long-term couples who are desperate for a baby. They're more deserving of the support than I was."

Frowning, I lifted my head from his shoulder to look at him. "Ed... It doesn't make the experience less upsetting for you. Your experience is still your experience, regardless of how it compares to someone else's."

"Hm. It just didn't seem fair when Lacey and I hadn't planned to be pregnant. We'd taken precautions to avoid it. But we were still excited. We'd made all these plans and we'd reimagined our lives, and we'd formed a bond with this baby that we didn't know had already..."

His voice cracked and his hand rose to his eyes again, shielding his tears. I ran my fingers through his hair, over his cheeks, clutched the back of his neck and rested my forehead against his.

"It doesn't matter how many times you tell yourself that it's still early days and that you need to wait for the first scan," he said. "When you get that bad news, nothing prepares you for it. All those plans we'd made, they were never going to happen. It just stopped."

Tears stung my eyes, and all I could do was carry on holding him and hope that I was bringing him some comfort.

"We told Aaron. Only Aaron. His sister lived across town, and I was staying in a hotel an hour away because she insisted she needed space to process. Aaron travelled between both of us every day. Even when I told him not to, he still visited me. Sometimes we didn't say a word to each other. We just lay in bed. And other times, I would cry or shout or smash things, and he'd stay with me until it was out of my system."

"I'm so glad you had a friend to support you."

Ed's fingers trickled through my hair. "I'm not saying that I let him get away with stuff because I owe him. However, in my darkest time, he did more for me than I could have ever asked for. That says a lot about a person. So yeah, I was pissed off when he kissed you, but I forgave him because I know he cares for me deep down. He wouldn't have spent so many hours travelling back and forth across LA if he didn't."

Leaning back to put some space between us, he took both of my hands in his. For several seconds he stared down at our entwined fingers before lifting his eyes to mine.

"This is also the reason why I'm so cautious about protection during sex. I wasn't lying when I said I've never had sex without a condom. It's failed on me before, though, and I'd never want to do anything that increases the risk of pregnancy even more."

I read between the lines on that. He'd gone through the pain once, and he wasn't ready to risk going through it again.

"I understand. I'm very careful about taking the pill, so we have two forms of protection between us. If you want, I can look at other forms of contraception that don't have a human error factor attached to them."

He lowered his forehead to lean against mine again, his breaths short and shaky.

"I'd never tell you what to do with your body, Soph. I trust you're as careful as you can be, but the fact you've even made that offer means a lot to me."

I brushed my nose against his, and our lips found each other. One hand floated up the outside of my arm to cup my cheek as we kissed, the exchange gentle and affectionate instead of the usual preamble to sex. But with my head spinning, trying to join all the dots, a different puzzle distracted me.

"If Helen and Mark don't know, then what do they think happened between you and Lacey?"

"Uh, well, Lacey created a cover story for when we went back to the hospital for treatment." Ed scraped a hand over his jaw, eyes glazing over. "She said she'd accidentally hurt herself during sex. Her team obviously kicked off, called Helen, and the stupid lie got blown way out of proportion."

"Oh, shit."

"Hm. We should've thought of something else, but neither of us was thinking straight at the time. Next thing we know, there's an NDA drawn up. Lacey didn't appreciate that. We were going through something so painful and personal together, that the threat of an NDA was insulting to her."

The pieces slowly slotted together in my mind, everything from our first conversation about Lacey on the plane—where Ed had admitted they shared an NDA—to Helen's reaction the night we came clean about the journalist.

"They didn't believe us when we insisted this fictional injury was an accident during something totally consensual. Her team was painting me as either abusive or careless, and my team was painting her as manipulative and opportunistic. It got out of hand, and yet while all this was going on, we were still suffering and grieving in private."

"So feuding teams was the last thing you needed," I said.

His mouth twisted into a strained smile. "We tried to stay out of it, but Lacey's emotions were all over the place and it was really pissing her off. With everything we were going through, it was horrible to think there could be a time where we'd need to rely on an NDA to stop us from damaging each other. So she persuaded me to make something even more damaging, so that the power lay in our hands and not in the teams'. And because she was in pain and I'd have done anything she asked of me, I said yes."

"That's what's on the memory stick?"

Ed shrugged with one shoulder, avoiding eye contact. "You probably won't want to listen to it now we're together."

"Listen?"

"It's just audio. We weren't total idiots. Our voices are recognisable, though, and it's what we're saying to each other that's more damaging than anything else."

My lips parted, tempted to ask the question even though I'd gone nowhere near that memory stick since he gave it to me seven months ago.

"It was sexual degradation," he said. "I know I want to stray away from my family-friendly brand, but this would be the total extreme. Hence why it would damage me."

"You've never degraded me in bed..." Did he want to? Rough sex, I enjoyed. Dirty talk, great. Degradation... Not so sure.

"It wasn't real, Soph." He squeezed my hand. "We weren't even having sex when we recorded it. We had a script in front of us, planned it all out. Maximum damage, minimum reality."

"Sounds like you'd have come off far worse than her. Her brand is based on positive sexuality. Surely what she does in the bedroom is her choice and all part of that?"

"She, uh... She compromised her own brand in a different way. She made references to me being better than her current boyfriend, so it sounded like she was cheating — she was single at the time but it's not like the audio had a timestamp. She also slut-shamed some co-stars and made fun of a famous director."

"Fucking hell."

Shame flashed across his face, and I immediately regretted expressing my shock out loud.

"Sorry. I didn't mean that to sound like judgement."

"No, it's fine. It wasn't a good idea, but when we made that audio, we were committed to protecting each other. An NDA was sterile, cold. This was on our own terms to undermine the legal agreement."

Curiosity be damned, I would not be going anywhere near that stick. Ed knew I'd not looked at it because I'd not asked him questions, and now I understood why he was so confident in that assumption. How could I listen to him degrading Lacey without asking if sexual degradation was one of his kinks?

"Anyway, we told our teams about the clip, and we let them listen to it. They predictably flew off the handle with us. That's why I told you it was perfect negotiation material for Helen. She wants to keep that audio private even more than I do."

"I bet."

"It's also why they're so sensitive about Lacey and me. They think it's a disaster waiting to happen."

I nodded and wiped some lingering wetness from his cheek. "Thank you for sharing this with me. I know it wasn't easy to talk about."

"I don't want it to change anything between us. You deserved to know, but it was a while ago now and I've adjusted and moved forward with my life. So has Lacey."

"Two years isn't that long, Ed. If you ever feel you need to talk to someone professional, or even just to me, I'll support you. If you don't need that, then I'm not going to tell you otherwise. The main thing is that you don't hide the pain if you're feeling it."

"Thanks, Soph." He then tilted his head to the side, confusion wrinkling his brow. "How'd you know it was two years ago?"

"Wasn't that when Summer Dreams came out?"

The tiniest smile tickled his lips. "I didn't think you'd know that."

"I've been revising." I winked.

Warmth heated the cool blue of his eyes. His thumb smoothed over my jaw, and then he drew me into a kiss. This time it was more intense, his tongue slicking over mine, warm and persistent, while his hand angled my head to help him drive deeper.

When we paused for breath, I plucked up the courage to ask the question eating away at me.

"Can I ask something?"

"Anything." He slipped his hand around to the back of my neck and tipped my head up to look at him.

"Degradation..."

"Not my thing." Then he pressed his lips together as his eyes flickered across my face. "I mean, if you want to try it, then we can talk about it and perhaps get some pre-agreed phrases—"

"No," I cut in, trying to contain my relief. "It's not my thing, either. I just wasn't sure if it was something you did with her that you haven't dared broach with me."

"I never did it with her. That's what I meant about keeping the audio separate from reality. We both said and did things we'd never done before, just so it felt like more of an act than something genuinely personal. The public wouldn't know that, but we would."

That made sense. Personally, I couldn't ever imagine making such a destructive audio purely for the purposes of self-preservation, but I also couldn't imagine the pain they'd both suffered, so there was no judgement from my side.

"Is there anything else on the stick?"

The corner of Ed's mouth tugged up. "There might be a few songs on there. Or, rather, lyrics."

"The ones you mentioned when we first got together?"

"Yes, well, I didn't think you'd be able to resist looking that long, and I was impatient to reassure you that every other song I wrote about you was positive and heartfelt."

My lips stretched into a grin. Even after all these months, with all the effort we'd both put into fixing our friendship, it still filled me with warmth to know concrete proof existed of his feelings towards me back then.

"Your next song about me better go straight to number one, too."

His eyes twinkled as he ran his finger along my lips, tracing my smile. "No pressure, then."

***

Thank you for reading :) xx

***

I strongly debated whether to include this chapter. It's not just a plot point to me — not just a "dramatic" story to explain the past that Ed and Lacey share. This is a heart-breaking tragedy that so many of us have faced in real life. We don't talk much about baby loss, and I thought that by removing this chapter or by changing their history to something else, I would be perpetuating that stigma. It is one of the most painful things to go through, and anyone who has experienced it would never want anyone else to suffer in the same way. Yet, sometimes, there can be a comfort in knowing you are not alone.