Chapter Eight
Luke
I’m headed for the bedroom door with the roar of my own voice in my head. Who the fuck am I kidding with all this happily-ever-after marriage bullshit?
I killed her brother. Why the hell do I think she will actually marry me? Yet, in what is clearly a ridiculous point of view, I’ve convinced myself that’s doable. I can marry Ana. I can live the dream. As if I didn’t fucking pull that trigger. As if anyone could live with that kind of baggage. A load and a half that would exist every day for the rest of our lives. I don’t know how I live with the pain in her eyes. I don’t know how she lives with the man responsible for her brother’s death, no matter what led to the ultimate act. I don’t know how the hell we do any of that. I also don’t know how the hell to live without her. I don’t fucking know how. I’ve been miserable alone.
Alone even when I was with other people. Even other women. No one could make me forget her and fuck knows I’ve tried. Because she hated me. Because on some level she still does or those words would not have come out of her mouth just now.
I’m ready to exit the room and clear my head when Ana steps between me and my exit, her hands pressed to my chest. I hate how damn good it feels to have her touch me even when she just called me a killer. A brother killer. The worst of the killers out there. Except maybe a baby killer. Thank fuck there is still a low I haven’t reached.
“That wasn’t about you, Luke,” she promises, “and I hate that you think it was. I hate that is where we’re still at right now. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t think anything, Ana. You said the words. He didn’t want to die. You might as well have said, you didn’t have to kill him. And yet, I did. Because I wanted to live. And I wanted the woman he was holding a gun to her head, to live. I guess it is what it is. We can’t turn back time and change the outcome. Not that I can think of one thing I could have done differently that day. And believe me, I’ve tried.”
“But we can understand it and accept it and I do. You’re still looking for my blame that doesn’t exist. I was talking about Kurt setting him up to die. You would never have had to kill Kasey if Kurt would have told us what was going on. Or at least, you. He could have told you.”
She wasn’t talking about me.
I don’t even know what to do with that piece of information, but she means it. I see it in her eyes. I feel it in her energy. My shoulders soften and flex forward, the edge of my mood, notches downward but I’m still shaken by what I’d believed she meant. Her blame might not be present, but my own is alive and well, but I shove it aside and focus on the moment. On the present hellish twist of events that back us into a corner in a room that is not of our making. But then, none of this ever has been of our making.
None of it.
“I told him that,” I say. “I told him he should have told me. It’s what made me punch him. Had he told me, I would never have ended up where it was me and Kasey, and a life-or-death situation.”
“Exactly my point,” she says easily, but her tone is far from easy at all. It’s raspy with emotion, tormented with both the past and the present that the past created. “And he said what to that?”
“That I would have told you. I would have told you, Ana,” I confirm.“You don’t want him to be right about this because it doesn’t support him keeping his secret. But for the record, the alternative means I would have kept a bombshell secret from you and let you suffer thinking he was dead. You have to know he’s right on at least this. I would never have been able to do that.”
Her lashes lower with what I am certain is the emotional rollercoaster of all this bullshit we’re going through, and I steel myself for her reaction. But when she looks at me again, her voice softens. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I don’t like the alternative. Not at all. I hate we’re going at each other.”
My hands come down on her shoulders and I drag her delicate curves against me. “We’re going to be okay,” I promise, kneading the tension in her spine. “We’ll find a way.”
Her blue eyes spark with concern. “And if we don’t?”
“That’s not an option. We tried that. It was pretty fucking miserable for my part.”
“Mine too,” she assures me, her blue eyes turning all dewy and soft. “I like me better with you.”
I stroke hair from her face. “I like me better with you, too, baby which is why we need to be objective about who Kurt is and what he’s doing here. We might not like his methods, or the way he went about this, but there’s a chance his intentions were honorable. You know that, right?”
She reaches up and touches my face, the tenderness in her expression transforming into something I can only call cold and bitter. “Don’t want it too badly,” she warns. “He’ll use that against you and you’ll end up dead instead of him. And that’s not what I want. I choose you over Kurt. I always chose you, Luke.” Her fingers curl around my shirt. “I don’t know how to make you see that, either.”
“Time, baby. We just need time and that time needs to be a whole hell of a lot more normal than where we’re at now.”
“And that will do it? That will be enough? Because it doesn’t feel like it will be.”
No, I think. It doesn’t but we’re going to make it enough. “We’ll make it enough,” I promise her, stroking her cheek.
We just look at each other, as if we both know, I’m speaking the impossible, but we both refuse to accept failure. She steps into me and I cup her face. “What if we can’t?” she asks again.
“We’ll make it enough,” I vow, and then I kiss her because a kiss is so much simpler than words.
And maybe that’s the answer I’m looking for. Keep it simple. Get us out of this mess and then fly her someplace exotic where we can stay naked for days on end. If we’re naked, we can’t fight. If she’s moaning, she can’t cry. If she’s crying out my name, she can’t call me other nastier names.
We’ll fuck away the past.
I’ve almost convinced myself it really is that simple when there’s a knock on the door and it’s already opening. The past isn’t done with us yet. Maybe it never will be.