“Hurt me? Scare me? No, you did not.”
He studies me, then, “Would you—”
“Do it again? Yes, I would.” My hand flattens on his chest. “I can’t explain it, and I know that was barely anything, but it was intimate in ways that I couldn’t be with anyone else. In ways I thought that I would never be with anyone, after Garner Neuville. You are somehow dangerous and sexy and still safe, and I don’t know how that’s even possible.”
His eyes darken, some emotion I cannot name flashing in their depths, and then he kisses me hard and fast, before he eases my leg down and reaches over to the table. He relaxes beside me again with a tissue that he presses between us, slipping it where he had been. But already he is pulling me closer again, maneuvering to his back, with my head on his chest. We melt into the couch and each other, a blanket of warmth wrapping around us, and I can almost feel our bond growing. This is what safe feels like. But even as I try to revel in this moment, there’s a nagging feeling that when we leave this room, we are no longer safe.
“Ella,” Kayden says, and I wonder if he feels it too.
“Yes?”
He rolls me to my back, one arm bracketing me, light brown hair draping his forehead. Those blue eyes becoming warm in the way they do only for me. “I want you to be my wife.”
I suck in air, shocked when perhaps I should not be. I love him. He loves me. And yet I can’t seem to make myself say the magic word: Yes.
five
sara
Tuesday, February 24th
Writing this entry is rather surreal considering it’s only hours after I spoke to Ella, confirming she’s alive. Alive! I cannot believe it. As silly as it seems as I write this now, I never said it out loud, nor put ink to paper, for fear I’d somehow jeopardize my chance of ever seeing her again. But back to why this is surreal. Well, I guess there are many reasons, but ultimately one. It was Ella who handed me a journal in the first place. Not my journal, but Rebecca’s, a woman I didn’t know then, but now . . . now I feel as if she is a part of me. Rebecca certainly changed my life. Her words touched my heart, my soul. Her words scared me enough for me to look for her, and while I didn’t find her, I did find Chris. And Chris is most certainly a part of me.
And that all came about because Ella became obsessed with Storage Wars, and decided to auction hunt during last summer’s break. She found Rebecca’s journal in a storage unit, obsessing over it before I did, and then leaving it with me the night she abruptly left for Paris to elope with a man she barely knew. And since a journal was the last thing Ella and I shared before our call today, somehow writing in one now that I’ve found her again seems profoundly well timed. That journal changed my life..
So with all of this in mind, I’m attempting to start my own journal. Again. I always feel weird about exposing myself on the page, but this time I’m committing because Rebecca’s fears, dreams, and life in general drove me to be better. And I think I’ve grown enough since meeting her on that first page I read to make that growth come from reading my own fears and insecurities on the page. And if I share them with Chris, because I am able to with him, who knows where that will lead us . . .
So where are we now? I am sitting in Chris’s Paris studio, curled inside the nook in front of the window where he was painting me just two hours ago. He’s back to painting. “Take Me to Church” is still playing on repeat in the background, while he works on one of his Underground Tom paintings, all of which have been dark, and no doubt inspired by the recent and past tragedies of his life, as well as his fear that part of his life will somehow touch me and us. He is broken in many ways, as dark as those paintings, but somehow that part of him collides with all the others and equals perfection to me and the canvas. He started by painting me, quite literally, and I’m not talking about the canvas. I’m wearing his shirt now, but beneath it, I have paint all over my body. My God, the things that man does to me!
One minute he was kissing me, the next my hands were bound and
I was at the center of the studio, on the floor, his brush, hands, and mouth driving me wild. Controlling me the way certain triggers make him want to control everything around us, and yet he manages to keep those moments naked and raw. And somehow, I like it when he controls me. The control freak in me stopped fighting that months ago. I like it. I love it. He might dominate in those intimate times, but I am never as free in life as I am then, when I don’t have to be anything but his woman.
But going back to how the need for control started today, or rather, why it started . . .
The minute he’d heard I might be in danger, I knew it would be a trigger for him, for which he’d need a release, which for Chris used to mean pain. I still can’t believe how he’d . . . I can’t write it. I just . . . can’t. Now, his release is sex. Hot, amazing sex, and this time it included binding my hands, painting my body, and teasing me incessantly. Teasing both of us, because when we finally . . . it was explosive. This is how he heals now. How we heal.
We.
I like that word.
Wife.
Husband.
I like those words, too, though there are still no white picket fences for Chris and me. I’ll happily take the many shades of perfect imperfection that define Chris Merit. But I really want Ella to have her version of the white picket fence. And I know she’s not the simple happy schoolteacher she played at being. I saw her own shades of imperfection because they spoke to mine. It’s why we connected and understood each other, beyond what we dared speak to one another. But maybe we will now. I just want the chance for us to get that close. I really need her to be okay, and my gut says she’s not. The way it said Rebecca was not.
ella
“This is where you say ‘yes,’ sweetheart,” Kayden says. “This is where you agree to be my wife.”
“Wife,” I say. “I never thought . . . but I like how that sounds.” I have recovered from the shock of his proposal enough to know why I’m hesitating to accept. “But there are so many reasons—”
“For you to say ‘yes,’?” he supplies, his voice rough, shadows in his eyes that weren’t there moments before.
He’s right; there are. But instead I say, “For us to talk. I need to sit up so we can talk.”
He stares at me, his expression unreadable, his naked shoulders bunched, and I can tell that he wants to refuse to move, but he doesn’t. He leans back just enough for me prop myself on the arm of the couch behind me. But he continues to bracket my hips, caging me as if he thinks I’ll run away, when all I want to do is kiss him. I settle for reaching up and fingering a strand of his light brown hair. “You’re The Hawk.”