“I can’t do this! I can’t pretend anymore! I just can’t!” She pounds her fists against my chest once, and then she fists my jacket and cries. Heartbreaking sobs echo around us as I wrap my arms around her. “It hurts … so …bad,” she cries against my chest as she shakes. Finally, she rests her head against me and lets the tears fall even harder.
I just rub her back and hold her, just …hold her.
“I can’t look at a photo and not think this is all just a bad dream, Lucas. I close my eyes and see him smiling and … and he’s right there, righthere. I feel him holding my hand and let myself believe he is, and I feel his flesh against mine. I look around our house, and he’s everywhere, but he’s not. And I miss him, and it hurts, and I can’t change it. I can’t heal and move on. I feel like I’m caged in hell, and I just can’t get to him, but I know he’s not in hell. He’s right here, and I just can’t reach him.”
It breaks my heart to see her hurt. Not just seeing her hurt but to feel her pain.
She continues crying as I lift her and walk to a fallen log that’s resting against a tree. I scoop her up, and she wraps her arms around my neck as I sit and hold her as she just keeps crying.
I want to stop those tears. I want to do something to make them go away, but I know she needs this. I can safely assume she’s spent the past several months damming them up.
So, I sit with her on my lap, rocking side to side, like I would with one of my children. At this moment, the woman in my arms isn’t the one I have been dreaming about being with again. She is my friend. Family. A woman I love and always have, just on different levels. A woman who I want to take care of, as she has me so many times in the past.
Her head bobs, now fighting to stay awake. I rest my chin on her head, holding it still as she falls asleep.
Once I know she is, I grab my phone out of my jacket pocket and, with one hand, manage to text Harper and let her know her mom is fine.
Her reply is a simplethank you.
I lean against the tree and hold her as she sleeps. A hundred years could pass, and I would be content right here for a hundred more.
Watching her fall apart, and feeling like I’ve been given a gift in that it is me she allowed to see her, hear her feelings, allowing all her walls to fall down in front of me, probably should have made me nervous. Should have made me realize this needs to go slower than the six months I planned appropriate to give it. But it doesn’t. She needs me, and I need her, too. Always have, always will. I just have to be sure I don’t get too far ahead of myself in this.
I lean down, replacing my chin with my lips, and steal a kiss,just one. I then inhale her scent, one that is so damn familiar to me.
Need for her claws at my insides, as it always has, but now, all these years later, I know it’s not as simple as a need to be inside her, for her to love me; it’s so much deeper than that.
I rest my cheek against her head and sit so contently, feeling like life will someday be right again. Someday, Tessa won’t see him everywhere and feel like it’s her own personal hell, but as a blessing. Someday, I won’t be sleeping in Ava’s room because my wife is a cheating bitch.
I either fall asleep or just lose time in the comfort I take from holding her because when she sits up, I’m jerked from the utopic state of being.
She pulls her face from my neck and removes her hands from my shoulders as she whispers, “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I hold her hand as she stands then hesitantly let go.
“No, I really … How did you know where I was?”
“Harper said you were—”
“Harper?”
“I was at the clinic and answered the phone. She asked me not to tell you—”
“She what?” She freaks.
“She just wanted to know you’re okay.”
“How long was I asleep?”
“Half an hour, forty-five—”
“Holy shit.” She starts walking briskly up the path. “I don’t want to talk about this again. I shouldn’t have—”
“Stop.”
She actually listens and looks back at me as I make my way to her.
“I won’t say a word to anyone. You just promise me, when you’re hurting so much inside you want to run and hide, you call me.”