31. Julia #3
His expression stills.
“That was the part that took me the longest to make sense of afterward.” I pull one hand from my pocket and rub my thumb over my fingers, suddenly aware of how cold they are.
“I kept going back through everything, trying to figure out where it became fake because you were Ghost too, and I couldn’t find it. ”
He says nothing.
“The things you taught me didn’t stop being true just because you lied to me about something else. The way you cared when I was falling apart didn’t suddenly feel acted. Neither did the way you pushed me to stop apologizing for existing or to finally get angry at people who deserved it.”
His jaw tightens slightly, emotion moving behind his eyes.
“And then I found the Board order.” He looks away. “I didn’t know you would ever see that.”
“I know. That’s why it mattered.” His gaze returns to mine. “You could have waited to see if I reported you. You could have protected yourself, or minimized it, or found some way to make it sound less ugly than it was. Instead, you told them.”
“I had to.”
“No.” I shake my head. “You chose to. There’s a difference.”
“Julia, I don’t want you thinking that makes what I did better.”
“I don’t.” My voice comes out firm because I mean it. “I think it means you finally did the right thing when there was absolutely nothing in it for you.”
The wind moves through the bare branches beyond us while Kai watches me as if he’s afraid to breathe too deeply and disturb whatever is happening between us.
“I forgave you.” I say softly.
For several seconds, he doesn’t move. Not even slightly.
“Kai?”
His throat works before he manages, “I heard you.”
The roughness in his voice nearly undoes me.
“I’m not saying it’s all okay now. It isn’t.
There are still things I hate when I think about them, and I might be angry again tomorrow or next week or six months from now.
” I step closer without consciously deciding to.
“But I stopped wanting you to hurt. Somewhere along the way, I stopped needing you to be punished forever just because I was hurt.”
His beautiful amber eyes shine, and this time he doesn’t look away quickly enough to hide it.
“I wanted that for you,” he says quietly. “Not forgiveness for me. Just… I wanted you to get to a place where what I did wasn’t something you had to carry every day.”
“I did.”
A breath leaves him slowly, almost like relief, but there is no hope attached to it. He doesn’t move toward me. Doesn’t ask what forgiveness means.
He glances back toward the house. “Then I’m glad. Really.” His voice softens. “And I should probably let you get back before somebody comes looking for you.”
The old version of me might have let him. I watch him pull one hand from his pocket and turn toward the garage, already giving me the distance he assumes I still want, and something in my chest twists hard enough that I speak before I can lose my nerve.
“Kai.”
He stops. Always. Then turns back slowly. There are a hundred things I could ask him, but only one has been sitting beneath all the others since the night I realized there had never been two men.
“Who fell in love with me?”
Confusion pulls his brows together.
“Ghost or you?”
For one long moment he simply looks at me, then something in his face changes. Not Dr. Blackwood, not quite Ghost either, just the man both of them had been hiding.
“Me.”
The answer is so immediate that my breath catches.
“Kai—”
“It was always me.” He steps closer, but only once, stopping well before he reaches me.
His voice is lower now, rougher, carrying none of the careful distance he has been using since he walked outside.
“Ghost wasn’t some other man who fell for you after I did.
He was what happened when I stopped the pretense of not wanting you. ”
My heart begins beating harder.
“I noticed you the first day you walked into my office. I noticed your hair, your eyes, the way you were trying to make a joke while every part of you looked like you wanted to run.” His mouth pulls into the faintest, aching smile.
“And then you kept coming back, and I got to know you, and it got worse.”
Despite the pressure building behind my eyes, I almost laugh. “Worse?”
“For me? Absolutely.” The smile disappears, leaving something much more vulnerable behind. “You were funny when you didn’t mean to be. Stubborn as hell. You argued with me when you knew I was right, which happened often enough to become exhausting.”
“Careful.” I feel my eyebrow arch but I’m smiling.
“There she is.” The words are quiet, almost affectionate enough to hurt.
Kai’s gaze moves over my face before settling back on my eyes.
“I fell in love with the woman sitting across from me every Thursday. Ghost was just the part of me that wanted her without pretending otherwise. He wanted to touch you, yes, but he also wanted to hear you laugh when you weren’t trying to hide behind it.
He wanted to know what you looked like when you felt safe enough to fall asleep against him.
He wanted every part of you I had already spent weeks trying not to want. ”
My eyes burn.
“And instead of doing the right thing, I found a way to have you without risking hearing you tell me no.” The words hit with enough force that neither of us moves for a moment.
“That’s the part I understand now,” he continues, quieter.
“I should have transferred you the second I knew I couldn’t be only your doctor anymore.
I should have waited until I was allowed to come near you as a man, and then I should have knocked on your fucking door with my own face showing and asked you out. ”
A tear slips free before I can stop it. Kai’s hand moves instinctively before freezing at his side.
“You want to know the really shitty part?” I ask, wiping the tear away myself.
His mouth twists. “I suspect there are several.”
“That probably would’ve worked.”
He stares at me.
“If you’d transferred me and waited, and then one day showed up on that ridiculous motorcycle wearing jeans instead of one of those criminally expensive suits and asked me to dinner…” My throat tightens around a laugh that doesn’t quite make it out. “I would have said yes.”
The look on his face nearly breaks me.
“You didn’t need Ghost, Kai.”
His eyes close briefly. “No.”
“You were already enough.”
When he opens them again, there is no protection left in them.
“You should have let me decide it.” My entire body is shivering over the way he’s looking at me.
“I know.”
“And if there is ever anything between us again, you don’t get to decide for me because you think you know what my answer will be.”
Kai goes very still. I hear my own words a second after he does.
If there is ever anything between us again.
Hope touches his face so carefully that I almost want to look away. “What are you saying, Julia?”
I draw in a breath.
“I’m saying I don’t want Ghost back.”
His expression shifts, but I continue before he can mistake where I’m going.
“I don’t want letters from somebody hiding outside my house, and I don’t want Dr. Blackwood back either. I already paid far too much money for that version of you.”
The corner of his mouth moves despite himself.
“I want Kai.”
He doesn’t breathe.
“I want the man who rides when his head gets too loud and gets bullied into Sunday dinner by Mara. The one Connor makes watch superhero movies. The man who inherited an entire property and turned it into this without ever thinking it was something worth bragging about.” I glance toward the house before looking back at him.
“I want the parts of Ghost that were actually you, too. Just without the stalking, preferably.”
A broken laugh leaves him. “That seems reasonable.”
“I thought so.”
His eyes stay fixed on mine. “What does wanting Kai mean?”
There is no assumption in the question. No attempt to fill in the answer before I give it and maybe that is why the answer comes so easily.
“It means I want to find out.”
Something shifts in his face, almost too much emotion to name.
“Dinner. Coffee. Your actual phone number. Things normal people apparently do before having sex against walls.”
That earns me the first real laugh I’ve heard from him, and God, I have missed it.
“I can try normal.”
“I’m not asking for miracles.”
His smile fades slowly as he looks at me, and the yearning beneath it is so unmistakable that my pulse trips. He still hasn’t touched me and I take the last step myself. My fingers slide into his hand. Kai exhales sharply, his gaze dropping to where our hands meet before returning to my face.
After everything those hands have done to me, holding one feels almost unbearably intimate. His fingers close around mine carefully.
“Are you sure?”
I think about the letters, the lamp, the open door and every yes I gave without knowing the entire truth behind the man asking for it.
This one belongs to me completely. “Yes.”
The word changes him. His fingers tighten around mine, not enough to hurt, but enough that I feel the restraint he has been holding onto since he walked out of that house begin to strain.
I look up at him. “Do you still love me?”
Something flashes across his face, fierce enough that for the first time today he doesn’t even try to hide it.
“Julia, I have loved you every fucking day you’ve been gone.”
My breath catches.