Chapter Thirty-Nine
As I hold Elise, the stars twinkle overhead, her breathing slows, and she melts into me. My chest tightens, and I fight the desire to nuzzle my face into her hair, but eventually, the feeling becomes overwhelming, and I give in.
I suck in a breath, her silky strands tickling my nose as my lungs fill with the scent of her own sweet, warm accord.
“Stop sniffing me,” she grumbles. “It’s creepy.
” Her voice is laced with exhaustion. A yawn slips free, and she drags a hand up, the blanket still covering it as she covers her mouth and sinks even further against my chest.
I laugh, pinching her upper arm, and press a kiss to the top of her head. “Brat,” I whisper, and she rewards me with a closed- mouth grin that makes my stomach twist. I’ve never kissed someone’s head like that. And suddenly I’m doing it with Elise, and she likes it?
You deserve to be happy . Carlos’s words ring through my mind, echoing until my heart has settled, and my fingers trail over her cheekbone. She peers at me dreamily, clearly lost in thought.
A few silent moments pass before it all comes down around us. “Why were you so upset that day? After the fundraiser,” she asks, clarifying which day, as if I didn’t already know.
I could lie or brush it off, but I have no desire to.
What happened to my brother is a fact of life, and as wholly complicated as it’s become to be with Elise, I like being with her.
I’ve had many times in my life where I’ve had to learn that when you want to say something to someone, you should just do it.
Because sometimes, you never get that chance before it’s too late.
So instead of following my first instinct, to run from the thing causing me discomfort, I say, “Do you know why we have that fundraiser every year?” I’m asking not because I want to run her in circles, but because I don’t want to. I don’t want to explain something she already knows to some degree.
She shakes her head. “No, not really. I know you’ve always done it, at least as long as my dad’s been the coach, but I have no idea why other than it being a good cause.”
I nod, letting out a slow breath to calm my racing heart.
“Do you want the long answer or the short?”
She peers up at me, those stormy blue eyes swirling beneath thick lashes. “I want as much as you’re willing to share.”
I nod. “My brother, Carlos, is a year older than me. Our plan was always to apply for the same schools, and wherever we got in, we both would go.”
I let that new information hang in the silence between us as I work through my thoughts, stringing sentences together that I hope make sense.
“He took a year off after graduating high school and worked with our dad. He’s a car mechanic.” She nods, urging me to continue. “We both got in here, to your university, actually. We each had a full football scholarship.”
She tilts her head, her brows pinching as she works through this.
She says nothing despite the questions piling up in her head.
Through all the chaos and her unrelenting sass, I see her.
I see Elise Auclair for who she truly is, and buried beneath the rubble of a difficult past and emotionally taxing mental illness is someone just fighting to get to the next thing each day.
She’s resilient. And through seeing her , I’m able to see myself reflected a little more clearly too.
That’s what drives me to open up to her.
She doesn’t rush me or push me further, and I appreciate that because I’m about to recount the worst day of my life, a day I haven’t spoken about in years, and I can’t be sure how it’ll impact either of us.
“I wasn’t a great kid, honestly. I made a lot of mistakes, but Carlos made sure to help me clean each one of them up.
I was sort of a daredevil, always looking for the next adrenaline rush.
So naturally, the night before we were supposed to fly here to make our dreams a reality, I convinced Carlos to do something reckless,” I tell her, my stomach twisting in knots as bile rises in my throat.
She wiggles her hands out from under the blanket and brings them up, resting them on my cheeks, rubbing the pads of her thumbs over my cheekbones.
“Carlos begged me not to do it. He hated all of the dumb shit I’d do for a rush.
But it was our last hurrah, and I promised him it would be the very last dumb thing I did if he went with me.
So he did. He wanted to get it over with, so when he jumped—” My words get stuck as I involuntarily grit my teeth, my jaw aching.
Elise lowers her hands to my chest, waiting patiently for me to finish.
“His bungee cord snapped,” I finish, and I’m hit with another wave of nausea as overwhelming guilt sears through me and wraps around my throat like a noose, my words the bucket being kicked out from under me.
Her eyes well with tears, but she blinks them away, pulling herself closer to me, resting her forehead against mine. I allow her warmth to seep into me, filling in the cracks of my long-forgotten soul.
She doesn’t try to tell me it wasn’t my fault. She doesn’t look at me with pity. She just lets us lie here like this, cloaked in a heavy silence as we both work to comprehend what’d happened.
I clear my throat. “He’s mostly paralyzed from the waist down and lives next door to our parents in case he needs help late at night.
And the only reason I’m here instead of rotting away somewhere is because of him.
He wouldn’t let me sit around feeling sorry for myself.
He didn’t want me to stay home when I could be here, living the dream we both had planned.
He’s good like that,” I tell her, pride swelling in my chest as I think about the incredible man my brother’s become despite every challenge he’s faced.
The man is the CEO of a major tech company, choosing to live a humble life because it’s what he prefers and not what he’s been forced into.
She speaks for the first time in what feels like hours. “How’d you wind up playing rugby then?”
A smile turns the edges of my lips as I think about that day. The day that changed everything for me. The day that saved my life.
“I was miserable playing football. The sport I’d loved my whole life had become a constant reminder of everything I’d lost and all the pain I’d caused my family.
So in the beginning of that first semester, I was on a run by the public fields and a group of blokes had asked me to join their rugby scrimmage for the morning.
They said they needed an extra player because their friend was too hungover to show up.
They taught me the basics, and it was a shock to everyone that I was actually good. ”
I shake my head at the memory of the guys, most of them off playing professionally, spread out across the UK and Europe. “They introduced me to their coach, and he worked out a way for me to play for them and maintain my scholarship.”
“Does it hurt you to coach our team? Does it dredge up bad memories?” she asks, her voice small, brows knitted.
I shake my head. “No, Elise. It doesn’t. I’d worried it would when your dad first demanded I coach your team. It took some effort, but after I quit acting like a ballbag, most of the sadness fled. It’s because of you ladies that I’m relearning how to love the sport I grew up playing.”
A small smile lights her face, and it sends a thrill through my whole being.
“It isn’t your fault, you know,” she says. “It took me a long time to learn that after what happened to Maman and my sister, but eventually I did.”
I know her mum passed away from cancer, but I don’t know any details beyond that. “What would you have to feel guilty about?” I ask, shifting our weight so we can both lie on our sides, facing one another.
“My dad supported us both. He loved us endlessly, but because Rachelle had no desire to play sports, or watch them, for that matter,” she adds, a sad smile crossing her full lips, “Dad was always with me. The weekend our lives went to hell was during an away game. Maman’s breast cancer had spread.
” Her chin quivers, throat bobbing. “It metastasized to her bones, lungs, liver, lymph nodes, and toward the end, her brain.” Elise takes a moment, chewing on her bottom lip before continuing, and my heart aches for her.
“Treatments weren’t working, and they’d gotten to a point they weren’t even slowing things down anymore.
She decided that the chemo wasn’t worth it anymore if it wasn’t going to improve her quality of life or prolong the time she got to spend with us.
She was feeling better, not because she was better, but because she wasn’t pouring toxins into her body to kill something that had already decided to kill her . ”
She takes another pause, her eyes welling with tears that threaten to break me.
“She convinced my dad and I that she’d be fine while we went away for the night.
It was just one night. She swore she felt better.
” Her lips pinch, her gaze shifting toward the sky as she tries desperately to hold herself together.
“But when we got home, we found her in bed, cold, and with no life left in her.” Her chin wobbles, and I want her to stop talking.
I want her to stop feeling the pain I can see rushing through her like a tidal wave, the same as when it first happened.
“And then we found Rachelle,” she whispers, her voice cracking as tears spill down her cheeks.
I swipe them away, but they keep coming.
“She overdosed. She was alone and terrified, and we weren’t there to help her through it,” she says, sobs wracking her body.
I tug her to my chest, and she buries her face in my shirt. I stroke my hand over her head, allowing her to get it out, and wishing like hell I could take it all away.
I had no idea.
I’m filled with a newfound respect for her father, one even greater than I’d already had.
He’s endured one of the worst things a person could ever imagine happening, losing the other half of their heart, and he still manages to smile and tries relentlessly to make those around him smile too.
Maybe if I weren’t so busy trying to keep everyone at a distance, I could pick up the pieces of myself that used to do the same—make people smile, laugh, and feel emotion outside of disdain, lust, or annoyance.
When time has passed and she’s stopped crying, she wipes beneath her eyes and looks up into mine.
“You probably can’t tell from all the crying I just did,” she says, sniffling after letting out a choked laugh, “but I no longer blame myself. I had no way of knowing any of that would happen. None of us did. It was nobody’s fault, but it was the cards we were dealt.
Sometimes, terrible things happen to good people, and that’s all there is to it. ”
God, this woman is so strong. It’s no wonder her age has never deterred me. I’d expected to feel weird about being intimate with her like this, but so far, I haven’t. She’s had to grow up too fast. But I’m grateful she’s here with me, safe in my arms.
“Thank you for sharing that with me,” I tell her, kissing the top of her head. The same thing I’d done just minutes ago, an action so intimate, but it feels right.
“Thank you for telling me about Carlos,” she whispers.
“Will you show me, sometime?” I ask, then clarify. “Can you help me figure out how to deal with the guilt?”
She nods, and I feel the movement against my chest as she squeezes me tightly to her.
“I can’t say I’m the best at it. I think I’ve managed to turn a lot of my guilt into the general shitty attitude I know you love ,” she says sarcastically, but the frightening thing is that I’m not sure she’s wrong .
Though “love” probably isn’t the right word for it. “But I’m willing to try.”
We spend the rest of the night like this, tucked away from the world in one of our own creations.