Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
I stared at the floor, my forearms hanging off my knees as the present slowly came back to me.
The sides of my vision pulsated as my heart tried to slow.
The past slithered back into the depths, but the strength I normally had, trained and regulated, to lock them back in the box, was diminished.
I didn’t know how I’d gotten into this position, my ass on the floor, back against the wall.
Perhaps my legs had given out the moment I started telling Margo about how the smell of Damon’s burning flesh had ingrained itself into my nostrils so deeply that it was all I could smell for three months.
Of course, the six psychologists who’d treated me at the direction of the Air Force all concluded that my mind was playing tricks on myself, a direct result of PTSD.
My soul refused to believe that.
Labeling it as punishment served a greater purpose, a reminder of the mistakes I’d made, the burden I had to carry.
I waited for the sound of her voice, a rough sort of sweetness that often reminded me of crystallized honey. It never came. Bravery was now a stranger to me, its presence so absent, I couldn’t even find a trace of its existence anywhere. Not in my body nor in my mind.
Margo had been right.
I was a coward.
I brought my hands up, shoving my fingers into my hair, pulling at the short strands, heart drumming in my ears.
“Hayes.”
Fuck.
Fuck.
Gasping for air, I squeezed my eyes shut, relishing in the sound of her voice. To my surprise, my body began to still, the beauty of her voice falling all around me like the first spring rain. Healing and full of promise.
When my eyes opened again, a pair of lime green sock–covered feet were there.
One of my hands fell away from the top of my head, reaching out to pinch her pretty purple dress.
Feeling the soft velvet between my fingers, I held on, letting the comfort of her proximity keep me afloat.
She shifted after a few seconds, lowering herself to her haunches, the fabric of the dress being pulled from my grasp as her thighs and hips came into view, the smell of jasmine following closely behind.
“Hayes, look at me,” she requested.
“You’re not touching me,” I whispered, my voice like gravel.
“Do you want me to touch you?” She paused. “Please tell me what I need to do.”
Accept my truth.
Accept the tainted parts of my soul.
Accept me as I am, not who I was.
There were so many things I could say, but the fear of losing her compelled me to lie. “Nothing. I’ll be all right.”
A sharp growl left her and then her hands were on my face, pushing my head back. “Stop lying to me,” she hissed, dropping to her knees between my legs. “Just stop, Hayes.”
“I don’t know how,” I rasped, my hands falling to my sides, resting on the cool floor. “I have to do this.”
“Shh,” she cooed, those sage green eyes of hers drinking me in.
My panic. My agony. My imperfections.
“You don’t have to be this person anymore,” she assured, her honey dripping onto my soul now. “Not with me.”
Acceptance.
Love.
Truth.
Her forehead met mine. Evidence of her tears streaked down her cheeks with her makeup.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry this happened to you.
” She took a breath as if to steady herself, her thumbs stroking my cheeks now.
“But you can’t spend the rest of your life blaming yourself for something that was out of your control. ”
A chill slammed into me then, chasing away the warmth behind her words. My hands were at her shoulders, gently urging her away from me so I could get a good look at her. “Out of my control?” I murmured coldly.
She knew she’d said the wrong thing, the proof of that laced through the panic dancing in her eyes. “Yes,” she confirmed. “Out of your control.”
The words left me slowly, each one carrying its own variation of anger. “I…was…flying…the plane…”
Pressing her lips into a thin line, she inhaled and pulled my hands off her.
A fleeting moment of panic sparked in my chest, brighter than the guilt and shame weighing me down.
It quickly faded as she laced our fingers together in a heap on her lap.
My eyes dropped to them, loving the way we fit, how good her colorful tattoos looked beside my skin.
Perfection.
“Have you spoken to a therapist about this?” she asked.
I wanted to scoff, to pretend this was a normal, everyday conversation that we’d forget about in a few years. But it wasn’t. “Yes,” I answered. “Multiple.”
“Grayson knows,” she assumed out loud, her eyes never straying from mine, holding steady as the boat we’d found ourselves in rocked in the harsh waters.
“They all do.” They were my brothers, after all. A family I’d found during the darkest part of my life. We each had our crosses to bear, each different, but just as heavy as the next. “Dominic is who I normally talk to when shit gets bad,” I told her honestly.
Her finger started swiping back and forth over my skin. A small, seemingly insignificant movement, but it rocked my soul. She comforted me in ways I never expected. She wasn’t just an addiction, but a safe haven. Now so more than ever.
“Do you want me to call him?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Okay,” she accepted. No argument. No questions. Just support.
I ground my jaws for a moment, unsure of what to say. “Damon was my best friend.”
She waited, close, patient, and warm.
“Back home, there was some shit going on with his family. One of his sisters had taken his Corvette out for a drive. He didn’t like the idea of the damn thing sitting in the garage for a year.
So she offered to take it out every other weekend.
” I paused, trying to remember the conversation we’d had in the mess hall that morning.
The weeks before the plane crash had all but evaporated from my memory.
Dominic had tried a plethora of techniques and exercises to revive the memories, but they were lost to my trauma.
My brow pinched together. “I—I’m sorry, I don’t…
I don’t remember what was wrong with the car. ”
“That’s okay,” she cooed.
“It’s an important detail, and I can’t fucking remember,” I pushed out in a frustrated huff, breaking our gaze.
I leaned back, head against the wall, eyes on the ceiling.
“He was stressed because it was an expensive problem. He was in his head over it all day, the Corvette was his father’s.
He had passed away when Damon turned sixteen. ”
She squeezed my hand.
“It was triggering for him,” I continued. “So once we were in the air, I took over, giving him a break.”
“Yeah,” she murmured.
“Then the fucking—” A sharp pain shot to my throat. It was almost as if my body was done talking about it, not wanting to relive the memory again. “So, yes, Margo, it was my fault.”
“Hayes, would anything have been different if the roles had been reversed?”
My neck snapped straight, the hairs on the back rising, my muscles tensing. “What?”
“Your plane was a target,” she said. “No matter who was flying it, it would’ve been shot down.”
“I—”
“You said the radar malfunctioned and didn’t pick up the incoming aircraft.” She talked over me. “That was another thing out of your control.”
I bit down, glaring at her as her logic tried to pierce its way into my brain.
For years, Dominic had been saying the same thing.
For years, I’d pushed back against his logic. Angry and unwilling to see the truth.
Yet now, as it spills from her lips, the lie I’d conjured up to live my life, to cope, was starting to shatter.
Those mossy green eyes started shining as she let out an unsteady breath. “You’ve been punishing yourself because no one else’s head was available for the chopping block.”
I jerked.
She moved closer and leaned in, a new tear gliding down her cheek. “You’re carrying an incredible amount of survivor’s guilt, my love.”
My love.
“You’re innocent, Hayes Mitchell.”
Innocent.
“You’re afraid of the truth,” she murmured, bringing her fingers to my lips, brushing over them.
A caressed whisper of touch. The lie—the wall—crumbled down, the final blow leveling it before her final words were even spoken.
“You’ve found comfort in your guilt, in the lie, Hayes.
You’re afraid of letting go of that comfort, of giving yourself the chance to be imperfect, because you think no one will accept you. ”
I blinked, chest heaving now. “I don’t—I don’t—”
“Shh,” she cooed again, her lips close now. My world was drenched in her green and hers in mine. “I accept you. I accept you as you are now and who you’ll become as you start to heal. You have a long way to go and so do I. But we can get through this. Together.”
“Margo…”
She put her forehead against mine and placed a hand over my heart, feeling it beat. “I accept your imperfections.”
I accept your imperfections.
I accept your imperfections.
I accept your imperfections.
I accept your imperfections.
I accept your imperfections.
I accept your imperfections.
My next question, weaved with doubt, filled the mere inches between us then. “And if I fail you? What then?”
“Your failures will never lead to my absence,” she answered, pressing a kiss to my lips.
Christ, this woman. This angel.
“All I ask for is to have you, Hayes. All of you for all of me. Sound fair?”
I kissed her then. Slow, intentional, groundbreaking. “Yes,” I gave in. “Yes, that sounds fair.”
As our bodies fell into one another, both of our crippling foundations of rejection, uncertainty, and self-loathing fell into the sea, floating down into the abyss of the past. We would heal, not together, but side by side, each on our own paths. She would not heal me, and I would not heal her.
True healing, as Dominic once put it, comes from within.
As the storm outside faded away, I took her into my arms and thanked her for weathering it with me.