Chapter 26 Gutted
GUTTED
Iring the doorbell of my childhood home and wait for the only woman I’ve ever loved to answer the door. After pulling Mabel from my arms and carrying her daughter to her SUV, I packed up their chairs and wagon and helped Doug load it all into the trunk of his car.
Faye was already long gone. I swear, she took my heart with her when she went. Every single piece of it.
Doug told me they’d be taking Mabel for the night. Told me to give her an hour and come over.
So, I’m here. With steak.
I feel like an idiot.
I don’t know what I’m doing here. What I’m supposed to say after all that.
She’s not ready for me. For us. For all the complication I bring to her already over-complicated life.
I should leave.
She opens the door. Every muscle in my body contracts at the sight of her. Even in her grief, she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.
“Holt.” My name cracks on a hitched sob.
I don’t think. I just move.
I step into her, sliding my arm around her waist and pulling her chest tight to mine.
The door slams closed behind us as I crush her against me, doing my best to keep all the pieces of her contained now.
I fail. I know it when I feel all the pieces of us collide in a collision of fragments, we’ll never pluck free again.
My pieces are splintered into the deep of her just as her shards cut into the quick of me.
Life stitched us together before tearing us apart.
Although the fabric that bound us was torn, the edges frayed, the threads were still there.
Now rough and tattered, threadbare in the aftermath of the life we lived, and the love that ribboned itself between us, those threads still seek the knots that will make us whole again.
That’s how we come back together. Rough and torn and twisted up in knots.
Her hands palm my neck, fingertips sinking into my hair, nails biting into my scalp as she holds me to her. I can feel the ravaged thrashing of her heart against my chest. My own hand lifts to sink into the thick waves of her hair, cradling her head.
And that is how we stay for a long while. Too long to know, for sure.
I just know that I could stay like this for the rest of eternity, holding her to me. Grounding her while she lets go of the pain she forces herself to shoulder in front of everyone else.
Finally, she stops sobbing. Her hands loosen around my neck to fall to my shoulders, but she doesn’t push me away.
I bow my head and bend my knees just enough to press my forehead to hers. Her scent, like sweet peaches and something warmer, spicier, invades my lungs with every breath I breathe, until I think I’ll taste her on every exhale I dare to release for the rest of my days.
“You’re here.”
My voice sounds thick with emotion and hunger. “I am.”
“Thank you.”
Her breath is warm against my lips. My hands move to hold the side of her head, my thumbs under her jaw. She trembles in my hold, and there’s a new hitch to the breath she breathes. A rattle of something that forgets grief.
“Holt…”
I can’t help myself. The emotions of the day. The feel of her body against mine. The teasing taste of her warm breath…
The way she says my name.
It’s all too much.
I’ve tried to be strong. But I am only a man.
I take her mouth with my own. It’s not gentle and sweet, like I hoped it would be when I first kissed her again. It’s raw and ravenous. I should have expected this after the years that stand between us. The hunger. The need.
She doesn’t deny me. There is no hesitation at all from her as she parts her lips under mine, allowing me to enter.
I don’t hesitate to claim all that I’ve ached to claim since the last time I kissed her all those years ago.
The taste of her is as familiar as it is new.
The hint of sweet peach now has undertones of spice that come only with time.
I kiss her harder and deeper, seeking more. Everything.
She swims in my mind.
I want more.
Her palms flatten against my chest, and she moans a sound I know I’ll never forget as long as I live as she pushes me gently away.
“We—oh, my goodness—Holt. I—I—I—” She’s shaking her head a little frantically now, still pressed between me and the wall.
Grieving, overwhelmed, freaked out—just kissed—she’s so fucking beautiful. I could look at her endlessly and still be twisted up in wonder.
Her lips are red and swollen. I wasn’t kidding when I said the kiss was raw and ravaging and filled with an obviously brutal hunger. I poured more than the last few months into that kiss.
She blinks wet eyes burning with hesitation and something deeper and darker up at me. Her bottom lip quivers. “I don’t know—”
“We kissed, Faye,” I tell her pointedly. “We’ll kiss again, too.”
Her eyes snap wide with shock.
I grin. That’s right, baby. This wasn’t a one-time thing. I wasn’t just caught up in the moment.
Her eyes tear from mine for the first time. They slide to the side, and she pulls the corner of her lip into her mouth, nibbling it in thought. And now she’s cute.
“I’m confused,” she admits it quietly, like she’s afraid to speak.
Her hands are still pressed into my chest, burning into my flesh.
Like all the other times she’s touched me, I’ll bear the invisible scars of these burns too. The imprint of her touch is everlasting, even though I once tried desperately to cover them with the stain of another.
It didn’t take long to realize that the touch of this woman, the memory of her, wasn’t something that could ever be covered or replaced.
Still, I know she needs time to battle the war inside her mind, the one that rages inside her heart.
Doug said it plainly enough, and those words will stay with me. Faye is going to struggle with the idea of allowing herself to love me, Tate, and me again.
And I’m going to need to work on accepting what my big brother clearly accepted, himself. That she’ll always hold him in her heart. She’ll always love him. And I’ll always share her with him.
I bend to lift the bag of steaks I dropped. “I brought steak.”
Her brows furrow as she blinks between me and the bag. She’s flushed and lovely as she gives her head a small shake, like she doesn’t know how she got to where she is. And then she straightens.
“I—um—I’ll make a salad.”
She takes a bite of her steak and moans. I can’t lie and say my cock isn’t hard as fuck behind my jeans. I’ve sported a semi since I kissed her, the taste of her lingering on my tongue. Teasing and taunting.
She takes another bite, and I take a swig of my beer.
Yeah, Faye had beer in her fridge tonight. I’m fully aware she bought it for me. And that feels good. Really good.
Watching her feels better, though.
The patio table is mostly shaded by the flowering tree that stands proud and tall, as it stood when I was a kid. Currently, it’s buzzing with springtime bees, a constant and low hum that rockets me back to childhood. It’s funny where life takes us.
The longer I’m home, the more I’m realizing there’s beauty buried deep beneath the pain of life. Like a secret we need to live to uncover. A sting we need to know in order to understand the grace of pleasure and peace.
Through the thick of the tree, a ray of sun haloes her in light. I swallow the burn in my throat, because—if she knew how she affected me even now after everything that stands between us—she’d hold the power to be my ultimate destruction.
Fuck, she already holds that power.
I’m already on my knees for her, at the mercy of her.
I think I’ve always been at her mercy. From the very first moment I dared a glance into those sticky honey-brown eyes.
She lifts her bubbly rosé and takes a sip. Her eyes slam into mine and crap, I can’t breathe.
“How did you know Mabel wakes in the night?”
“What?” I croak.
“Earlier today, when you spoke of club heaven…” Her smile is as soft as it is pained.
I honestly don’t know where club heaven came from.
Tate, maybe? “How did you know that Tate used to wake with her? That he’d carry her to the window and look at the stars and moon with her to calm her back into sleep?
” She frowns. “That we called what she did howling at the moon?”
I don’t want to lie to her. But I’m not ready to tell her about Tate’s letter.
I’m not ready to tell her that he knew he was sick before he died. That he was dying before he died.
How can I admit he wrote me a letter giving me permission to love his family and our woman—without admitting that he knew what was coming?
Thankfully, I don’t have to lie to her. She slumps back in her chair, her eyes stuck on me.
“I should have known he wrote to you.” Wait, what?
“I have a whole box of letters from Tate to you going all the way back to—” She pauses.
Her eyes shift to the side. “To the beginning. I just didn’t realize he’d sent any. ”
I swallow down the burn in my throat.
He wrote me letters? She has a whole box?
I can’t speak.
Faye continues, “I found them in the closet when I was clearing some of his old clothes. I couldn’t get rid of them all…”
I know. I wore his clothes while I was waiting for mine to dry after holding her in the shower while she was delusional with sickness.
“The box was tucked into the back of the closet.” She flicks away a tear. “It was stuffed full. I—I only read one.”
When I still say nothing, she adds, “I planned to give them to you. Eventually.” I swallow hard when her eyes come back to me. “When did he start writing you?”
He never wrote to me. “He’d been trying to communicate with me since before Owen was born.”
There. It’s not a lie. I never said he wrote me letters. I said he communicated, which he did by text. A lot.
Faye nods, but there’s a pinch to her smile. Her eyes are filled with water.
I hate that she’s hurting. I hate that I don’t know if I’ll ever be enough to make the hurt fade.
I hate that there’s a part of me that’s afraid of the fade. Afraid that it could mean she’s forgetting him…
“Did you ever respond to him, Holt?”
I wish I had. “No.”
She catches her little sob with the tips of her fingers as she presses them to her lips. I expect her to scold me. To tell me that I should have responded because now I’ll never get the chance.
“I’m sorry.” Her gentle understanding hurts more than if she’d laid into me.
My own throat burns, so I take a swallow of my beer. Then, because I clearly want to hurt, I ask, “Tell me about your life with him?”
She studies me closely for a long moment. I think she’s trying to decide if I really want this. If I can take it.
I’m not sure if I do. If I can.
But I think I need it all the same.
“He was good, Holt. He was slow and safe. He didn’t have any burning passions that didn’t revolve around us.
” Not like me and hockey. “Tate made a point of having a family popcorn night every weekend, no matter how busy we were. Both the kids loved those nights. Snuggling up and sinking into the couch with homemade popcorn. I don’t think either of my kids has ever had popcorn out of those microwave bags. ” Her nose wrinkles.
I chuckle. “That’s the only way I’ve ever made popcorn.”
The wrinkles soften into a gentle curling of her lips. I want to kiss them again. Soft and slow this time.
“I’ll make it for you sometime.”
“I’d like that.”
She rolls her eyes to the sky and laughs. “They ruined every bowl I made, of course, by pouring salt and vinegar flavoring all over it.”
“I won’t do that.”
Her eyes slam into mine. Her lips part and she guts me. “Do you promise?”
“I promise, Faye.”