Chapter 43 Kit
Kit
By the time I make it out of the woods, I'm drenched. I was already a sweaty mess, but now the rain has my hair plastered to my face and my feet moving faster than they would like after the abuse I've put them through today.
I jump at the next crack of thunder and barely register the figure hovering on the porch of the cabin until it moves closer to the banister.
“What are you doing, Meyer?” Bowen snaps, his voice like its own whip of thunder cutting through the rain.
I laugh, wiping under my nose with the back of my hand. “Oh, so you do talk.” Whatever adrenaline fueled my one-man fight with the earth is rapidly disappearing, leaving me a jittery, exhausted husk of a man.
The van is so close, yet so far. I know I'm going to have blisters tomorrow. My knee aches. My palms sting. I limp another few steps closer to the van when Bowen clomping down the cabin steps registers in my brain.
“You don't get to do that.” His voice is sharp and cutting, nothing like the whispers of memory that chased me through the woods. This isn't the same boy I fell irrevocably in love with.
This is the man that my love broke and abandoned.
If it wasn't for my love, I never would have pushed him away.
If it wasn't for my love, I wouldn't have put a wedge between him and his brother.
If it wasn't for me and my unrequited feelings, Brett never would have gotten in that car angry. He wouldn't have been on the road. He wouldn't have been taken from us.
My love is a fucking parasite.
I'm sorry, Bowen.
He doesn't want my apologies. He doesn't want me. He made that abundantly clear two years ago. And why would he want me? I've caused so much damage. What am I even doing here?
I groan, low and wrecked. My eyes ache from crying, and I dig my palms into them. “What can't I do, Bowen? Anything right? I'm aware.”
He doesn't touch me, but he stops an arm's reach away.
“Stop it," he rushes out through gritted teeth. "You don't get to show up here unannounced and get pissy with me for how I handle it.”
“I didn't realize I needed to announce myself. I didn't know you would be here!”
“It's my fucking house!”
“It's my family's property!”
“I bought this property over a year ago,” he snaps. Then looks up to the dark sky like he's praying to a higher power for patience. Or maybe willing me to disappear. Be flushed away with the storm, so he doesn't have to continue with a conversation he obviously doesn't want to have. “Fuck.”
“What do you mean?” I ask quietly. My voice quivers, but I steel my spine. I want to crumple into a ball at his feet. I want him to bundle me up in his arms and hold together all my fucked up pieces.
Bowen sighs and pushes the wet hair out of his eyes. A crack of thunder has me jumping.
“Can we do this inside?” he doesn't wait to hear my answer, just turns around and makes his way back to the cabin.
I stand there in the rain, battered heart thumping like it knows it's in for more bruising tonight. I contemplate hiding away in the van. I could lock the doors and refuse to continue down a path that's bound to hurt.
“Bowen…” I call, voice cracking. He stops.
Just like earlier, he doesn't turn around.
He's soaking wet, and the rain isn't letting up.
The sun is gone, just the waning light from the moon through the clouds and the lamp post not far from the van gives enough to see him in the dark. “We don't have to do this.”
He turns around, his shoulders tense, but he moves swiftly, taking the steps back to where he was. The rain is clinging to his beard, running down his nose. His eyelashes are wet. His mouth opens to no doubt stick me with another verbal dagger, but then it snaps shut.
I hiccup over a sob I try my hardest to contain.
He's beautiful.
He's always been beautiful.
His eyes are like blue flames; even in the dark, I can see the intensity behind them.
His features lost any soft edges of boyhood a long time ago, I bet.
He's all chiseled angles and sharp features now.
My eyes can't stop moving from one point to the next and back again.
They've been desperate for years, and now that I've given them permission to look, they can't get enough.
Bowen looks almost as wrecked as I feel. He looks tired and beaten down by rain. By the day. By me? Probably.
But he's still the most beautiful human I've ever seen.
“Hi,” I say and sniffle, wiping my nose with my hand. His jaw ticks, and my eyes zero in on the movement before moving right back to his eyes. His lips. The little line between his brows. His beard covers the freckle above his lip, but my eyes look where it would be anyway.
“Inside,” he says, softer than anything he's said to me this far. When he turns around and walks again, I don't stop him. I just follow.
I don’t realize how loud the storm is until the cabin door closes behind me.
I watch Bowen continue through the cabin, all while my back stays glued to the wooden door behind me.
I was in here the other day, but this feels different.
I walked in and closed the door with the knowledge that he would be closed in here with me.
It doesn’t take long for him to come back into the main living room area, and I almost don’t move fast enough when a towel comes sailing through the air at me.
“Thanks,” I murmur. I unfold it. It's nothing special. In fact, it's old and worn to hell with parts that are completely threadbare and see-through. But it's black and white stripes, and it’s still so soft. It’s the kind of towel that’s been used and washed so many times it doesn’t even feel like a towel anymore.
It doesn’t make my skin crawl when touching it with my wet hands, like so many towels do.
It was my cabin towel. The one I always used when we were here.
I didn’t see it in the cupboard the other day, or any of the other towels that used to be here.
They had all been replaced with a stack of new ones.
The lump in my throat feels big enough to suffocate me.
I bite my lip and use the towel to dry my hair, peeking up at Bowen.
He’s already watching me. One of the new towels in his hands, as he dries off his own head.
His bun is down, wet curls around his shoulders.
It’s longer than I’ve ever seen it before.
The hair, the beard. He’s the same, but so different.
His eyes are watching me, but they’re guarded.
Like I’m a wild mutt he let in from outside, and he’s scared I may attack at any moment.
My heart aches. Fucking aches. It has nothing to do with anything other than standing feet away from someone who used to be everything to me and acknowledging that I don’t really know him anymore.
I didn’t know he lived here, for one. Or, apparently, bought the land from my parents. I didn’t even know they were selling it.
So much can change in a few years. And if I’m honest with myself, I wasn’t really present before I left, either. I was so caught up in me. My shattered heart. My grief and endless despair.
“Your hair’s long,” I finally say, breaking the silence.
Bowen’s eyes rip away from mine with a cleared throat. He covers his face with the towel and gives said hair a good scrub before slinging it over his shoulder. Now he’s the one who isn’t looking at me.
“Want something to wear?”
My body tenses with another loud bang of thunder, and I swallow thickly. I nod, and he must see it because he’s walking out of the room again. I use my towel to dry my legs the best I can, squeezing out my shorts so they stop dripping on the floor.
Minutes pass before he comes back into the room.
He’s changed into dry clothes himself, and this time, instead of tossing them at me, he holds them out.
I take them with a mumbled thanks, but he doesn’t hang around to watch me walk out like I watched him.
He moved into the small kitchen area. I hear the sink go and something bang onto the range before the bathroom door closes behind me.
Your hair’s long? Really?
I make quick work of shedding my wet clothes and drying my body before pulling dry ones on. They smell like clean laundry and the unmistakable scent of man. Bowen. A sharp, rich scent that lingers in the air. I rub my chest and take a slow, deep breath.
The mirror shows that I was very, very wrong.
Bowen doesn’t look wrecked at all. Not compared to me.
My eyes are red-rimmed and swollen, my cheeks blotchy.
I have dirt smeared on my cheek and neck, probably from when I was face down, screaming like a banshee.
It’s a shock he even bothered letting me in.
I look unhinged and on the cusp of a mental breakdown. Which may not be far from the truth.
I crouch on the floor, head bent, and pull in slow, ragged breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
I’m okay.
I close my eyes, and I’m no longer in the bathroom. I’m nineteen, curled up in a stupid olive-toned chair with Dr. Martin watching me with careful eyes.
I’m sobbing. Not the angry tears that sneak out sometimes when Dr. Martin digs and pushes where it hurts.
No, these are full-body sobs. My chest feels like it’s been cracked open in the center, and my heart is being strangled.
I haven’t been able to take a full breath since I opened my eyes this morning to Bowen’s face right in front of mine.
He was sleeping. Even in sleep, he looked like a ghost of the boy he used to be.
The same shadows lived under his eyes that I had under mine.
His lips were chapped, his hair wild in a way that spoke of neglect and not just wind in curls.
His brows drew together, and he made a low, pained sound in his sleep.
He was never here still when I woke up. But the sun had barely just come up, and the spaces around the top and bottom of my curtains let in enough light to get a good look at the boy in my bed.