Chapter 63
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Ace
Song- Closure, The Plot In You.
"Ace. You don't have to do this. It's like sticking a knife into an open wound," Colten says from behind me.
Romeo types fast on his laptop, pulling up feeds, cycling through cameras. I don't take my eyes off the screen.
"Ace, he's right," Jett says from the corner.
I ignore them both. But if Jett thinks it’s a dumb idea, it definitely is.
"If I'm going to get over this, I need to see it for myself."
Jett sighs. "So you're into torture now. Great. I'll add that to your dating profile."
I shoot him a look that could put a man in the ground. He holds up his hands and shuts up.
Romeo pulls up the main feed. The country club's internal security system was cracked through a back door in under four minutes. Four cameras cover the ceremony room. It’s a clear enough picture, but no audio.
I don't need to hear it. I just need to see it happen so my brain will finally accept what my heart won't.
The room is packed. White chairs arranged in perfect rows. White flowers on every surface. A string quartet in the corner, bows moving in silence on my screen. And standing at the end of it, beside a minister in a room full of people who mean nothing to me, is Hudson Blake.
He looks relaxed. He’s smiling. Of course he is, he won a war he didn’t even know he was part of. And I’m the one who lost everything. Again.
"There," Romeo says, pointing at the screen.
The doors at the back of the room open.
And there she is.
Harper. In a white dress. Walking down the aisle.
The air leaves my body and doesn't come back.
She's holding red roses. Her hair is down, loose and golden, the way she wore it the night I caught her in the desert.
The dress is simple. Thin straps. No train.
No veil. She looks like she was carved out of sunlight, and she looks miserable in a way that only I can see because I've memorized every version of this woman's face, and this is the one she wears when she's already gone.
When she's left her body and is somewhere else entirely, going through the motions while the real Harper hides somewhere deep enough that nobody can reach her.
I want to reach for her. Even now. Even watching her walk toward another man. I want to reach through the screen, pull her out of that room, and carry her home.
Her friend, I assume Emma, walks behind her as Harper reaches the altar. I see Gianna and her brothers sitting in the second row.
Harper turns to face Hudson. He takes her hands.
I grip the edge of the desk. My knuckles go white. Then past white. The tendons stand out across the backs of my hands.
Colten puts his hand on my shoulder. I shrug it off.
The ceremony plays out in silence. The minister is speaking. The guests are watching. Hudson's thumb is tracing circles on the back of Harper's hand. I want to tear his fingers off one by one and feed them to him.
The minister looks between them. I see him speak. I see Hudson's mouth form two words.
I do.
The minister turns to Harper. She pauses. A beat that lasts a lifetime on a screen with no sound. And then her mouth moves.
I do.
Two words. Mouthed in silence. From the woman who, less than a month ago, told me she was coming home forever, to a man who doesn't know what her laugh sounds like at three in the morning, or that she talks in her sleep, or that she sings off-key in the shower and doesn't care who hears.
The minister gestures. Then it all happens in slow motion. Hudson leans in.
His lips touch hers.
Her hand rests on his arm. Not pulling him closer. Not pushing him away. Just there.
It all looks real. Too real for me to handle.
Harper Jones should be marrying me. I should be the man waiting for her. Kissing her after we say I do.
She should be Harper Sterling. And now, that won’t happen. It can’t. Because I might have had all of her firsts. But she wouldn’t give me this one. The most important one.
She wouldn’t let me be the only man to marry her. And we can never get that back.
My stomach turns inside out.
The bile rises so fast and so violently, I can't stop it.
I shove back from the desk, the chair crashing behind me, and I'm on my feet and moving, but my legs aren't working right, and I slam into the doorframe with my shoulder, and then I'm in the hallway, hands braced against the wall, and my body empties.
Everything. All of it. Every ounce of bourbon and coffee and nothing that's been keeping me upright for three weeks comes up onto the hardwood floor of my house.
My knees buckle, and I'm down, retching, sweat pouring down my face, tears I didn't authorize streaming from my eyes, and I can't stop.
My body is rejecting something my mind has been trying to reject for weeks, and it's finally winning.
I hear Jett swear. Hear Colten's boots coming fast. Hear Romeo close the laptop.
I push myself off the wall. Stand up. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.
And then something detonates inside me.
Not grief. Not sadness. Something underneath both. Something that's been building in my chest since the night I walked out of her parents' house, compounding every day, pressurized by every sleepless night.
I grab the hallway table and flip it. The lamp shatters against the wall.
The bowl of keys scatters across the floor.
I put my fist through the plaster beside the door and feel the drywall crack around my knuckles, and I don't stop.
I hit it again. The framed photo next to it falls, and the glass explodes on the hardwood, and I reach for the next thing, the coat rack, and I rip it from the wall and hurl it down the hallway so hard it takes a chunk of the doorframe with it.
"Ace!" Colten's voice.
I'm not listening. I grab the bookshelf in the living room doorway and drag it forward.
Books cascade onto the floor. The wood groans and splinters.
I kick the base of it, and it collapses sideways, crashing into the wall, and I'm already moving, grabbing the whiskey glass from the side table and launching it at the far wall where it explodes into a spray of crystal.
I think about the time I smashed up Reese's apartment with Lola and Hunter. That was fun because it wasn’t my shit. I need to fuckin’ stop, but I can’t. I need to take this out on something before I combust.
My hands are bleeding, and drywall dust is in my lungs.
I'm breathing so hard that each exhale sounds like a growl, and the house around me looks like a crime scene, and I don't care.
I don't care about the plaster or the glass or the bookshelf or any of it because none of it matters.
Nothing in this house matters if she's not in it.
Colten appears in front of me. He just stands there. In my path with his hands by his sides.
I stare at him.
"You done?" he asks.
I look at my hands. At the destruction around me. At the hole in the wall where my fist went through. At my father's bookshelf in pieces on the floor.
Something cracks in me. The rage collapses inward, and what it leaves behind is worse. I’ve got nothing left to break except myself.
"I can't do this, Colt."
My voice doesn't sound like mine.
He nods. "I know. Come outside."
I let him steer me to the front door. My legs are heavy. My hands are throbbing. The daylight is too bright when he pushes the screen door open and guides me onto the porch.
I slide down the porch column until I'm sitting on the boards with my back against the wood.
Colten lowers himself down beside me. He doesn't speak.
There's a clink of glass. I look up. He's holding a bottle of whiskey. Already opened. He takes a drink and holds it out.
“I get the first bit, I don’t want to drink your puke,” he says.
I half grin. It’s all I’ve got in me.
I take it. The bourbon burns down my throat and lands in my empty, ruined stomach, and I take another pull because the fire is better than what was there before.
We sit in silence. Staring at a ranch that's been in our family for three generations while the world closes in around us.
"She looked miserable," Colten says eventually.
"Yeah."
"You still love her."
Not a question.
"I'm never going to stop, Colt." My voice comes out destroyed. "That's the problem. I can walk away. I can tell her we're done. I can mean it with every fiber of who I am. But I'm still going to love her. Every single day. For the rest of my life. And there's not a damn thing I can do about that."
He takes the bottle.
“Fuck, brother. It almost makes me believe what Gianna said when she was here.”
I nod.
"Then maybe the question isn't whether you love her. Maybe it's whether you trust her," he says.
I stare at the east fence. At the horizon that Paulie used to watch.
"I don't know anymore."
Colten nods.
"I'm here," he says. "Whatever you need. I'm right here."
I take another drink. The bottle is getting lighter. The pain isn't. I don’t know if it ever will anymore.
"Just sit with me, Colt."
"I'm not going anywhere, brother. You know that."
I rest my head back against the wood and close my eyes. Replaying the moment my Harper kissed her husband.
I can't save her.
I don't know if she wants me to.
And I love her anyway.
That's the thing about love that Gianna got wrong. It isn't a weakness. A weakness is something you can fix. Something you can train out of yourself, patch up, move past.
Love is a wound that never closes.
And Harper Jones is mine.