62. Declan
Brogan left the room and immediately it was as if a weight had been placed upon my chest. While I was in no physical pain, I kept blinking, wondering whether the last few minutes had been a dream after all.
The disorientation was lessening, as had all nausea, and now it was replaced by anxiety that he wouldn’t come back, if he’d ever been here to begin with.
My parents arrived at my bedside, and it physically hurt to see the tears in both of their eyes.
Their worry was evident by the way my mother fussed over me continuously.
They sat with me for about an hour until I started to yawn.
I was going to pass out soon, but I didn’t want to until I saw Brogan again.
Upon seeing how fatigued I was, my parents got up to leave.
“We’ll be back first thing in the morning,” my father said, and I nodded.
“I was so scared, Declan,” my mother said as she leaned down to kiss my forehead.
“I love you both,” I told them.
“And we love you too. We’ll be back soon,” she replied.
When they left, I was once again alone. My earlier anxiety came rushing back, but I discarded the last thought as I inhaled the scent of his cologne in the air.
I also saw his overnight bag in the corner.
He was here, and we were finally going to be alright.
I kept repeating that to myself until the door opened and he slipped back inside.
I was now sitting up. As our eyes met, he stole my breath once more.
Even with dark shadows under his eyes, he was so devastatingly handsome.
I frowned slightly at the thought of him getting no sleep, but again, I was to blame for that.
I didn’t want to think about that as there was plenty of time for self-recrimination later.
My eyes drank in the sight of him, and I saved every inch of perfection that was Brogan Sinclair to memory. Over the last two months, I’d worn out all the images of him in my head. He didn’t stay still, instead moving back to my bedside to sit down beside me.
“Is something wrong?”
“I was starting to think I’d imagined everything… imagined you being here.”
“Do you imagine me often?”
I nodded. “Everywhere I go, I see your face and hear your voice, but it's never real.”
“I'm real, baby,” he said.
“So much has happened.”
“I know, Declan. It’s mostly my fault because—”
“No,” I quickly corrected. “I’d betrayed you.”
“I completely overreacted to everything that happened with Layla.”
I shook my head again. “No, I was wrong. I never should’ve paid her off.
I should’ve told you when I came up with the idea.
At the very least, I should’ve told you afterward what I’d done.
Everything just got out of hand so fast, I couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so I understand why you’re so mad at me. ”
“Correction, I was mad at you, but there are bigger things in life. Between going to jail and sitting by your side, I’ve realized life is short, and freedom is fleeting.
I’d spent my entire life trying to keep myself in somebody's perfectly fitted box when all I want is to just be unapologetically me.”
“I'm so sorry about everything.”
“I forgive you, Declan. I only hope you can forgive me too.”
“Forgive you for what?”
He placed his hands on one of mine, cupping it between them. “For ever placing anything else above you. All this time we’d wasted has been for nothing. There never would’ve been a Layla situation to deal with. Had I been strong enough to stand up to Stanley Sinclair, we—"
“Your father—”
“Stanley,” he said more emphatically. “And he’ll never be an issue for us again.”
I narrowed my eyes as his face remained unreadable. “What have you done, Brogan?”
“Something that should’ve been done a long time ago. He’ll never come between us again.”
“Did you k-kill him?” I stammered.
He grinned. “No, but he probably wishes he was dead.”
“What did you do?”
“I’d confronted him over what Layla told me, then convinced him to sign over the majority of his shares to me before leaving him with a well-deserved parting gift.”
“I don’t like the sound of the latter.”
“So concerned with where my dick was all these years, he hadn’t been careful of where and how he’d put his. It won’t be an issue anymore because his will never rise again.”
“Y-you did that?”
That boyish grin of his caused something to flutter in my chest. I knew he’d done it for himself, and deservedly so, but I couldn’t help but think he might’ve also done it for us.
“Don’t worry about any of that. We're going to get through this together like we have everything else in our life.”
“I’ll always be with you. We ride and die together.” He nodded, and I added, “Remember neither a you without me, nor a me without you.”
“I don't want there to be any me without you.”
I slipped my hand out from his, then brought one of his to my mouth and kissed a few of his knuckles. “There's so much more we need to talk about.”
“We don't have to do that tonight. I'm just so thankful you're awake… that you're alive—”
“I need… No, we need to do this. We have to get everything out in the open because I don’t want to leave this room with anything still hidden between us.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
Wanting to be able to look at him, I grimaced slightly as I turned onto my side.
When I did, Brogan lowered the side rail of the hospital bed that was separating us, then pulled his chair closer.
Despite the proximity between us, there still felt like so much distance.
We’d been running around in circles, and for more than a decade.
We couldn’t move forward until we addressed everything we should’ve addressed a long time before now.
“I want to know what really happened back in high school?”
Something flashed in Brogan’s eyes, and I could tell from the tightening of his jaw and thinning of his mouth that it was something he didn't want to talk about. I needed to hear it, though. “I know that you know about it now,” he said in resignation.
“Enslee gave me the bare minimum. It wasn’t even a high-level overview of what that monster did to you, so I need to hear the rest from you.”
“It’s been so long—”
“Yet, it still haunts you to this day. Please don’t hold anything back from me anymore. I need you to tell me everything so I’ll know what I did to you… what I was responsible for having done to you.”
“You're not responsible for any of that. Stanley’s a cruel monster and always has been. You did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. We did nothing wrong.”
“What did they do to you?” I asked him again.
“Do we really need to talk about this tonight?”
“Yes. I need to know what they did to you, so I can understand why you’d changed?”
He covered his face with one of his large hands, and for a few brief seconds I thought he might not answer me at all. Finally, he removed his hand, and I could see the pain in his eyes. Beyond that, there was horror in them as well, which made my stomach curl in apprehension… remorse… guilt…
“I’d truly thought it was a business trip because it was what I’d been told.
Somehow, I ended up in the UK. Where exactly, I don’t really know.
I don’t even know how I’d gotten there. Everything’s still foggy in my head.
I’d been on the plane, then I woke up in a brick cell, and my father had been the one responsible for putting me there. ”
“How badly did they hurt you?” I knew Enslee had filled in some of that, but I needed to hear it from him.
“They’d tried to break me. And at first, I refused to let them, but it grew harder as time went on.
The very thought of spending the rest of my life in that cell and never seeing you again was…
Fuck!” He scrubbed a hand down his face, then fidgeted a bit until I placed my hand on his arm.
“The prisons both seem to meld together, and I can’t even say which one was worse. ”
“The one in the UK. What else happened?”
“They’d tortured me day and night. I truly thought I’d die in that place.
I’d been stripped naked and shackled, then subjected to routine beatings, electrocution, waterboarding, envenomation, electroshock therapy, and anything else you could think of.
They’d deprived me of food, water, sleep, and even light.
I’d held on for as long as I could before the treatments grew more intense.
Finally, I’d started to give them pieces of what they’d wanted. ”
“When you came home and ignored me, it hadn’t been because you’d blamed me?”
“Of course not. Stanley had been responsible for that. Not you. Why would you ever think something so asinine?”
“You were not the only one locked in a broken mind, Brogan. There's something else you don't know about that time.”
“Something, like what?”
“When we’d gotten caught, and your father lost his mind, I’d been so wracked with guilt over everything that’d happened.
I’d been so afraid for you, and now I know I’d been right.
I’d thought your father would send you away permanently…
that he’d banish you from New York. And after everything that’d happened with your mother and her disappearance—”
“She’d walked out on me, Declan. You can fucking say it,” he said with the same bitterness he’d harbored way back then.
“Okay, when she walked out on you.” I swallowed hard as the lump those very words created stuck in my throat. “I didn't know if your father was going to do the same or not. If he did, would you blame me for that?”
“I would’ve never blamed you, but what happened to you during that time?”