Chapter 30 Hattie
HATTIE
I press my lips together while I grapple with my choices.
On one hand, I’m sick of slapping a Band-Aid on our conversations and putting off any real resolutions.
I also know that when I was at my worst on Wednesday, Heston respected that and knew my exhaustion was too much for yet another emotional upheaval that day.
It makes me wonder if I shouldn’t do the same thing for him.
For the first time, though, the moment we’re in feels right. Finally. I want to trust that my heart knows what it’s feeling, so I clear my throat, sit up a little taller, and go for it.
“We should talk,” I suggest nervously.
Heston’s mouth shuts tight, and he looks like he just swallowed something sharp. Even in the room’s dim, filtered moonlight, his sudden intensity is unmistakable.
“Does it hurt?” I ask.
His forehead wrinkles with confusion. “What?”
I gesture to his face. “The prolonged jaw tension. It’s got to be painful.” He lets out a heavy sigh, momentarily loosening the severity in his expression. It doesn’t take him long to revert to his typical rigidity, though. I point at him. “You’re doing it again. My god, the clench is relentless.”
He all but ignores me, blurting out a quick sequence of words that have nothing to do with the insane amount of time he spends with a face full of tension. “If you changed your mind about staying, I get it. But I can’t do this anymore, Hattie.”
I lean back, realizing that telling him we should talk might have scared him. “Can’t do what?”
“Stay out of it.”
“There’s nothing to stay out of, Heston.” I lean forward to rest my hand on his thigh over the comforter. “That’s what I’m trying to talk to you about. It has nothing to do with changing my mind about staying tonight.”
“There’s nothing to stay out of,” he repeats my words. I can tell that he wants to scoff but is holding back.
“That’s right,” I confirm through a soft sigh. “But . . . this is all very complicated.”
“No, it’s not.” Despite his voice’s low volume, his argument comes quick and assertive like a strike of lightning.
My lips part as he glances over my head for a moment, deep in thought, before continuing.
“You know how you feel and what you want. The only complicated part is that you’re scared to choose it. ”
“That’s not fair. You don’t realize how many things have made this impossible to navigate. You think it’s simple just because you’re handling it better than I am.”
He denies it by shaking his head. “Handling what? My regrets or that ring on your finger that isn’t mine?”
“I’m not even wearing the ring, in case you haven’t noticed.
And why are we fighting right now?” I whisper back with a pained slant to my eyes.
“We’re both tired beyond belief. Obviously.
Not to mention, hurt and scared and a million other things.
Just listen to me. Please? I’m trying to tell you that there’s no choice to make. It’s over.”
“No.” He shakes his head again, this time for so long that his face starts to turn red. “It’s not fucking over. I know it’s not.”
He rubs his chest, and I raise a hand to grip his wrist and make him stop. I’ve already seen him do it a thousand times since arriving at the ranch tonight, and he’s going to break skin soon if he keeps it up. I loosen my grip to slide my palm into his.
“Heston—”
“No. Just because you say it doesn’t mean it’s true. I can’t sit back and let you tell me it’s over while I watch you end up with some other guy. The wrong guy.”
“Heston.”
“I know we’re both different people now.”
He’s completely misunderstanding me. I can’t seem to get his attention and pull him out of this spiral, so I push back his shoulders and climb into his lap. Our faces are less than a foot apart now, but he barely notices and continues his display of pure panic.
“But that’s normal, right? Everyone changes. I’ve come a long way from the guy who couldn’t say what he was feeling. And it doesn’t matter that you’re not the same girl, Hattie. I’ve never met a version of you that I wasn’t in love with.”
He only stops rambling when I lean forward, crashing into his chest and smashing our lips together. There’s nothing sweet about it. I’m pressing every inch of myself into him with enough force to knock him over if there wasn’t a sturdy wall behind him.
My hands grip the sides of his face. I kiss him until my lungs burn, and the relief I feel being in this position again is so overwhelming, it makes me lightheaded. When our lips finally break apart enough for me to suck in a breath of oxygen, our foreheads stay connected.
“Stop talking,” I whisper.
“I can’t,” he says, eyes closed and hands smoothing the middle of my back over the thin cotton t-shirt. “What do you want? Tell me what it is, and I’ll get it for you. I’ll find a way to give you anything you need if you’ll just let me, Hattie.” He kisses me again. “Let me. Please.”
I feel terrible that I accidentally caused this reaction from him, but how sick and deranged—the warm satisfaction I feel—witnessing him fighting for me like he has everything to lose and refuses to accept anything but me.
It’s all I’ve craved from him, and he’s never shown this side of himself to me before.
“I never meant that it was over between you and me,” I say, finally getting my point across clearly. “What I was trying to tell you is that I broke off the engagement.”
He pulls away to search my face. Over and over, like I might break down and take back everything I said at any moment. Thirty seconds pass, and I lower my hands to the side of his neck, dusting lightly over the edge of his jaw with my thumb.
Although he doesn’t say it out loud, his eyes are heavy with the question, “Why?” He deserves an answer, and so do I. The verbal acknowledgment is long overdue for both of us.
“Because I missed you so much that it almost swallowed me whole. And no matter my reasons for doing it, pretending to want a life with someone else didn’t make that feeling go away. It made it worse. My life has had so much sadness in it. So damn much . . .”
I pause out of habit. This is usually the point during an emotional upheaval that my eyes well up, and I have to sniff to preserve a semblance of composure.
Surprisingly, the tears don’t come. I don’t feel like falling apart.
In fact, the corner of my mouth lifts into a soft smile, and a surge of peace comes over me.
“I know I’m strong enough to face the hard days on my own,” I go on. “Or maybe even with someone else, if I were desperate enough to make it work. I just . . . don’t want to. I never wanted to lean on anyone but you.”
His mouth flattens, and his forehead crinkles in a pained expression. “Then, do it,” he whispers. “Lean on me.”
Tension dissolves from my limbs, and I drop my full weight on him with an exhale. He lifts a hand and weaves it through my hair, pulling me tighter against his chest and kissing my temple.
“When I met you, I needed you to fix me,” I admit quietly.
“You held me up and carried the burdens so well. Too well. Everything started to feel lighter.” I burrow my face into his neck and feel a spark of longing at the reminder of how incredible he made me feel that summer.
“I just couldn’t come back to you and expect you to hold everything together for me again.
Not when I knew that was part of why it all fell apart in the first place. ”
“It never fell apart,” Heston says, low and intense. “It got off course, that’s all.”
“I don’t think it even matters anymore, Hes. I’m so sick of looking back. I just want to throw a stick of dynamite over my shoulder and sprint forward.”
He holds me tighter. “Me too. We’ll run together.”
“We will?”
He nods into my hair. “Promise.”
It’s a monumental relief to tell him all of these things. I don’t know exactly where we’re headed, but I do know that against all odds, after all the turmoil we’ve been through . . . we survived. I’m not sure either of us even noticed that until now, because we’ve been too stubborn.
Standing in the ashes after burning alive together, just to waste time fighting over who lit the match. Instead, we should have realized that we’d made it out.
We survived.
Heston’s hands, as strong and domineering as I’ve ever felt them, bracket my hips. There’s something disturbingly hot about his touch. It’s intentional and controlled, and has always made me shiver.
I lift my head to kiss him again, but stop short when I see the twinge of pain in his eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he grits out, eyes half-lidded. “I just need a second. Making sure this is real.”
I full-on shudder when his thumbs run a firm line down my sides and along my hip bones. I hold my breath to keep from squirming under the delicious pressure.
“It’s real,” I breathe out. “I’ve dreamed about doing this enough times to know the difference.”
He hums as his thumbs continue their trail down, drifting over my panties, toward my center. I don’t know whether to focus on where they’re headed or the way the rest of his fingers are digging into the flesh on the sides of my hips.
“You thought about this?” he asks gruffly.
On the last word, he pushes one thumb over my clit, and I nod with a whimper.
“Yes,” I answer, breathlessly. “All the time.”
His hand turns over as he drags his knuckles down even further. There’s no way he doesn’t feel how wet I am through the fabric. He’s touched me before, but this time, it’s more incredible than I remember. It’s electrifying.
Maybe my heightened sensitivity is because I haven’t been touched in so long, but I think it’s more than that. Almost as much as my heart longed for him while we were apart, my body craved him to the point of devastation when it couldn’t have what it wanted for so long.