Chapter Fourteen #2
She spun on her heel, fury radiating off her like heat waves from scorched metal, and damn, I followed her, the apology clawing up my throat, so desperate to be heard.
But she moved with purpose, gathering everything she could find that belonged to me.
My jacket, my shirt, my phone, my keys, my bag…
my sanity. And while she moved around the house, I followed her, I couldn’t help it.
My body just moved, following her as she went, calling her name, and still being unable to say more than that.
“Get out of my house!” She shouted it so loud the walls quivered. “I was stupid, so stupid for calling you in the first place. I should have handled this myself.”
“Elena, please, listen to me,” I pleaded, needing her to at least look at me.
“There’s nothing to listen to!” She shoved my shoes into my chest hard enough to knock the air out of me. “Nothing except the fact that I should’ve known better.”
“Elena…”
“Get. Out.” Her voice shook with rage and heartbreak and something colder than both. She didn’t stop until every scrap of me was piled in her arms, then shoved into mine, until I looked like a man holding the debris of something sacred he had just destroyed.
I fumbled into my clothes while she stood there sobbing in fury, telling me to leave, to get out, to never come back.
Blaming herself for even daring to call for help, regretting the phone call that made my whole day, my week, gave me something to look forward to.
And when she turned her face away from me, I felt something in my chest rip, rip in a way like I was watching my life fade, yet I couldn’t understand it. It cut deeper than the slap.
I opened my mouth again, but she shook her head violently, the white sheet slipping a little from her shoulder, and I sucked in a breath.
Her breathing was uneven, sharp, exhausting, making her breasts rise and fall, and in the midst of all of this heat and cold, I wanted to get that damn sheet away from her.
We were both unworthy to be close to her…
the sheet and I. How on earth could I…in the midst of all my guilt and confusion and self-loathing, still think of how she looked impossibly beautiful?
Her skin haloed in the morning light, her hair wild, and that damn white sheet draped around her like she was carved from fury and heartbreak. And she was crying because of me.
I swallowed the thought like poison and walked out, no more arguing, no more trying.
I couldn’t, I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t trust myself to do anything but kiss her, beg her, grovel at her feet, even if I couldn’t remember what she was talking about.
I got into my truck, my keys trembling in my hand, and through the windshield, I watched as she burst out the door like she’d been struck, rushing into the yard with those damned red candles, and flung them into the air one by one, as her other hand clutched the sheet to her chest.
I shouldn’t look at her, I shouldn’t want to stay back, I shouldn’t feel anything except shame, but I watched her anyway.
“Get out!” she screamed at nothing. “Leave! Leave me alone, leave us alone!” And the wind answered her, because only the wind could.
She hurled another candle, then another.
Her voice shredded, breaking into sobs that shook her entire body before her legs gave out, and she crumpled to the ground, the sheet pooling around her like fallen clouds, and I froze, stopping the car.
Every instinct screamed at me to keep driving, to leave before I broke her more, leave before I broke myself.
But hell, I didn’t move. I couldn’t, not from her.
Not now, Jesus, maybe not ever, if she let me.
My hand slid from the gear shift, then I looked into the rearview mirror again, but this time, she wasn’t alone.
A man stood beside her, pale and still. Watching her as she cried.
He was trying to comfort her, but she wouldn’t feel him; she couldn’t.
My pulse stopped, my brain stalled, and every part of me fought for logic, but logic drowned like a stone in deep water.
Then, slowly, I turned to the passenger seat, and a small boy sat there.
The one ghost boy I hadn’t seen in years, the one ghost boy that was a fragment of my imagination.
His legs dangled off the edge of the seat the way he used to swing his feet years ago.
His eyes glowed faintly, not with malice, but with pleading.
“Don’t leave her,” he whispered. “She needs you. We both do.” My throat tightened.
His voice always shook something inside, something buried. I sucked in a sharp breath and opened the door. The air outside hit me like cold truth, and I began to walk toward her. Then, on my fourth step, a flash hit me.
Her voice…it wasn’t the same as this morning. It was sharp, pleading, breathless, and frightened. Then I took another step, and I heard it again. She called my name, whispered it like it was a prayer or a curse.
I staggered, but forced another step, and this time, images began to play in my head. The candles, the circle, the mirror, her scream. Oh, God, last night, the memory of last night began to flood into my head, but I didn’t stop moving to her.
More images slammed into me: her running, me chasing, the house shaking, her uneven breath, my hands on her skin, her whispering my name again and again like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to run or collapse into me.
My head throbbed, and my stomach twisted, but I didn’t stop. I was close to her.
Then another.
The memories came faster now, her knees sinking into the circle, a voice, deep and not mine, speaking through my body.
Her lips parting in fear and something that tasted like surrender, then the things we did, the things I did, the way she begged, looked, tasted, felt…
And by the time I reached her, by the time I dropped to my knees in front of her trembling form, my entire body remembered everything.
Her cries had softened into broken sobs, her forehead pressed to the ground. She didn’t hear me approach. “Elena,” I breathed.
She jolted, lifting her tear-stained face to face me, and I cupped her cheeks before she could pull away. Without thinking, without planning, without breathing…I kissed her.
Her lips tasted like every memory from the night before.
The taste of her mouth burst through the guilt, fear and the lingering terror of what I’d been.
The kiss clawed through both our anger and stitched something fierce and fragile together.
Her hands clung to me, not in forgiveness, not yet, but in something different.
Recognition. Of everything we had been through, everything we had seen, everything we might be again.
And the ghost of a man I didn’t know, and a boy I longed to see, watched in silence as I kissed this woman who had somehow consumed me in less than 24 hours.