Chapter 45 #2
My vision blurs, the image of his earnest face swimming behind a hot, sudden film. A sob breaks from my chest. A ragged sound of my heart cracking open with both gratitude and unbearable regret. The tears are a flood, breaking free, scalding a path down my face.
Matthew’s hands are instantly on my cheeks, his thumbs gently wiping at my soaked skin. “Don’t cry,” he whispers, his voice a low caress laced with an aching concern that only makes my heart constrict further.
“I’m so s-sorry—” A watery sniffle fractures my attempt to speak.
“Hey,” he murmurs, his touch incredibly tender as he tilts my chin up, seeking my gaze. “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”
I shake my head, a jerky motion that is a desperate attempt at the composure I’m losing. “It’s not okay.”
My gaze locks with his, and my internal dam of shame cracks wide open. I need him to see my regret. Not just to hear the words I’m about to say, but to see the truth of them.
“What I said to you that day…” My voice cracks on the last word, the memory alone enough to make it tremble. “In the café…”
“Matt…” I have to force his name past the lump forming in my throat. “Y-you are nothing like him.”
My admission feels both monumental and hopelessly inadequate.
“I was just... so overwhelmed.” The explanation feels flimsy, pathetic, but it’s the only one I have. “So much was happening. And I let all my fear, all my history with him, twist my words, and I… I compared you to James.”
I feel a subtle tension tighten his arms, but he doesn’t speak. He continues to watch me, his expression softening with dawning understanding, giving me the space to confess.
“To say that to you, of all people,” I whisper, the words an ache in my throat. “I wish I could take those words back.” The tears flow again. “I am really sorry, Matt.”
His eyes, when they find mine, are luminous. Glistening with unshed tears that make them look like captured stars.
A soft sigh escapes him before he drops his head back and pulls me to him, wrapping his arms tightly around my shoulders. “You’re breaking me,” he mutters to himself.
I pull back to look up at his face. His eyes are closed, a single tear escaping down his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” I repeat, resting my palm against the side of his face and wiping away the tear.
When he reopens his eyes, the maelstrom of emotions in them stills the breath in my lungs.
“You’re breaking my rules,” he tells me with a self-deprecating smile.
“My unbreakable truths that I spent so long believing.” He shakes his head, a look of dazed wonder softening his gaze as his finger traces my cheek down to my chin. “Until you happened.”
My fingers lightly trace down his temple. Over his cheekbone. Down to his jawline where that muscle still jumps. He doesn’t pull away as I slowly lean in, my lips meeting his in a whisper of contact. A quiet reverence for the courage it took him to lay his barricaded soul so bare before me.
I feel him respond. A soft sigh escapes him; his lips yield, answering my tenderness with a hesitant, aching gentleness of his own.
The kiss deepens into a slow, melting certainty.
A silent communion in the stillness, sealing this new, fragile truth that has just taken root.
Your broken rules, your shattered truths…
It’s all safe here.
With me.
When I reluctantly draw back, my forehead comes to rest against his. My eyes flutter open to find his face etched with an almost boyish vulnerability underscored by a peaceful gravity.
The air around us feels sacred.
Lost in the depths of his emerald greens, I softly glide my thumb over his eyebrow. “Why the rules?” I whisper, needing to understand the shadows behind his words. “Why so strict?”
He lowers my hand from his face and presses my palm to his. His fingers interlace with mine, as if drawing strength from the contact. “It’s safer,” he murmurs, his gaze fixed on our joined hands. As if the answer, too complex for easy words, resides there.
“Safer, how? What are you so afraid of?” My voice is soft, terrified that any more pressure might make him retreat.
He lowers our intertwined hands to the fleece between us and leans back against the lounger.
He exhales a long, heavy breath that seems to carry the weight of years of suppressed pain.
“I’m afraid of repeating what she went through.
” He looks up at me. “And what you went through.” His lips thin into a taut white line as they draw inward, the effort of his confession etched into every muscle of his jaw.
His words land, and everything clicks into place with an aching clarity.
His rules.
His fierce protectiveness.
The ghosts he carries.
It was never about a lack of trust in me. It was about the terror of his past.
My heart clenches with the certainty that the ‘she’ whose suffering defined his fears was his mother. I draw a small, steadying breath, needing to counter this darkness I sense in him.
My voice is soft but laced with conviction. A tremor of apprehension runs through me as I dare to name both of his shadows.
“Matt,” I say, my gaze holding his. “You’re nothing like James.” I pause.
Then, more gently, more insistently, I offer him the one truth he can’t see for himself. “And you are certainly nothing like your father.”
“I am my father’s son, Amy.” The words seem to tear from him, steeped in a lifetime of hidden anguish.
The admission itself is a branding iron searing his soul.
He winces, his gaze instantly breaking from mine, skittering away to some unseen horror beyond the tranquil pool. That muscle in his jaw ticks violently, a visible sign of the storm raging beneath his skin.
“Nothing,” he continues, his voice flat now, heavy with a bleak, immutable finality.
“Nothing changes that biological fact.” He forces his gaze back to me.
The desolation, the self-loathing I see there, is a chasm that threatens to swallow me whole.
“It’s in my blood.” He swallows, the sound harsh in the stillness.
“I can’t change that. Can’t trust myself. ”
For a heart-stopping moment, I feel the ground beneath me crumble. The sheer force of his despair threatens to pull me into that darkness with him.
How can this be?
The man whose integrity shines like a beacon. Whose protective instincts are so fierce. Whose tenderness has been a balm to my own battered soul…
How can he believe himself untrustworthy, tainted by the very monster he so clearly despises?
His easy warmth is gone, replaced by a rigid tension. As if he’s bracing for my reaction.
A fierce protectiveness surges through my veins. A desperate need to shield him from this cruel judgment he’s passed on himself.
He’s wrong.
So wrong.
I pull my hands from his. This requires more than a comforting touch; it requires conviction. I place my palms on either side of his face, my thumbs tilting his chin until his shadowed gaze is forced to meet mine.
“No.” My word is aimed like a defiant arrow at the heart of his despair. “That’s not true.”
His eyes are still fixed on that bleak internal landscape of his own making, but a tiny question flickers in their depths.
“You may be his son, but that poison is not in your blood,” I insist, desperate for my words to find a crack in his despair. “The man I see in you has an enormous capacity for goodness and a strength that honestly leaves me in awe.”
He pulls back slightly, his face slipping from my hold.
As if my belief in him is a pressure he can’t quite bear.
“The man you see got his ass handed to him every damn time he tried to rescue his mother. Over and over and over.” His repetition is a bleak litany.
“Until that strength you mention got beaten out of that boy and he learned to give up. To run and hide in Sal’s truck whenever shit hit the fan, leaving her behind.
” He squeezes his eyes tightly shut, fingers raking agitatedly through his hair.
“I made a promise,” he chokes out, the words thick with the ghosts of youthful hope and crushing responsibility.
“When I finally left that hellhole, I swore to her I’d come back.
I’d graduate top of my class, claw my way up, make enough money to buy her a life. A real one. A safe one. Away from him.”
He presses the heels of his palms hard against his closed eyes, as if trying to physically block out the images. “But that piece of shit…” His voice breaks, raw with fresh grief. “He got to her first. He killed her. Before I could bring her here.”
He gestures vaguely around us, at the house, the pool. “This was supposed to be for her. I was on the phone with her, from right there in the kitchen, telling her I was finally coming to get her. That it was over.”
He drops his hands from his face. His eyes are a storm of remembered horror. “But just as I was saying this to her, I could hear him start in on her. Drunk. Then I heard a crash and her screaming in pain.”
His voice drops to a haunted whisper, lost in the memory. “She yelled, ‘I love you, Matty! I’m so proud of you!’ Her voice was so far away. Must’ve dropped the phone. Then she screamed again. A sound… a sound I can’t even describe… but I can still hear it.”
A single, ragged sob, he tries and fails to swallow, rips from him. “Then it was just him. His voice, roaring. The sound of him kicking something. I just kept screaming her name into the phone. Then, hung up. Called 911.”
He shakes his head, his face a mask of utter devastation. “By the time they got there, it was too late. He played the grieving husband. They called it an accident. Said her heart just gave out. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy.” He chokes on the medical term. “Broken heart syndrome.”
His hands come up to cover his face, his words muffled. “But I heard it, Amy. I heard him kill her.” He lets out another shuddering breath. “He didn’t need a weapon. He was the weapon. And I was here. Miles away. On this end of the phone.” He pauses, guilt heavy in the air. “Safe.”
He bows his head, his face still buried in his hands, body wracked by a silent sob. A single, ragged “Fuck!” rips through the stillness.
After a moment, he straightens, wiping his hands across his face, inhaling sharply. “Sorry.”
His scratchy apology and those red-rimmed eyes, brimming with hurt, tip me over the edge. My own eyes well up.
I shift slightly and pull him to me, wrapping my arms around his neck. “I’m sorry.” My own choked apology is more of a vow against his hair. I pull him closer, my arms a protective circle, tightening, trying to become a shield against the pain that’s just poured out of him.
He collapses into my embrace. He buries his face hard against my neck; his hands fist the fabric of the T-shirt at my back. His body is heavy, surrendering to the utter depletion. Surrendering to the release of a lifetime of dammed-up grief.
For a long moment, there’s only the sound of his breathing, gradually steadying against my neck. The frantic, broken rhythm of his heart begins to calm as my hand rubs steadfast circles on his back.
He doesn’t move beyond the occasional hitch in his breath.
He just is.
Broken and utterly present in my arms.
As if the boy who had to run and hide finally found a safe place to fall apart.