Chapter Twenty-Two
I really don’t know how to absorb all this information. I’m not sure I’ve fully accepted that article Logan showed me about
our mother, and I never read any of the details. I just couldn’t bring myself to picture her trapped in that mine.
I’m pretty sure that if Jack were one of the details, though, Logan would have mentioned it to me.
I realize I’m shaking my head, like I don’t believe him. I have no reason not to. But I need more information. I need—
“How?” I manage to ask.
His forehead creases. “I don’t remember how I got there. I don’t even remember climbing inside the mine itself. I just remember
being there, and then . . .”
He pauses. I don’t know if he’s reaching back to try to remember what actually happened. Or maybe he’s trying to put things
into words that don’t fit there—something I know too well. What I do know is that I have not really seen Jack like this before.
Unguarded. Like his mask has slipped.
Like what’s underneath is him remembering what it was like to be a helpless boy trapped in a mine. I feel my heart kick at me. Or maybe for him, though I doubt he’d appreciate me telling him that.
He swallows, but keeps talking. “It was dark. I heard the slurping. I’m sure I screamed. Cried. Tried to get the hell out
of there. But I couldn’t . . . It was like being slowly absorbed by something black and thick and sticky. It didn’t hurt, but I couldn’t get out of it, and I knew that was bad. I’d heard enough of my grandparents’ warnings about steering clear
of the mine to know I was in trouble.”
My throat feels dry. I’m watching Jack closely, feeling drawn to him and this story and this moment in ways I can’t really
explain. It feels like a physical thing, but we’re not touching. I can tell he’s trying to keep himself blank, separate from
this memory, but he can’t manage it.
“Then I heard your mother’s voice.” He glances at me. “Your parents used to come into the antique shop. Sometimes my grandmother
would stop by the knitting store when she was babysitting me, and your mother would be there. I knew her. I knew you.”
Everything in me stills. “What?”
“You were a baby.” His voice is gruff. Something that sounds almost . . . defensive? “But I saw you. Someone was always holding
you or Logan, making a big deal over the Darling twins.”
“And it never occurred to you to mention that?”
His green gaze holds mine, somehow stern and compelling at once. “To what end?”
That he knew me as a baby is weird and wonderful and somehow revealing. It also makes me feel oddly vulnerable. I can think
of a lot of ends, except I suspect they’re mostly feelings, so I focus on the other part of this story. “So you were in this mine, surrounded by blackness with no idea how you got there, and my mother just . . . showed up?”
It’s what she did, he said, and in my head I’m imagining her as some kind of superhero. I like it. It makes me want to cry, but I like it.
“She swam through the black to find me,” Jack says. “That’s the only way I can describe it. Somehow, she got to me. She wrapped
her arms around me, and that was better. I didn’t feel the other stuff anymore, but the slurping . . . That was still there.”
I think of every dream I’ve had that was filled by those sounds. Of the encroaching black I have run from in dreams—both asleep
and waking. To actually be in that blackness with no hope of waking up, to be a child actually in it, is horrifying in ways I can’t fully grasp.
Particularly since his experience was real, and mine has only been dreams.
I think about Cleo calling what I’d suffered trauma, because I didn’t know what I was experiencing. Even at four, Jack did. And still, this is all trauma. None of us are safe from it.
Jack is continuing on. He sounds measured, yes, but not unaffected.
“She talked to me. I could hear her voice in my head. It was like we were stuck there, but she was keeping me calm.” His gaze
meets mine, direct. Pained. “Telling me stories about you.”
My breath catches. I can’t fathom this. That he knew I existed. That my mother talked to him. Knew him. Saved him. Hell, that Jack saw my mother hold me, and I have no memory of this. No feeling of it.
I’ve never even dreamed this.
Jack doesn’t shift his gaze from mine. “She told me that someday we would all grow up and become what we were meant to be. Just like her and your dad. I was four. I didn’t really understand, but it all felt comforting. Soothing.”
“Until you met me, you mean.”
His expression goes inscrutable. This Jack I’m more familiar with, though somehow, I question my reading of him now. Maybe
that look on his face doesn’t mean what I think it does.
But I don’t know what else it could mean, I tell myself, even as my pulse picks up speed.
I could swear I see something in all that green that matches, but his voice remains measured. Gruff. “I don’t know what she
did. I assume there was a sacrifice involved, because she got me out. She pushed me right out of there, but she got sucked
back in. Or something—I don’t know. I wish I did.” The intensity of his gaze is almost too much for me, but I don’t look away.
“I could hear her in my head, telling me to run. So I did. By the time I could get to my grandfather, it was too late.”
These are the details I didn’t want to read about in soulless newsprint. Not that any paper is likely to get into the slurping. Maybe that’s a good thing. But I realize as I stand here, taking in the scene Jack has set for me that I can see all too clearly,
that she’s still a stranger to me. I feel sad about her. I feel sorry for her. The way I would about any sad story I read somewhere.
But I know Jack. I know how it feels to press against his back, the wind rushing at us, the fall landscape a colorful swirl
around us. I know what it’s like to close my eyes against his shoulder. I have the scent of him from those motorcycle rides
inside me now, leather and leaves.
I feel sad about my mother, but kind of proud, too, that she went out saving a little boy.
Especially this little boy.
Like she saved him for me. A gift from the past, delivered into this future. For me.
“Don’t you see, Lexi? I’m here because she’s not. She sacrificed her life for me.”
“And this is why you hate me?”
He full-on scowls now. “I told you I don’t hate you.”
“My mother saved you, so you knew who I was, and from the beginning you’ve been nothing but rude. Standoffish. Antagonistic.”
But I know him now. I really do. “You’re telling me all this time I thought you hated me, and you were just being noble.”
This pisses him off even more. “I’m not fucking noble.”
But he is. To the bone. And I am . . . awed, by a myriad of things. I don’t have the words at first, but I have to act. So I move to him and put my palms on his cheeks.
And then I know what to say. “You’re the most noble man I’ve ever known.”
He stares at me for a moment, like he doesn’t understand why I’m not berating him for not saving my mother the way grown-up
Jack certainly would have.
“The point is she told me about you,” he says, a little more fiercely now. Back to the Jack I know, always with the warnings
and the dire and the everything is about to end, and badly. He takes my hands in his, pulls them off his face. “She told me
about us.”
He sounds growly and indignant. He does not release my hands.
“What about us, exactly?” I ask.
“Don’t pretend you didn’t feel it,” he mutters. “From the very first moment.”
“Feel what, Jack?” I demand of him, squeezing the hands that hold mine. “If you can’t say it, then I don’t think you felt anything.”
He scowls down at me. “You looked up at me from the booth, our eyes met, and there was a jolt. It was like getting a swift
kick to the stomach.”
It is exactly what I felt. That wild jolting moment. He describes it like a blow, though I’m not sure I would. It was more like something being unlocked.
A release. Not an attack.
I’m tempted to get my feelings hurt that he took it that way—but I can’t quite get there.
It’s the way he’s looking at me, something like affront all over his gruff, beautiful face. It’s the way I can tell he can’t bring himself to let my hands go.
Maybe it’s the demons or the stories about my mother or having to sleep in creepy antique stores. Maybe without all of that
I would have just stood here in this moment, let it roll over me, and then let both of us go our separate ways.
If his gaze didn’t drop to my mouth. If I didn’t feel that kick he described all over again.
“You could,” I tell him, without articulating what I mean.
But his gaze lifts to mine again. He knows what I mean.
He knows exactly what I mean. You could touch me, kiss me, find the fuck out.
Yet, Jack doesn’t move. “Aren’t we dealing with enough danger?”
It’s kind of funny the man who has contended with demons his entire life—who has been lured by them and saved from them, studied them and tried to stop them—thinks I’m dangerous.
It’s a hell of a lot better than crazy, I’ll grant you.
Maybe that’s why I decide to dive into danger rather than sidestep it. If he won’t find out, I will.
So I close the distance between our mouths and I kiss him, again.
And I brace myself for him to set me aside—again.
Once he does, I will really have to contend with why I throw myself into unwinnable situations. Is there a brick wall in the
vicinity? Let me pound my head against it!
But first, I kiss him.
And this time, Jack kisses me back.
It’s a rush of heat. His mouth is hot and frustrated. I’ve never kissed someone who was this infuriated, and not by me, really. That, I’m used to. Jack is pissed about this situation.
By our connection.
But I can taste him and I know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that this man does not hate me. He does not find me repulsive.
It’s quite the fucking opposite, and knowing him like I do by now, I suspect it’s the distraction from his mission that’s the real issue here.
Though that’s not an issue right now.
Not when he angles his head and takes the kiss somewhere wild.