Chapter 24
Lana
The most annoying, insistent pounding on my front door wakes me up from my slumber, New Girl still playing—which I’m rewatching for the umpteenth time. I pause it on one of my favorite episodes and the knocking begins again, sounding like thunder in the storm outside.
I swear it better not be him because if he even smells like anything remotely alcoholic, he can sleep on the porch. No, on the sidewalk.
I felt terrible after kicking him out without allowing him any time to explain.
I was just…triggered. Maybe he was going to tell me it was a bad choice of words, or maybe he was going to pick up something for our talk after we closed the shop.
Maybe he was going to pick up take out and other things before our talk. Or just things for our romantic night.
I didn’t give him a chance—I didn’t give him the benefit of the doubt, which he deserves, and I regret my defensiveness. But it’s two hours later and he’s here now…
The pounding on my front door comes back, louder the torrential downpour this time. With a sigh, I slip my feet into my white furry slippers and drag myself to the front door. I take a deep breath before turning the lock, and then I pull it open.
“What?”
Christian is there with red eyes and cheeks, an obvious tell that he might have been crying. He isn’t drunk and he didn’t drink—he has a different tell for that. “I love you,” is the first thing he says. “I have…so much to tell you and I don’t know how, but, Lana, I love you.”
I blink up at him. My lips part. And I love him too.
“Christian, what are you—”
His pair of tempestuous, coffee colored eyes stare back at me and line with silver.
“I overdosed,” he croaks quietly. “In New York—I overdosed and I didn't know how to tell you. I’ve been working up to it, I swear. Lana—”
I lose my breath.
He overdosed. He overdosed.
He could have died.
My knees go weak and I think I’m about to crash, but he catches me and holds me up. “Lana, baby, don’t do that. I’m fine.”
I’m not fine.
I could have lost him.
“But you aren’t,” I cry. “You could have died and I would have never known it, Christian!”
“I know.” He sniffles and his voice shakes when he repeats himself, “I know.”
“No, you don’t know! You leave, I don’t know about you for years other than what I see online and you just… You just…”
“It was kept quiet—All of it. I overdosed and they saved me. And then I got clean. I got sober. I went to rehab,” he says. “And now I’m here.”
I swallow and he pulls something out of his back pocket. It’s our jar. The faded, sloppy writing is stained on the glass, spelling out, house jar.
“What is that?”
“These,” he shakes the jar, “are all of my chips. Each and everyone of them that I’ve earned the past year and a half.”
“Chips…”
“Sobriety chips.”
I steal the small Mason jar from his hand and turn it, shake it, inspect it.
It’s our old jar—our house jar. We added money to it all the time.
Money we were going to use to buy a new car and a house.
It was filled with the money that I found left on the counter, and now I know he took it as if he knew he was going to come back to me one day.
He came back to me.
“All of them,” Christian breathes. “Every single one of them, I put in that jar, thinking of you. Of the day I’d come back and get you and we’d finally have that house. I had to take it with me, I’m sorry.”
“Christian…”
“For four years, you are the only thing that has been on my mind,” he says. “But for a year and a half, I have been planning this day. It didn’t happen the way I thought it would or wanted it to, but I’m here…and I fucking love you.”
I shake it again, gently. It’s filled with something much better now. “A year and a half?”
He dips his chin.
These were the confessions I was waiting for…
“And you…” I swallow, turning our old house jar—still stained with the sharpie. “You went to rehab.”
“I was…not well, Lana,” he rasps. “You have no idea how badly I don’t want to be my dad.”
I should have trusted him tonight. “Christian, I…”
“I wanted to be the person you deserved. The person who deserved you,” Christian says, his voice cracking. “But no matter what I do, I’ll never deserve someone like you. So, if I have to, I will get on my knees and beg you to love me anyway.”
My hands tighten around the jar, my mouthing opening and closing with words I want to say but can’t seem to find.
“You were right to kick me out earlier,” he continues. “I know what ‘the store’ meant, I just… forgot.”
“Then where did you go?” I croak quietly, hugging our house jar.
Christian pulls something from his front pocket.
“This one is new. I got it today at a meeting that Nico told me about the day I came back into town. I started going that same week, and I’ve been going every Friday.
It’s been a year and eight months today.
” He holds out the chip for me to take. “I had to go to the store to grab pies because I promised I would be the one to bring the snacks and desserts this week. This is why I’m here.
Because I can be. I’m okay enough to be here and tell you…
” He releases an exasperated breath. “To tell you I have missed you. Everyday for the past four years, and I have been miserable without you. I have nothing without you—I am nothing without you.”
“Don’t say that,” I choke. My chest is tight to the point of pain and my hands are trembling around the chip in my hand and the delicate jar in the other. “You are everything, Christian.”
He shakes his head, his eyes flitting away from me and down at the floor. I take a step into his air, his cologne assaulting my senses, and I lift his chin with my fingers, my thumb skimming his bottom lip.
“You are everything to me,” I whisper.
“Lana?” His voice cracks. “Do I deserve you yet?”
“What?” I breathe.
“Am I the man you deserve?” he says, his voice hoarse. “And am I the man who deserves you?”
“Christian…”
“Lana, please,” he says. “I need this.”
“Yes, Christian,” I whisper. “Yes. You are. I deserve you and you deserve me. And you’re mine.”
Christian nods, his red eyes locked on mine. “Lana, baby…”
“Come inside,” I breathe, standing on my toes, just tall enough for my lips to brush over his. “Just come home.”
“Lana…”
“What?”
“I don’t want to be the thing you regret in the morning,” he breathes, breaking my heart.
“You’ll never be something I regret.” I kiss his jaw and lower onto my heels. “Come inside the house, Christian.”
He doesn’t move just yet. I take a step back and his hesitance doesn’t fade. I know this look on him. Fear. “Can I keep these?” I ask softly.
Christian nods stiffly.
“Come inside,” I say. “Please.”
His hand on the threshold of the door tightens, his tan hand pale.
“If you come inside, I’ll let you kiss me,” I propose.
I catch his lips twitch and his eyes brighten a smidge, just enough to soothe my heart.
I set the jar down on the entrance table, and twist off the cap.
My eyes move over his face, and his eyes are stuck on my hands.
I watch for his reaction as I drop his new chip in with the rest.
Something flashes in his eyes, but all I feel inside of me is pride.
He worked for it, for himself. His eyes come back to mine and I see a hint of calmness now.
In lieu of that, I step away from the front door and walk up the stairs, heading for my room.
Upstairs is dark and silent, and at the top, I’m waiting to hear the door close.
Then it happens.
I hear his shoes come off at the door and his padded steps up the stairs. I slip into my bedroom and sit at the foot of the bed, and he comes in. The moonlight that pours in between the blinds and curtains bathes him, amplifying his hard features.
There is truly no lighting that can make this man look unflattering.
Christian takes a small step forward and with his eyes on me, his gaze so intense my lips part, he closes the bedroom door behind him.
“Lana,” he breathes.
“I said I’d let you kiss me,” I whisper quickly, “if you came inside.”
His chin dips only the slightest bit.
“Come kiss me,” I breathe.
My legs open to make room for him to stand between them, and when he does, his hands cup my face. “If I kiss you, I won’t stop.”
“I’m not asking you to,” I whisper. “No more rule.”
The growl trapped in his throat is a quiet one, just a sign of his satisfaction. His mouth crashes down onto mine and his hands are everywhere until I’m tossed further up the bed.
I know he hasn’t told me everything, but it doesn’t matter. This is enough. He can tell me the rest tomorrow, and I’ll still love him.
Christian crawls over me until he’s between my legs and pushing my shirt off my body. My nipples pebble from the cool air and his breath grazing over them. “Christian. Please.”
“Let me have this.”
His hands cup my breasts as he kisses across my clavicles, down the center of my chest, back up and down my neck again, until his lips are around my nipple—licking, sucking, biting, swirling his tongue around.
By the time he’s showing the other one the same focused attention, I’m a trembling wreck—everything clenching and pulsing and aching.
I arch into him, welcoming the torture.
Then he’s kissing down my body and I’m dying.
I reach down for him, tugging him back up to me with my hands on his cheeks. He comes over me again, devouring me, showing me just what he’ll do with his tongue later while I pull off clothes.
This is one of those things for us. We’ve done this so many times, it’s muscle memory. I know how to take his clothes off faster, I know which parts of his torso to brush my fingers over, where my lips should kiss to make him tremble.
“Condom?”
I giggle.
“What?” he asks, kissing my neck.
“We haven’t used condoms together since…”
He looks down at me with a blissful smile. “We were twenty one?”
I nod, smiling and biting my lip. “Do you want to use one?”