Chapter 25
Christian
Lana is sprawled out on top of me when I wake up. Her hair is somewhat in my face, her face is squished against my pec, her arm is on my cheek, and she’s full starfish.
Just how I always woke up with her before.
She always swore she didn’t move in her sleep and that it was me, but obviously that isn’t true.
I kiss her once, but it’s enough to make her stir with a soft moan. Lana adjusts her position, removing her arm from my face, but doesn’t get off of me. “Hi,” she rasps and kisses the center of my chest.
“Hi.”
She moans happily, smiling with her eyes closed—her dimples just for me. I press my thumb into one of them and her smile widens. “I missed that.”
“I love you,” I say, just for the sake of saying it. To say it out loud and know she hears me, and to know that I’m not just talking or thinking to myself.
“I know,” Lana breathes. “You have a lot of explaining to do.”
She rolls off of me now and there’s a weight in my chest that wasn’t there before.
“Don’t think I forgot, Christian,” she says gently.
“I didn’t.” I shake my head. “I just…don’t really know how to talk about it.”
“It’s me,” Lana whispers, nestling into my side with her hand on my cheek. She throws her leg over my hip and I hold onto her thigh. “It’s me, Christian.”
I swallow and nod. “I know, baby.”
“I would never judge you, and I can never hate you.”
“I know,” I rasp. “It was just…a mistake.”
Lana nods, telling me to take my time.
“We were just all… It was a party. I made friends who weren’t friends and they just…
enabled me.” I turn onto my back and rub my hand over my chest. But Lana moves it aside and puts her hand on my heart.
“I’d started experimenting, if that’s what you want to call it.
I was always drunk, always high. And that night, I don’t know.
I just over did it. These girls that were there…
One of them had been trailing after me for a bit, flirting because I was one of the thirty under thirty.
Then she saw an opportunity to take advantage of me…
I don’t remember much of that. I just remember pushing her off me and leaving her on the couch to go to the bathroom because I was thinking of you. ”
And I left to get higher.
With every girl, I imagined Lana’s face, even said her names a couple of times and got slapped for it. But when I didn’t, I just pictured her. Then it would end and I’d blink, wake up from the sex haze, and it wasn’t her. It was never going to be her.
I don’t know why I kept doing it, I think back on it a lot and I hate it. I hate myself for it. I can’t tell her that though—not today, not this morning.
“Christian…”
“I was just trying to get over you—I thought I could. I wanted to forget about this town and my dad. I hated the company, I didn’t want it. I hated my mother for putting me in that position when she could have just taken over herself.”
She reaches up and kisses my jaw before burrowing her face in my neck.
“Nothing I did worked, obviously. I couldn’t get you out of my head, no matter what I did.
But, I guess that night, I was just so angry about it because all I saw was you.
There were a lot of people there, people I didn’t even know but somehow they knew me.
They had all the stuff, stronger things no one had until they got there.
The guys brought all these pills and…and one of them was cutting lines for everyone.
And I did them. Almost all of them. Or all of it, I don’t remember. ”
I pause for a moment, my body prickling with shame as I talk about it. But as Lana holds me tighter, that shame dissipates some, overthrown by her love for me. I try to finish what I have to say, searching for the words even though I can hear Lana’s quiet cries.
“I don’t remember all of what happened. I don’t even remember what I took. I don’t think I knew what it was when I was doing it. It was a bad night, Lana. I was with…this girl.” I grimace, disgusted with myself. “I was drinking and taking whatever was put in front of me. I…”
“It’s okay, you can say it,” she croaks. “You’re mine and I’m not going anywhere.”
“I was…with this girl and I was thinking of you…” My skin feels too tight and itchy, and I want to crawl out of it.
Washing this stuff off is impossible. “I was thinking of you and I couldn’t take it.
I left her there and found something stronger.
More of it. That night…I overdid it,” I rasp.
“And they all left me there to die. I don’t even know who it was that called the ambulance. ”
“Christian,” Lana croaks.
“You would have saved me,” I murmur, my vision clouding. “I know you would have saved me. You did save me. And you do, all the time.”
Lana’s body shakes.
I pull her closer. “I’m okay now.”
She shakes her head and somehow buries herself further into me. “I’m not.”
“Why, baby?” I pull her over me, her legs on either side of my hips. I hold her face in my hands, wipe under her eyes, and softly kiss her pout. “Why not?”
“Because you could have died,” she cries quietly.
“And if you had? What would I have done? I wouldn’t have even known.
I would have been here, in this town, waiting for the day you showed up.
I would have been in a rocking chair on my stupid front porch waiting until I was ninety, and I wouldn’t have known. ”
I push her hair back and move my hands to her neck, my thumbs over her pulse. “Can I tell you a secret?”
Lana nods.
“I thought the same thing when I woke up in the hospital.” Her lip trembles harder. “I thought of you, and I checked into rehab. I was planning to come back, Lana. I just needed to get clean for us.”
She puts her ear over my heart. “I would have killed you if you died on me,” she mutters.
I laugh softly. “I would never die on you, Lana.” She nods and I play with the ends of her hair. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes—done things I’m not proud of. But none of those things are you.”
I feel Lana sigh and her lips press a kiss to my chest. She sits up slightly, brushing my hair back with her fingers and tracing features with the tip of her forefinger. “Are you sure you’re okay now?”
“I am, I promise.”
“One year and eight months?”
“One year, eight months, and one day,” I say.
“And was that when… you went to rehab?”
“I went to rehab right out of the hospital,” I tell her. “I was done. I didn’t want to keep having to kill myself to see you. If I died—actually died, I would have never seen you again. I would not have been able to make the life I wanted for myself. For us, baby. Our girls.”
“Christian…”
“I think I died for a minute,” I say, huffing a laugh as I recall what I saw. “I didn’t see any god or anything like that. I only saw my life if I wasn’t such a fucking mess.”
“What’d you see?”
“You. Us. The lake house we always wanted.” I smile. “Two little girls running around, and you running after them.”
“And where were you?”
“Taking your pictures.” My cheeks burn from the grin on my face. “Then one of the girls called me Daddy so I went running after all of you. I heard your laugh, and their laughs. And then I woke up in the hospital.”
“Oh, Christian,” she croaks and kisses my neck, over my pulse before she nestles her way into its crook.
“You, me, and two girls,” I say. “Could you imagine that?”
Lana chuckles. “Yes,” she says, her palms on my cheeks as she gazes at me with those bright eyes. “I see you as a girl dad. You’d worship them—spoil them rotten.”
I laugh. “I’d spoil all of you.”
Lana exhales heavily through her nose. “And your mom…”
“I’ve been coming up with a plan to buy her out,” I tell her. “I just haven’t been focused on it since I got here because you’re my priority right now, Lana.”
Her thumbs brush up and down across my stubbled cheeks. “So what will happen if you buy her out?”
“I get rid of her for good. I’ll have nothing to do with her and she’ll have nothing to do with me. The only thing we’ll have in common is a last name.”
“You hate her?”
Lana always told me, hate is a strong word.
And she’s right, obviously, it is. But the more time I spent with my mother in New York, and the more I got to see how much of a money hungry monster she was, I lost the last ounce of respect I had for her.
She was a business partner, not much else. And even now, she means nothing.
She and I never had a connection.
I was always just a means to an end. Someone to give inheritance too, pass on the torch of their “Calloway Legacy.” An afterthought.
“A bit,” I whisper.
“Can I tell you a secret?”
“Yeah, baby.”
Lana scrunches her nose up. “I kind of hate her too.”
“I’m sorry I let her win.”
Lana holds my face in her hands. “She didn’t. She only thought she did, but you’re here now.”
“And I’m yours.”
“You are.” Lana takes a breath. “I’m sorry I thought you were drinking. I’m sorry I didn’t trust you last night. I think when you… My head…”
“I know,” I rasp. “The store.”
“Yeah,” she breathes sadly. “But I do trust you, Christian. I love you and I trust you. And I’m sorry for the way I reacted. It wasn’t fair to you.”
“I love you, Lana,” I say. “I forgive you.”
She smiles.
My hands on her back move up to her cheeks, my thumbs pressing into her dimples. “I missed these,” I breathe out with a smile of my own. “I think these are what made me fall in love with you.”
She gapes at me, still smiling. “My dimples? That’s it?”
I laugh. “Everything.”
“Hmm.” She kisses my jaw. “Promise me something.”
“Anything.”
“Promise me you’ll stay.”
“I promise,” I say, holding her face in my hands, “I’m not going anywhere. Ever. I’m staying.”
“I believe you,” Lana breathes. “I trust you.”
And I swear everything that was broken and stained is somehow fixed. The cracks are mending and the stains are erasing.
“You do?”
“I do, baby,” she says and kisses me. “I do.”
I can’t stop myself from asking anyway. “Do you hate me?”
“No,” she breathes in disbelief. “No, never, Christian, how can you think that?”