Chapter 4 #2
I want to hold him close to me, run my fingers through his hair, but tremors still inhabit my bones, and I just cannot do it.
Every time I want to reach out, I see Cole standing above me on the concrete floor.
His chair screeches as he stands, stepping to the window, his back to me, arms crossed, the fabric struggling under the push of his biceps.
Filled with unsaid promises, the air thickens by the minute, making me want to curl up under his skin and disappear there.
I cry because silence used to be our language, and now it has become a wall between us.
I cry because the man I fell for, the man who saved me, is standing a meter away, and still, I cannot touch him or tell him how terrified I was back then, and how picturing him was the only comfort I had.
That he was my only hope. My own guardian angel in the dark.
And I curse every part of me that has been broken underground, because now, I am not sure if we will ever be who we were supposed to become.
Tristan
Cars drive into the parking lot, looking for a spot.
Hundreds of them, all shapes and colors, right there, visible from the fourth-floor hospital window.
My girl is behind me, the sound of her tears perforating my chest with knives as I look away, unable to comfort her like I should because something happened down there, and now she will not…
She will not let me touch her, and now…now she’s asking me if she was worth it.
If searching for her while she spent twelve days in that hell, hidden from me, while I was losing sleep and sanity, holding it together so I would not trash my home with a hammer and let my wrath win over reason, was…
worth it. I wish I could sign to her how it felt.
How crushed I was. How devastated I still am.
Except something happened to her, and now signing, speaking our language, feels like doing so with a barricade between us.
As if we are both trying and failing to connect, the wall is too thick and sturdy for us to destroy and overcome.
I want her to know that these last weeks made everything crystal clear.
I had a life before Ella.
And now I have another.
And there will be no going back, even if we have to overcome the worst trauma possible.
No matter what happened there. Even if we have to crawl through the worst of it.
Even if she cannot bear my hands for a while.
Even if the sound of my voice sends her somewhere I cannot follow.
I will gather patience and time and lay both at her feet until she believes me.
The words I cannot say yet are on the edge of my tongue.
I cannot say them, so my mouth starts spewing the cheesy stuff I have kept locked up for days, which I can't hold in anymore.
“Twelve days,” I mutter. I can hear her breathing, soft and uneven, and I know she is watching me.
I feel the warmth of her attention like a hand against my chest. “You ask me if you were worth it.” I shake my head, looking away, clearing my throat for the tenth time and blinking twice.
Stupid AC. “If I bought a pen today, I’d write your name first just to see if the ink worked.
” My voice scrapes on the words. “If you were to never talk to me again, I’d move from this city because all the places would forever be kissed by your memory.
For twelve days, I tasted you in my coffee.
I saw your reflection in every window. I tried to read to make the hours pass, but the words kept turning into you.
” I look back at her then. “You’re asking me if you were worth it, and I’m standing here trying not to say something that would scare you, when the truth is, your smile has been dictating my choices since the day I met you.
Your laugh has ruined every other reward.
Nothing, and I mean nothing else, comes close.
” Her lip shakes as she bites it. “And earlier, when you said home, you meant my house.” My voice drops.
“I need you to know that there hasn’t been a single day since you left that I haven’t missed watching you live there like it was yours.
” The words thin in my throat. “Like it was ours.” A jolt of electricity runs through my forearm, and it takes everything in me not to cup her sweet face.
“So yes. You were worth it. Every loss. Every piece of the life I had to burn to get to you.” I hold her gaze. “No matter how monumental they were.”
“I…I missed you so much,” she signs, shutting her eyes hard.
Relief washes over me; even if it's meager, it’s still there.
My Ella does not seem like herself as she looks back at me, haunted by another presence that is not there with us and yet fills more space than both of us can fight against. Cole won.
Not by taking my money and businesses. By taking her spark away.
Stealing it. Momentarily, I tell myself.
Still, a nagging sensation settles in my gut, warning me that I will have to make her acquaintance again and uncover the new version of Ella she's become.
Because darkness changed her, and I will take it upon myself, as her knight, her partner if she will let me be one, to find her in the black forest she is now hiding in.