Chapter 18 #2
For a while, neither of us moves. The room fills with our uneven breathing. Reed’s weight rests carefully over me, his forearms taking enough of it that I can draw a full breath.
He looks down at me, and his face changes.
“Annie,” he says. Just my name, but his voice is raw enough that my chest aches.
I pull him closer before the prickle behind my eyes can turn into tears. He presses his forehead to mine, his nose brushing against my cheek, and his breath warms my damp lips. He eases us onto our sides without letting go, then rolls onto his back and brings me with him.
I settle across his chest, and his arms close around me immediately.
A truck passes on the road below, tires hissing over wet pavement before fading away. The clock on my old dresser is stuck at eleven seventeen. It probably hasn’t worked in years.
Reed’s heartbeat slows beneath my ear. His hand moves up and down my bare back, never straying far before returning to the same place.
I close my eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
I open my eyes.
“What?”
“I’m sorry,” Reed says again.
His voice is quiet beneath me, almost lost beneath the steady beat of his heart against my ear.
“I know I’ve already said it. More than once, probably.
But I don’t think I’m ever going to reach a point where I’m finished being sorry.
” His fingers move slowly along my arm, tracing the same path from my shoulder to my elbow and back again.
“It was bad enough that I let my mother and Lexi make you feel like a stranger in your own home.”
He stops.
I feel his chest expand beneath my cheek, then slowly empty.
“But there was also what I told Glen.”
That makes me lift my head.
Reed is staring somewhere past me, his jaw tight. When his eyes finally find mine, there’s no defensiveness in them. No explanation waiting behind the apology.
“I took something that belonged to us, and I gave it to someone else.”
My throat tightens.
“I told him about the miscarriages. The treatments. The doctors. Things about your body you never gave me permission to tell anyone.” His hand stills against my arm. “Things about us.”
“Reed—”
“I was hurting. I was falling apart, and I needed somebody.” His mouth twists. “That part is true. But needing somebody didn’t give me the right to hand him pieces of you so I could feel less alone.”
Something inside my chest gives a painful little pull.
I lower my head again, settling against him, listening to the heart I know almost as well as my own.
“I don’t want to keep twisting the knife,” I say.
“You’re not.”
“But if I’d known, Reed…” My voice catches. “If I’d known, maybe…”
I close my eyes and suddenly I’m back in that hallway. Catherine’s face materializes behind the mask, her voice going soft with all that poisonous concern.
The treatments alone would exhaust any woman.
I swallow.
“Don’t get me wrong. I still would have been pissed, but at least I wouldn’t have been unprepared.”
Reed’s arms tighten around me.
“It felt like the world had flipped upside down and suddenly I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t, because I couldn’t make sense of why you, of all people, would have told anyone when it was so clear that it belonged only to us.”
“Annie.” He takes a deep breath, steadying himself. “It was bad enough that I broke your trust, but then I let you keep trusting a secret I’d already broken.”
I go very still.
Reed shifts beneath me. He slides an arm behind my shoulders, settling the other around my waist before carefully rolling onto his side, taking me with him.
We face each other, our legs tangled beneath the covers.
He doesn’t let go, but his hold stays loose enough that I could move away if I wanted.
His hand comes up and cups the side of my face.
“I should have come home that next morning and told you exactly what happened. You could have been angry with me. Hell, maybe you would have walked out right then, but at least you wouldn’t have been ambushed.”
His thumb moves once across my cheek.
“Instead, I decided telling you would only hurt you.”
I watch his face.
“Joke’s on me because not telling you hurt you way more than if I’d been upfront with you.”
The words settle between us.
“I can’t promise I’ll never need somebody else,” he says softly. “I probably will. So will you. We’re human.”
My eyes burn.
“But what I won’t do is hurt you again.” His forehead comes down against mine. “If something is ours, then we decide together who gets to know it.”
I close my eyes.
His breath warms the space between us.
“And I will never keep something from you because I’ve decided you’re too fragile to hear it.” His voice roughens. “I told myself I was protecting you. Maybe part of me even believed that. But you didn’t need me protecting you from the truth. You needed your husband to trust you with it.”
I slide my hand against his chest, his heart beating beneath my palm.
“Yes, I did,” I agree. “But now I know I’ve got exactly that.”
“Annie, I don’t ever want you standing in another room discovering something about your own marriage that everybody else knew before you did.”
He presses his mouth to my forehead and stays there.
I tuck myself beneath his chin, my arm sliding around his waist, and Reed lets out one long, shaking breath before folding himself around me.
For a while, neither of us says anything.
We just lie there tangled together, holding what belongs to us.