Chapter 8
Raemy let the hot spray beat down on her. She piled her hair up on the top of her head, because she didn’t really feel like washing it tonight, let the water pound into her skin, and wondered what would happen next.
Would he storm out? Would he start...punching things? She really didn’t know.
What she did know was that the look on his face was sheer betrayal. Aimed right at her, as if the boxes in her hotel room were made of deception and lies instead of her grandmother’s collection of miniature glass animals and her own accidental collection of irreverent dishtowels.
And while Raemy certainly didn’t like him being upset, she was actually more relieved than anything else. Because now the other shoe had finally dropped. She’d known it would.
She’d known it was only a matter of time.
Because no way Noah Kendrick, who thought he was responsible for every bad thing that had ever happened in the United States Marine Corps while he was in it—and possibly also throughout its entire previous history—was just going to allow himself to slip into the relationship that they’d been having.
She’d expected dire warnings by now. Lists of acceptable behavior.
Lectures—with a frown—about what was and what wasn’t going to happen because of this or that very important (read: bullshit) reason that was mostly him not wanting to deal with his feelings.
On any topic.
It had been making her ever-so-slightly nervous that he’d instead seemed to be going with the flow, which was something she did not think was possible for him to do. Not that she hadn’t loved it, because of course she had.
But she’d been waiting for reality to hit and here it was.
That he’d simply been waiting for her to cut and run made a lot more sense than him suddenly being perfectly okay with what was happening.
Raemy expected him to come into the shower and continue telling her what she could and couldn’t do, so it was pretty surprising when he didn’t.
But she didn’t hear the door to her room slam, so she was not all that surprised when she came out to find him sitting there on the end of the bed, looking like he’d been sucker punched.
Repeatedly. Directly in the solar plexus.
She went and sat down next to him, tucking the towel she’d wrapped around her a little bit tighter.
When he glanced over at her, he looked...
This poor man, she thought, probably with more fondness than he would have appreciated in that moment. He looks traumatized.
She could easily believe that he was. On some level, she’d been expecting this kind of reaction from him. There was a reason, after all, that she hadn’t told him her plans. She’d known what he was likely to do. How he was likely to take this news that she thought was nothing but terrific.
If she was honest, Raemy had kind of been hoping that she could just...move here. Settle into her new rental cottage with its beach roses and thundering ocean views. She’d been thinking that maybe it was better to keep postponing this inevitable crashout until they were even more enmeshed.
Okay, if she was really honest, maybe she’d been thinking that he might not notice until they were living together, and it was all too late, and he’d been living with her and sleeping in her bed for a year or two. That was obviously a piece of fantasy.
Even the most charmingly oblivious of men would probably notice a complete and total change of address, especially one who lived in community housing with a bunch of smartass veterans who would have been certain to point it out to him.
She blew out a breath, picking at the bedspread between them, and made herself wait to see what he was going to say.
“I don’t think that I can live like this,” he said, his voice low and raw.
“I don’t think I can live with myself.” She made a noncommittal sort of humming noise, but that seemed enough to keep him going.
“I’ve known the entire time that this was wrong.
This is what I’ve been trying to tell you all along.
I’m no hero, Raemy. I didn’t deserve the way your brother felt about me and I doubt he would have kept feeling that way the longer he’d been in the service.
I knew better than to kiss you, but I did it anyway. ”
He looked at her as if he expected her to react to that, and Raemy just nodded, to indicate she was listening. She kept picking at the bedspread, which was actually a sailboat motif instead of a sand dollar. Food for beach cottage thought, she told herself.
It seemed to agitate him that she didn’t react to him mentioning that first kiss, because he amped it up. “The fact of the matter is that I destroyed your family. I don’t know why you seem so compelled to ignore that, but I can’t ignore it. Not any longer.”
And that actually did require a response.
“My family has a William-shaped hole in it,” she told him, calmly enough, because it was no more and no less than the truth.
“It’s not even a hole. It’s just William and he’s not going anywhere.
None of us will ever forget him. I wouldn’t know where to begin forgetting him, in fact.
We love him. We miss him.” She looked at him, and her heart squeezed at that stark, bruised sort of look on his face.
“But you didn’t destroy my family, Noah.
I don’t know how many times I have to say this. ”
“I’m aware of what I’m responsible for even if you refuse to give it the weight it deserves,” he said gruffly.
With all of that misplaced honor that made her want to shake him and hug him, maybe at the same time.
“I don’t know what you’ve been doing since you got out of the Marines.
” She waved her hand in the general direction of the main street outside and up on the other end, the Salty Dog.
“I know what you do with your days, but I don’t know what you’ve been doing with yourself.
Except, I guess, a whole lot of self-flagellation. ”
He let out a sound, making it clear he didn’t like that description. That didn’t make it any less right-on.
Raemy kept going. “Maybe that feels better than sitting in the sticky, unpleasant reality, that bad things can happen. Probably it does. But they can happen to any of us and that doesn’t make us responsible for them. It doesn’t make us victims, either.”
He turned and looked at her then, with a hollow sort of expression that very clearly stated that he did not consider himself a victim.
Raemy smiled at him, and clearly, he didn’t like that either.
“I think, and I fought this for a long time, but I really do think that this is just life,” she told him softly. “Sometimes we lose people. It’s actually highly likely that you might lose someone in a combat situation.”
“I’m sorry that I can’t be glib about it,” he all but growled at her, his dark eyes like a storm.
And Raemy understood, so she didn’t react to that the way she could have. She sighed instead. She put her hand on his thigh, feeling the way that big muscle bunched up beneath her palm, because he was stiffening.
Maybe waiting for the blow. Maybe waiting for her to return his growl.
“My parents and I grieved him,” she said, very simply.
Very directly. “We grieved him like it was our job. You don’t know this, because you weren’t there.
But the person you saw at my brother’s funeral is the person I was.
For years, Noah. I sleepwalked through my life.
I don’t remember whole seasons. It’s like driving home and only realizing when you get there that you have absolutely no idea who was operating that vehicle. That’s what it was like.”
She squeezed that hard thigh of his a little, and leaned closer. “It was ugly. It seemed like there was no end in sight. And we had to just accept that. We had to live like we were just out there in the sea of it, never to return. So that was what we did.”
And she could see on his face that he was already feeling guilt for the glib comment. He rubbed his hand over his eyes, and blew out a breath. “Raemy...”
But she wasn’t done. “The thing about grief is that you can’t rush it.
If you try to deny it, or push it away, or try to rationalize your way out of it, it’s just going to take more from you.
It’s going to sit on you and flatten you until it’s done, and what I’m trying to tell you is that my parents and I let it.
” She sat back a little, and her heart ached for the way he was all but hanging his head as he sat there next to her.
“And that’s not to say that it’s gone forever.
Because it will never be gone. Because my wonderful little brother—who used to chase me with caterpillars in his hands and called me outrageous nicknames that I will never repeat, and who was tender and lovely and left me part of his Halloween candy under my pillow because he knew I liked Mounds Bars more than he did—is gone.
” It was still hard to say things like that without her breath catching.
She let it. “And I like thinking of him as a hero, but that’s not who he is to me.
It’s part of it, sure. But mostly, he’s just William.
And I miss him. And I will always miss him. ”
Beside her, Noah stirred as if he was about to mount a counter to that.
Raemy kept going. “Allowing myself to feel every contour of that is why I’m okay. I’m not glib. I’m okay, Noah. And I don’t think that you are.”
Now he was shaking his head, his eyes gone dark again.
“William is just one of them,” he said in a low voice. “But he was... It’s what you said. He was too...”
But it sounded like he was too anguished to continue.
“You don’t have to tell me all the things that are in your head,” she said quietly, still keeping her hand on him, because maybe she was grounding them both.
“Do you think that I don’t know that you wake up in the night?
I can’t imagine what it is that you’re seeing in the dark.
In your head. But, Noah. You don’t have to live like this. Do you know that?”
He stood then, and actually, Raemy was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. She was surprised he’d let her offer him anything that was even remotely like comfort.
She stayed where she was, and watched him vibrate with that tension of his that was never far from the surface.
“I shouldn’t be laying all of this on you,” he said darkly. Filled with that same intensity. “You’re already carrying enough.”
“Noah.”
“The facts are pretty simple. I’ve taken advantage of you and it has to stop. I told myself a story about how if it was temporary, it wouldn’t count. But it does. It counts anyway.” He raked a hand over his face. “But if you’re really going to move here for good, that’s it. It’s done.”
Raemy wasn’t much of a yeller. Her job had always helped with that.
Kids responded better to calm than chaos, and she’d been teaching them so long that it rarely occurred to her to yell anymore.
It had turned into a life skill, this ability she had to keep her cool in almost every possible scenario.
Though right now she was reconsidering that.
She pinched her nose and fought to stay centered. Calm. In control.
Because on some level, she thought he wanted her to flip out. It would prove something. It would allow him the comfort of thinking he was right.
“Let’s make sure that we have all the facts on the table before we come to any conclusions here,” she said, aiming for something like serene and ending up neutral. Okay, maybe it was more aggressively neutral than anything else.
She waited for him to turn back and look at her from where he was pacing a trail from her door to her window. And again, it made her ache, because he looked so determined.
And so lost.
Raemy wanted absolutely nothing more than to curl her body around his, hold him tight, and somehow kiss away all the things inside him that hurt him.
But first, she had to lay on a little more of that pain—well. What he would no doubt consider pain.
“Are you finally willing to admit my responsibility in this?” he asked, sounding both hollow and vindicated.
Like this was the terrible moment he’d been waiting for all this time.
The ways she felt soft and tender for this man almost knocked her over.
“It’s much worse than that.” Raemy shook her head, sadly. “I am staying. I do plan to live here. I don’t have any intention of breaking up with you, however. Would you like to know why?”
“No,” he said shortly.
“I think you need all the facts, Noah. That’s only fair, right?”
“I can think of a few clinical reasons—” he began.
“Because I love you,” she said, her eyes on his and her tone as direct as her gaze was.
“I love you, I’m in love with you, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
So you can break up with me if you need to do that, but I’m not going to take it well.
And I’m not going to give up on you.” She lifted a shoulder. “Ever.”
Noah stared at her, his eyes so dark that they almost looked like shadows.
And he opened his mouth as if he was going to argue, but for a moment, all he did was stare. Almost as if—
“Oh, yes,” she said, before he could ask. “It’s true.”
She settled back on the bed, pulling her legs up so she could curl them to the side, and then lying down with her head propped up on her hand. Then she watched him quietly implode right there before her.
Poor Noah, she thought.
“You were saying something about how this could never be anything. And that I’m sick in the head. Or both.” She nodded, encouragingly. “Go on, then. Take it away. Explain to me how I don’t love you.”