“Stop.” My voice was a whisper.
“You never should have been with him.”
“Stop.” My voice got louder.
“And I never should have touched another woman, no matter that you wouldn’t speak to me, wouldn’t look at me. I was celibate for two years after the night of the accident and for one year before the ranch. Everything else was wrong. It should have never happened like that. My only excuse was that I’d lost all hope.” His voice went from unsteady to breaking on each word. “If I’d had even an ounce of hope left that you would let me so much as kiss your f**king feet again, I would have waited for you.” He made a visible effort to calm himself.
He took a very deep breath. “And then I saw you with that piece of shit—“
“Stop it! He’s not a piece of shit. He’s actually a very nice man.”
“Well, I f**king hate him, so please don’t talk him up to me.” His voice was shaking, and getting louder by the word. “When I saw you that night, the way he was with you, touching you with privilege, I knew that I couldn’t go on like that anymore, couldn’t go on pretending that I was okay with the way things turned out.
I tried it your way, Danika. No one can say, that six f**king years later, I didn’t try to respect your wishes, but I am done. This was wrong. You were wrong. And I’m here to tell you that, if it takes me the rest of my f**king life, I am going to make this right again.”
I had no words, for once. And I couldn’t move, couldn’t begin to imagine how to react to his statement. Something was happening inside of me, some hardened part of me had thawed out and the repercussions of that thawing were not something I was ready yet to contemplate.
“So that is how I know for a fact that it is not my baby,” he continued relentlessly, “and she knows it too. She’s turned malicious. She’s not who I thought she was, and that’s unfortunate; it has cost her job, but she does not have the power she thinks she does to hurt what you and I have. No one has that power, with the exception of you and me. So, sweetheart, please, I just need you to have a little bit more faith.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before now that you hadn’t been with anyone in so long?”
“You hadn’t even admitted to me that things were over with Andrew. Did you expect me to admit to a thing like that, when I didn’t even know if you were jumping from his bed to mine? I do have some pride left, even when it comes to you.”
“I told you about Andrew—”
“Yes, well, that was later, and by then we were avoiding this subject, not finding new reasons to talk about it.”
I’d been so full of anger, so fueled by wrath, that when it left me, I was completely deflated.
I would have fallen to the ground if he hadn’t caught me.
But caught me he did and swung me up into his immeasurably comforting arms. I laid my head on his chest as he kissed the top of my head. I could have stayed there forever.
It felt like coming home.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
We were in the kitchen of his house, cleaning up after one of his amazing dinners.
“What did you come to the apartment for that night?”
I didn’t have to ask what night he meant, no matter how we’d been tiptoeing around it. We talked about the before and the after like reasonably well adjusted adults. But the other, the incident, that night, and the sequence of events that led directly to it, that we’d been avoiding. Well, okay, I had been. He’d been quietly but persistently asking and then waiting me out for answers.
I would have loved to keep avoiding it. It had already caused us so much pain. What was the point of dragging it all out in the open and letting it hurt us again? Because it could. I knew it was only a question of when.
There was no doubt in my mind that we weren’t done bleeding for that night. Weren’t done suffering.
“What could it matter, Tristan? Why do you keep digging at this? What’s the point? Just let it go.”
“I can’t. It’s always bothered me. I find myself thinking about it all the time. On the edge of sleep, at the oddest quiet moments, that’s where my mind goes. To this day. I need to know. What were you doing at the apartment that night? Did you come to reconcile? Is that what happened?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “That is what happened. I came there to try to work things out.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him jerk. As I’d suspected, he hadn’t taken that well.
“My God. You came to make up and I—I—“
“Yes. You were too far gone to talk just then. You couldn’t be reasoned with.”
“There are so many holes in my memory that night. In rehab, they call it a blackout. You function, sometimes almost like normal, and have no memory of it. It’s a sign of alcoholism.”
I, unfortunately, had had no such mercies. I remembered the details of that night so clearly that they haunted me. I had been so stupid. I remembered that. So completely naive, thinking I was tough, meanwhile a predator had been lurking in our midst, taking advantage of our every emotional misstep.