Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 68033 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 340(@200wpm)___ 272(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68033 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 340(@200wpm)___ 272(@250wpm)___ 227(@300wpm)
“You should have waited, Kerris! Dammit, yes, I resented you. I had to give the toast at your fucking wedding and grin like a monkey the whole day, while my insides were torn up. I told you at the hospital we should have talked to Cam. And after what we shared in that gazebo that night, you did what? Went off and got engaged to my best friend twenty minutes later? Because you assumed I was marrying Sofie? What is that? Who does that?”
“Walsh, I—”
“No. You will damn well listen now.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his flawlessly tailored pants. He dropped the room temperature with his icy stare. “You don’t poke a tiger unless you’re prepared to get bitten.”
She held back her words, knowing this was what she had provoked. He breathed deeply through his nostrils and out through his mouth before continuing more quietly.
“I was so angry with you.” The ice in his eyes slowly thawed until only pain remained. “And I loved you so much, I loved Cam, and I wanted to do what was right, but everything felt wrong. The only thing that felt right was being with you, but I knew it wasn’t right. Only because you’d made the wrong choice. It wasn’t just your life. It was mine. It was Cam’s. Did I resent the decision you made? I did. Do I miss Cam? I do sometimes. Do I ever, ever want to live without you again? I can’t. Not ever. That’s all that matters.”
“But Walsh—”
“It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, or how your choices separated us. I don’t know how not to love you. And a choice between you and Cam is no choice at all.”
Kerris refused to cry. She wished with all her heart that Dr. Stein were here to run interference. They needed an objective third party, a mediator, because now that she had provoked him to the ugly truth, she had no idea what to do with it. No idea what the right thing was to say, so she just said the truth that mangled her security and tugged at the threads of her assurances.
“I’m so scared it’ll always haunt us.” It was something she’d never even admitted to herself, that the damage she had done to his friendship, what she had cost him, would erode what he felt for her. “I’m scared that one day you’ll wake up, see Cam gone and me still here, and it won’t be enough and that you’ll leave.”
“You don’t ever have to be scared of that.”
“Yes, I do.” She said the words with eyes closed, afraid that if she opened them, she’d lose her nerve. “Walsh, this love gives you so much power over me. Something I promised myself no one would ever have again. That I’d never be that vulnerable again. Everyone leaves.”
“I won’t leave you.”
His tone was sure, but she was not.
“Oh, that’s reassuring.” Kerris’s short laugh and the look she finally gave him had soaked in uncharacteristic sarcasm and bitterness. “They all leave eventually.”
“Kerris, I’m not them.”
“No, you’re not.” She balled her fists together at her waist, clenched in a nervous knot. “You’re much worse. I could live with my mother splitting. And then, when I lost Mama Jess, it was like losing my mother all over again. And I knew my foster parents never loved me. And then my husband leaves me after I lost our baby. I mean, what is wrong with me that everyone can walk away so easily?”
“Walking away from you is impossible for me.” Walsh reached for her, but came up empty when she backed out of his reach. “I’m not them.”
“I know. You’re not them.” She knew if she unballed her hands they would shake. “Because I could live through all of them leaving. I did live through losing every one of them. But you…if you left me now, Walsh, it would break me in half. It would wreck me.”
“I’m not going to leave you. Not ever.” He caught her around the waist and pulled her to him. He stroked a steady hand down the silky fall of hair at her shoulders.
“You will.” She cried into his crisp shirt. “You will, and it’ll destroy me.”
“Baby, I won’t. I promise I won’t.”
“Walsh, I can’t…I can’t do it. I can’t…if you leave me, too—”
Her words became incoherent, muddied by the sloppy tears she wept into his strong shoulder. She didn’t protest when he sat on the bed and pulled her into his lap. He just held her until it seemed there could be no more tears. Kerris wondered if these were from a reservoir she’d been filling up since the day she was born. Since her mother’s first leaving, which had cut so deeply—cut her to the bone. Her tears were for that original pain, and every one that had followed.