Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 80495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Until I hear a thump on the other side of the door.
What the hell?
“Ignacia?” Beau’s voice comes deep and commanding and still somehow off. There’s something in it I haven’t heard before. Worry? He probably thinks I’m summoning demons on his ass in here.
“It’s fine. I’m fine. I meant what I said a few nights ago and out there. I understand, Beau. I’m an adult. It’s all good.”
Another thud, like he set one hand on the doorframe, and now he’s set the other. I imagine him leaning against it. I imagine the way his shoulders would jut out, his shoulder bones pressing against the back, his biceps bulging, and the outline of his hard chest, abs, and pecs apparent under the soft, expensive fabric.
I peel my back off the door and turn slowly. I find one hand reaching out before I can stop it. Then the other. I arrange myself in a mirrored pose, clutching the wood, my hands to his hands. He doesn’t make a sound out there. And I’m probably being silly.
“I need you to understand, though.” I must be crazy because it sounds a little like he’s begging, and that’s something this man would never do.
“I do. It’s fine,” I reply.
A wrenched breath gets expelled into the hall, and the old farmhouse magnifies it back at me through the wooden door. “Not that. I mean about me. Truly, it’s not that I can’t give you that or that…the contract…I mean, it is, but it’s…I just have nothing left in me but hardness and ice. My heart was shattered when I was pretty much still a kid, at least where my innocence was concerned. I was an adult in body, but my spirit? It took a beating. I’m just—just done with that. I have nothing left to give, even if I wanted to. I know that’s no way to live, but I’ve made a life for myself, and it’s good enough. I’m happy enough. I keep busy, and I bring value to the world through my work.”
“I’ve made a ton of money but because I have zero desire to get married and have children and pass it on. The world doesn’t need more fucked up people, and I will just mess up as a parent. I know we’re not talking about marriage or children, but even tenderness? I can’t. I’m not one of those you deserve more people, but you do deserve more. You deserve to be free, and you deserve to do what you will with that freedom, which I hope is to find someone worthy of you. Someone completely unlike Aiden and also completely unlike me. I’m not a project worth fixing. I can’t be glued back together. Love is an impossibility, but even anything resembling what that looks like isn’t—”
I have to stop him. It hurts too much to listen to him gasping for breath out there as he pours out the exact thing he thinks he’s not capable of. It’s so awkward, and he’s drowning and hurting.
I rip open the door, and he has enough time and training that he doesn’t fall through, but I think he was standing exactly the way I pictured. My heart pounds. I won’t reach out to him now. I won’t touch him now. But just a few seconds ago, I felt like we were connected. Wood is a vital element. It’s powerful. It’s a living organism even years after it’s turned into something like a door and a frame and a house. Maybe my body heat somehow soaked into it and reached him on the other side. Maybe it was just the slightest comfort.
There were zero masks now. He caught himself before he could fall through the air the open door created, but he couldn’t hide the agony from me. My hand came up like I was going to caress his face. Like my touch alone could make up for years of what the world did to this man and how he has built up thick and icy and cold walls to shut it out. I imagine him curled up in there, in the middle of his ice castle, shivering and plaintive and just trying to make it through another hopeless day, another long night.
“You know that the good guys are always the ones who win in the end?”
“That’s just in books and movies,” he responds. He’s working on getting his face back in order. His eyes. His soul.
I stare back at him, willing him not to retreat back into the stony, impenetrable castle. “Ahh, the language of the masses. Such a terrible thing.”
All that earns me is a grunt. “It’s the truth, though. In real life, the bad guys prosper. There is so much hate and hardness and anger and pain in the world. You know that firsthand.”