Page 68 of Sin of Love
If I ever find it.
“Eighty-four days,” I whisper, staring at a divot in the floor. “It sounds like forever, but it wasn’t even three months. When I was a teenager, I lived through four years of… it. Why does it seem like so much longer this time?”
He doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t know. That’s something I’ve always admired about him. No bullshitting. Straight to the truth every damn time.
You’re surprisingly complex for a bottled blonde.
You’d be beautiful if you smiled more.
Deflection doesn’t suit you. You’re a sledgehammer. Be the fucking sledgehammer.
I don’t think that woman exists anymore. She’s a cracked mask, a stiff costume. Is that who he wants? The woman who faked confidence so well she became a successful publicist? Who pretended she was normal so long she forgot how truly abnormal she was?
Not looking at him, I ask, “You think I can come back? Survive this when all I want in the world is enough morphine to make it all go away? I think about it all the time. All—the—time.”
After a heavy pause, Gideon answers, “It depends on whether or not you want to come back. But my honest opinion? You’re too stubborn.”
“To give up?”
His lips tilt. “To die.”
For the first time in eighty-four days—longer, if I think about it—I laugh. Hard. Until I’m crying. Until I reach for him, crawl into his lap, and claw at his chest like I can burrow inside him and find safety in my tree-root cave.
He holds me until I sleep. Holds me when I thrash awake and almost scratch his face off. When I yell at him to get the fuck out, then seconds later beg him to stay.
I’m chunks of floating debris, crashing and clashing in a sea of darkness. Damaging everything that comes too near. But still he stays. My personal lighthouse.
Eventually he falls asleep sprawled across the bed, mouth slightly parted, bright roots sprouting along his hairline. I’m no artist, to capture his beauty with pen or camera or words, so I simply sit, and as usual, listen to him breathing. My eyes caress the red-gold hair on his arms, the spray of freckles like the stars of an unmapped universe on his skin. He’s vital. Enormous. The sky and the ground.
I sit, and barely exist, and know that whatever is left inside me belongs to this man. And though I know there’s no way back to who I was, I wonder…
Maybe there’s a way back to him.
