Page 60 of His to Cherish
“I’m so damn lonely. So damn tired all the time. Hell,” he sighed, and his voice broke. “Fourteen years old today, that’s how old he would have been. How old he’s supposed to be. We were supposed to head to Chicago and make it a guys’ weekend. Gorge ourselves on pizza and hit the Cubs’ season opener. Now what in the hell am I supposed to do?”
My throat choked and tears fell down my cheeks. I figured he knew I was crying when his hand tightened on my shoulder.
I wasn’t brave enough to look back to see if he was doing the same. Seeing him shattered and crying could end me.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his head tilted back, looking at the sky.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I dumbly replied. “I wish I could take it away for you.”
His handed drifted from my shoulder up to the side of my head and he pushed, pressing me against his shoulder. His fingers tangled in my hair.
“I wish you could, too.”
We sat like this, in the silence that was so familiar between the two of us, while he reached out and began taking small sips of the coffee.
“It’s not easy…feeling like I have something good sitting next to me, something I want, and I feel like I can’t have it. It also makes me a dick that I want to keep taking whatever it is you’ll give me because being around you is the only good damn thing in my life, and I don’t want to let that go.”
I shifted, my head turned until I could see his droopy, half-lidded eyes. He was going to pass out at any moment.
“You haven’t done anything I don’t want, and you haven’t taken what I haven’t given willingly, Aidan.” I pressed my hand on his chest.
“I know everything seems so dark and ugly in your head right now, and I don’t get what you’re going through, but I do know difficult loss. And the one thing I know for sure is that whenever there’s good in your life, you need to grab on to it and hold on tight. So much horrible shit happens in the world, so much disaster and death like Derrick’s that doesn’t make any sense no matter how hard you’re going to try. You need the good stuff to help you remember that not everything is always shit. The good helps you be able to bear the bad.”
His lips pressed together into a line so fine they almost disappeared. “I’ll take your word for it.”
Giving up on being able to say anything to help him feel better—because really, what could possibly do that—I stood and held out my hand. “Come on. You need to go to bed.”
He was way drunk, it was getting late, and he needed his sleep.
At the worried flash in his eyes, I offered him assurance. “I’ll stay, though, if you want.”
He nodded immediately. “I do.”
“Then go to bed, I’ll be up after I clean up a bit.”
A frown line appeared between his eyes. If he remembered the disaster he’d caused inside, he didn’t show it. But I turned him by his shoulders and pushed him toward the house, ushering him inside. I didn’t stop moving him until we reached the stairs.
“Up you go.”
He reached out and gripped the banister. His sigh was deep and slow as he turned to face me before staring at the staircase like I’d asked him to climb Mount Everest. “Thank you, Chelsea.”
I chewed on my bottom lip, wanting to lean in and brush my lips against his, tasting him like he occasionally did to me, but I held back.
As much as I desired him, tonight was not the night. And it most definitely wasn’t the moment, even though for the first time since I had stepped inside his house earlier, the tension and anger had seemed to evaporate. “Anytime.”
—
It took hours to have the house halfway presentable. I did the most I could before my body felt like it was going to collapse from exhaustion.
I kept busy, vacuuming up the glass shards all over the place and stacking the thrown photos into a neat pile on the kitchen table. In the office, I took the broken lamp to the garage to throw it away, vacuumed, and picked up the scattered papers and broken laptop.
The kitchen was the worst, but by the time I was done scrubbing and cleaning the floors and countertops, it was mostly picked up. I loaded the dishwasher and left the remaining dishes to soak in the sink overnight.
It was midnight when I finally dragged my weary and aching body up the stairs, and the random thought of Beth’s text message blinked into my mind.
Quickly, I changed course and moved to the entryway where I had dropped my purse and dug out my phone.
“Thank goodness,” I said to myself when I saw there were no texts other than one from Suzanne. I ignored it, feeling my eyelids droop heavily with exhaustion.
