Page 48 of Broken Warrior
Fin and I have been in the bedroom James and I shared when we first moved in and my son has been staying in the room next door. Harriet has the third bedroom downstairs next to Nadine, and no one has set foot in Fin’s room since they cleaned it out.
Jackal comes over every day, and spends time with Fin while I carry on some sort of normalcy for my son, but James is so worried about his hero that he’s been a little tiny bundle of nerves. On day five, after the severe withdrawal had mostly passed, he asked me if he could see Fin, and after wrestling with my decision, I allowed it, only to have my heart simultaneously swell and break at the same time.
My baby climbed into bed with Fin, snuggled up with him and told him all the stories he knew until they both fell asleep. And when he woke up? James gave Fin Fred, his favorite stuffed spider, told him he loved him and said he could have him because Fred makes everything better and my son was convinced he’d make Fin better too.
I had to step out into the hall so I could cry without either of them seeing it happen.
And despite my joy over his hard but progressing recovery, I waited until a couple days ago to potentially ruin it by asking the hard questions.
Fin said he’s been using heroin in secret for about a year, ever since he started seeing a girl named Lola who was the one who introduced him to it and supplied him while they were together. When they split for good, Fin found another dealer who had better stuff and he only snorted it, occasionally smoked it, until the night I found him.
That’s why there weren’t any other syringes. He cooked up a dose the size he normally took but decided to shoot it into his vein instead and the amount was too much, way too powerful for a first time intravenously, and Fin’s positive that’s why he overdosed.
When I asked him why he decided to shoot up, his answer almost killed me.
”It hurt too much to love you and not be able to have you. My secrets are what keep us apart. It’s all my fault and I couldn’t handle feeling like I was ruining you by loving you. I didn’t want to feel like that anymore and that was the quickest way to make it stop.”
I’ve never been more split down the middle emotionally than I was when Fin laid that on me. He told me he loved me then said he used drugs to make the feeling stop. He later explained further, explained that it wasn’t the love he didn’t want to feel, it was the fact that everything about him made it impossible to act on it.
Yeah, I was emotionally ripped in half, but I strangely understood it. I still do. The only problem is that now that Fin is thinking more clearly, is more himself than I guess he’s been in a long time, I’ve fallen even more in love with him which is scarier than before.
There’s a shyness to the real Fin MacAllister, an unsure and not very confident side I haven’t seen before. Quite honestly, the more conversations we’ve had the last few days the more I realize Fin is kind of a nerd and way out of my league.
His IQ is ridiculously high, he reads Latin and quantum physics for fun, and he has a collection of comic books that rivals most library catalogs. All of that plus what I already knew? I’m so in love with this man that I physically feel it every second of the day.
Fin still has demons though.
He won’t tell me why he started using drugs in the first place, won’t explain his extreme and unjust self-loathing. Fin avoids it when I bring it up or tells me he can’t really talk about it because it puts him in a bad place.
I understand that, probably more than he realizes, but he needs to deal with his monsters that lurk in the dark part of his mind or else he’ll fall right back into the same patterns again.
“Tate?” Fin reaches out and reverently lifts one of my curls, stretches it until it’s straight, then lets it bounce back into place. “Why did you stay?”
I give him a soft smile. “Because I had to.”
His eyes, so much clearer, so much bluer, shift from my face to the wall over my shoulder. “I heard you.”
My pulse quickens as he answers a question I’ve been too scared to ask.
“That day, in the tub.” Fin’s electric ice blue eyes find mine again. “It sounded like you were a million miles away, an angel sent from heaven to bring me back to earth, but I heard you, heard what you said to me.”
“I’m glad.” And I mean it but I have a feeling I know where this is going, I’ve been preparing myself for it since he woke up.
“Did you mean it?”
I nod and brush his chestnut hair from his eyes. “With all my heart.”
Fin inhales sharply, sucks in a breath that shakes in his chest then he does something that I’ve longed for, something I’ve wanted so badly but couldn’t have happen, not right now.
He kisses me.
Fin cups my cheek, brings his lips to mine and kisses me with so much love, so much affection and gratitude I couldn’t stop the tear from rolling down my cheek if I tried.
“I love you,” he says against my lips. “I love you so damn much, Tate.”
My tears flow freely as I kiss him back, as I stroke my thumb along his cheek. “I love you too, Fin.” Then I squeeze my eyes shut tight. “But I can’t be with you, not yet.” He presses his forehead to mine and doesn’t take his hand from my face. “I can’t be with you until I know you’re ready, until you face whatever darkness that lives inside your beautiful soul. I don’t want our relationship to grow from a place of codependency or feelings masked under false pretenses. I don’t want you to replace one addiction with another, don’t want it to rear its head when things seem perfect only to ruin them in a way that may not be fixed. We both have things to sort through before we can give us a real shot and I love you too much to give us anything less than that.”
He nods, slides his fingers into my hair and grips tight. “I don’t want to lose you.”
