Logan had been a comfort. Steady and just there in a way she couldn’t quite describe. He made her feel like someone else was paying attention. Like someone else was there to handle things if she missed them. There was a steady strength to his presence she’d noticed for the first time when Becca was sick.
She found him sort of challenging a lot of the time, but she could see that there was something to that. He was a strong man. A hard one sometimes. Not always the most effusive.
But he was there when it counted. There for the hard things.
She swallowed.
“I’m listening. I’m sorry. I’m just having…a hard moment. It’s okay. I’m okay.”
She stood up and started walking toward the ocean. Maybe she would go for a swim and it would get her mind off of everything.
She just wished she could take a break from being herself. And she didn’t know how to do that.
***
It was late and she was outside in the yard, listening to the sounds of the ocean on the beach. She couldn’t sleep.
She could never sleep anymore.
So she stayed up and moved until her eyes got too heavy for her to stand it. She leaned against the porch rail and closed her eyes.
“Somehow I thought you’d be up.”
It wasn’t Will. It was Logan.
She wasn’t even surprised.
It was intimate, though, the way he’d said that, his voice low and knowing. Certainly no man other than Will had ever spoken that way to her before. It made her stomach feel tight.
But she kept remembering. All the moments. When he’d seen her. When he’d known her. And right now they felt huge. Magnified.
“Yeah. That’s me. Not sleeping again.”
“I meant what I said earlier, Sam.”
“What? That the cost for the snorkels was outrageous?”
“No. That you don’t have to be okay.”
It hit her hard this time. She tried to take a breath. “Logan… I do. What if… I don’t…”
“Come here,” he said.
She saw him, solid and tempting as he’d been earlier, and if he was offering, she was going to take it.
She moved toward him, and he folded her into his arms. He was strong, solid and hot, and he smelled like the sea and skin she wasn’t familiar with.
Then all the tears she’d been holding back since that phone call came. And they came from somewhere deep. Wrenched from her body. Pulled from deep within her soul.
She was shaking with it, but he was more than able to hold her up.
“I have to get surgery,” she said, the words miserable and pouty, and she didn’t know why she’d said it to him. His wife had gone through multiple surgeries. And worse. But everything she’d held in on the car ride over was bound and determined to come out now, because he’d offered her a place to rest so she didn’t have to be strong. And she needed it. Needed to be small and terrified and sad for a minute. “I’m scared and I don’t want to, and at the same time I can’t…” She sobbed. “I can’t leave my kids without their mother. I can’t.” She looked up at him from where she was pressed against his body. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that Becca…”
He lifted his hands and cupped her cheeks, wiping her tears away. “Samantha,” he said, the name like a caress. “Don’t. This is about you. You need this. You don’t need to protect me from how hard grief is. How sharp it is. I know.” She looked into his blue eyes and was sure she was drowning. “I know,” he said again.
She pressed her head into his chest again. His heart was beating so hard she could feel it against her cheek.
Even in the middle of all of this, that stood out.
