“Look. Hannah’s asleep. Your dad and I are here for the weekend. Why don’t you go talk to him?”
“Now?” I said, looking at the clock that read eight.
“If you feel like you blew it and want to make it up to him, why wait?”
My heart stopped and started. If I went, I wouldn’t be able to stop this. I wouldn’t be able to walk away unless it fell apart completely. Could I handle it if it did? I’d handled a lot in my life already. Not always well. Not always with my shoulders back and my head held high, but I’d weathered the storms.
What if, in some wild way, we could make it work? God…wouldn’t that be worth it? The joy. The love. The feeling that my body belonged tight up against someone else’s. Knowledge that every single part of me belonged to him just as every single part of him belonged to me. I’d loved Darren that way?with all of me. Loving someone else besides Darren wasn’t dishonoring his memory. Loving someone else didn’t require me to choose between whom I loved more. I could love them both differently and equally.
I’d deal with forever and the afterlife when it came time for it.
I looked at myself in the mirror. I was still in the dress I’d bought and worn special for the party. I hadn’t purchased anything for me in so long I hadn’t even known my size and had to go back twice just to find one that fit the curves of my body. The curves Brady had already seen quite a bit of and hadn’t seemed to mind. The ones he’d said would make him too loud to make love to me with Hannah in the room a few feet away.
I gulped and nodded at my reflection, giving myself courage. My mom’s face broke into a smile, wide and happy, and I realized it was Grams’ smile. I had thought she looked nothing like my grandmother and me, but it was there in our shared smile.
I squeezed her tight before letting her go and heading for the stairs.
Her voice stopped me with my hands on my purse.
“And if you don’t come back ‘til tomorrow, we won’t be worried.”
I choked, flushing at the insinuation, and when I looked up, her eyes were twinkling with Grandma’s mischief. Another similarity I hadn’t seen before.
I left via the back door, keeping to the shadows, and avoiding the few news vans still parked on the street. A lot of them had disappeared for the night, and they were slowly going away altogether. A week, Marco had said, and we were nearing that point. Some other hot celebrity news was sure to make them go scurrying in a different direction soon.
When I got to Brady’s street, it was almost empty, as if the media didn’t care what he was up to with his family. They only cared if he showed up at my place—the woman with the dead SEAL husband.
Marco saw me coming and smiled. He opened the back gate for me and said as I went by, “He’s in the apartment.”
He hadn’t needed to say it because I could hear the music. The guitar and his gritty voice. I couldn’t hear the words, but I could hear the ache in it. It matched the ache in me. Need. Loss. Hope.
I walked up the steps and knocked on the door.
The guitar and his voice went silent, and then I heard his footsteps before he opened it. He was shirtless, in just sweats with his feet bare. My mouth went dry, and my body shook at the thought of his body touching me. Of making me forget everything and anything but him and me and the emotions that pulled around us like a cloak.
“Cariño,” he said quietly, deeply. The gravel in his voice sent spirals of shivers and goosebumps across me. I’d asked him not to call me it, but I was glad he’d ignored it. I wanted to be his sweetheart.
“I…” I looked down at my toes, the nails painted bright pink in the sandals that were also new. When was the last time I’d painted my toenails before last night? I couldn’t even remember. “I was hoping we could talk.”
When I looked back up, his eyes were sparkling, and I wasn’t sure if it was from unshed tears or if it was just a trick of the light. His lips burst into the wicked smile that had my body thumping…wondering about the full Brady O’Neil Experience.
He stepped back, letting me in, and I put my purse down on the counter before turning back to him. He’d shut the door but hadn’t really moved. He was taking me in from the top of my hair down to my painted nails and then back up. A man who wanted a woman. My blood pulsed a reply, but we needed to talk, and I think he knew it as well, because he was ignoring the call of our bodies as much as I was.
I licked my lips, and he groaned quietly.
“I wanted to apologize,” I said.
“You don’t need to,” he insisted, but I was already shaking my head.
“I do. I told you I wanted to try this. Us. I told you I was all in, but then I scrambled away at the first hill that rose before us.”
He took two steps closer to me, and I took one step back, bumping into the counter. It halted him, a shadow of doubt coasting over his face, and I didn’t want him to doubt me, but I also had to be straight up before I let myself lose myself in his skin.
“I’ve already been with a man who loved me but couldn’t stay by my side. Even if he’d lived…” It didn’t hurt quite as much to say it as it used to. “Even if he’d lived, he still would have been gone more than he was home. And you, your lifestyle…it’s sort of the same thing.”
He smiled and snorted. “I’m not risking my life onstage.”
I smiled weakly in return. “Well, no, but it still could risk us.”