Needing to Love You (Houston's Finest #2)

by Erin Rylie

  What really bothered him was that she didn’t communicate with him. Why was it so fucking difficult for her to discuss her thoughts and feelings with him? How could he make a relationship work with someone who was so damn closed off?

  Carlos tossed his shirt onto the floor and stripped out of his pants and boxers, not even bothering to throw them in the hamper. He slid under the covers of the cold sheets in a bed he hadn’t slept in in weeks. Instead of spreading out, he found himself sleeping on the right side of the bed, the side he always slept on when he and Kelsey were in bed together.

  He closed his eyes and willed thoughts of his shitty day and his frustration with Kelsey out of his mind. When after an hour, he still couldn’t sleep, he rolled over and reached into the drawer of his bedside table, finding his final bottle of pills. Without giving it a second thought, Carlos loosened the lid on the bottle and slipped two pills into his hand. He only hesitated for a brief moment before popping them into his mouth and swallowing them dry.

  He laid back down and stared at the ceiling, waiting for the pills to kick in. When he closed his eyes he saw that damn gurney, covered in a white sheet. If he didn’t see that, he saw the panic in Kelsey’s eyes when he’d told her he loved her. He heard the joke she’d made repeating in his head. When after another hour he still couldn’t sleep, he rolled over and took two more pills from the bottle, swallowing them down without giving himself a chance to rethink.

  When the pills kicked in a short while later, Carlos slid into a hazy, blissful sleep, mind clear of dead young women and Kelsey’s rejection.

  Chapter Nineteen

  After Carlos had gone to bed, Kelsey changed into her pajamas and brushed her teeth, checking on James again and replacing the ice pack. He was sleeping so soundly that he hardly even stirred when she lifted his head to switch out the cold packs.

  She tinkered around in the living room for a while, picking up toys and straightening anything that was out of place. She didn’t want to sit idle with her thoughts so she focused on anything else she could.

  When the living room was completely spotless, she slipped into bed with her Kindle. She’d reread the same page at least three times before she gave up, flicking off the lamp on her bedside table and flinging her Kindle onto it. She rolled to her side, taking in the empty side of her bed and doing her best to hold in her tears. It just didn’t feel right sleeping here without Carlos now.

  She was a fucking idiot. A handsome, wonderful man had just told her he loved her, and she’d responded by making light of the situation. Her initial reaction to those three wonderful words had been panic. She hadn’t said them to anyone but James and her friends since her failed marriage. What if she said them to Carlos and then ended up hurting him later down the road? Hell, what if he hurt her?

  She did have strong feelings for Carlos; she might even love him. He brought so much joy into her life and was absolutely incredible with her son. James was still talking about the week they got to be giraffes. He helped her around the house without being asked, left her sticky notes with random facts every single day. Kelsey honestly couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.

  This could still be salvaged, she just needed to go to Carlos and talk things out. Being completely open and vulnerable about her feelings was mildly terrifying, but nothing worth having came easy. And a relationship with Carlos was absolutely worth having. She could tell him that she cared for him but just wasn’t ready to say the words yet. Reasonably, she should just go to sleep and talk to him in the morning, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to get any rest until she’d laid everything out on the table. She needed to clear the air with Carlos tonight, before she lost her nerve.

  She flung her covers off and left her room in a rush, desperate to be in Carlos’s arms. On her way to his room, she decided to check in on James. She wanted to grab the ice pack she’d left with him and see if he was all right. He really had seemed completely normal all evening, but she worried about him nonetheless. When she cracked open the door to the room, her worry immediately increased. James usually slept cocooned in sheets and bedding, but the light sheet she’d tucked him in with had been kicked to the floor. He was sleeping restlessly, his hair damp with sweat. The ice pack she’d left with him was on the floor, having fallen off in his sleep.

  She crossed the room quickly and placed her hand on his forehead. Shit, he was burning up. Rushing to the bathroom and grabbing the thermometer, she did her best not to panic. A fever and vomiting were the final symptoms of a concussion. He’d been abnormally tired before bed, but she’d chalked that up to his eventful day. If his temperature had peaked over a hundred degrees, she would take him to the emergency room right away.

  Gently, she woke James up, kissing him on the forehead and smoothing his sweat-dampened hair. “I need to take your temperature, okay baby? Will you open your mouth for me?”

  Her usually loquacious son merely nodded and opened his mouth, causing the panic she felt to increase. The minute spent waiting for the thermometer to spit out a result was excruciating. The moment she saw that the thermometer read one hundred and three degrees, she kissed James on the forehead again and told him she would be right back. She ran to her bedroom, threw on a bra, grabbed her phone from her nightstand, and went to knock on Carlos’s door.

  She wanted to sit in the backseat with James on the way to the hospital and was honestly so frazzled that it would be a relief to have someone else drive them. When he didn’t respond to her knocks, she opened the door and walked into his room.

  She saw the pill bottle on the bedside table and her stomach dropped. He hadn’t been taking his painkillers nearly as often anymore, not needing them because his pain was mild unless he pushed himself too far. When shaking Carlos gently didn’t wake him up, she called out his name loudly and shoved him harder.

  His eyes slitted open and a smile cracked across his face. “Kelsey,” he slurred. His pupils were tiny pinpricks, a sure sign that he’d taken more pills than prescribed. He patted the bed next to him clumsily. “Get into bed, baby.”

  “Are you fucking high right now, Carlos? James has a high fever and I need to take him to the hospital. I was going to ask you to drive us, but you’re clearly not in any condition to get behind the wheel.”

  Carlos sat up, rubbing his eyes as though that would dispel the haziness in his mind. “Let me get dressed. I’ll go with you to the hospital.”

  His words came slow and she wanted to scream. She’d needed him and he couldn’t help her because he’d taken too many fucking pills. Kelsey had thought they were past this. Sure, the first few months after his accident had been rough, but he’d been doing so well.

  “No. Go back to bed, Carlos. We don’t need you.”

  Despite his current state, the hurt in his expression was clear. “You don’t need me?”

  “I can’t do this right now. I need to get James to a doctor. Just go to bed. Sleep this off. We can talk about it later.”

  As she left the room she felt warm tears slipping down her cheeks. A wealth of emotions swirled around inside her. She was disappointed in Carlos for going down this road once again. She had hoped that she’d been wrong about his pill intake. After finding him on the couch, high as a kite, she’d assumed he had things under control. He spoke of honesty, but he was clearly hiding the depth of his addiction from her. At the very least, he hadn’t talked to her about what was going on in his head. Why had he felt the need to take pills tonight? Was it because of what had happened between them in the kitchen? Was it something else? A relationship required trust, and she felt that slipping away. How could she trust someone who turned to pills instead of her when things got tough?

  Kelsey honestly just didn’t know that she was emotionally strong enough to cope with this. She had a small child to worry about, to take care of. James was already so attached to Carlos and that attachment would only continue to grow. If Carlos slipped deeper into whatever he was going through, she ran the risk of her and James
being sucked into his mess. Maybe if she didn’t have a small child to think of, she could work through this with Carlos, explore his options and try to help him get better. At the end of the day though, she had one major priority, and that was James. It would always be James.

  Approaching her son’s room, a million different scenarios ran through her mind. What if Carlos’s addiction worsened? His prescription was out; he was on his last bottle of pills. What would he turn to in tough times without them? Would he rely on alcohol or harder drugs to get through those situations? She just couldn’t rationalize involving her child’s life in that kind of chaos.

  Scooping James out of his bed, she grabbed her keys and purse from the table by the front door. She could worry about things with Carlos later, right now her number one priority needed to be her son.

  Kelsey got home a little after nine the next morning after having spent the night with Kyle and James in the hospital. They’d done a CT scan on James and had found no internal bleeding, thankfully. They’d told her they were going to treat it as a possible concussion or virus and advised her to have James take it easy for a few days. Someone needed to consistently check on him, and make sure that he relaxed as much as was possible for an active four-year-old boy.

  She was still beating herself up for not taking James to the hospital sooner. Nothing had happened, but what if there had been internal bleeding? She should have taken him to the hospital as soon as she’d picked him up from school. At the very least, she should’ve taken him in when she noticed that he was abnormally sleepy at dinner.

  The house was quiet when she walked through the door, and she couldn’t fight the butterflies in her stomach, knowing that the conversation before her would be one of the most difficult of her life. Ending things with Carlos might be harder than asking Kyle for a divorce. It felt like she was breaking her own damn heart and she wanted to curl up in Carlos’s arms and cry.

  She needed to do this though; it was the best thing for her and James. Last night had proven that Carlos wasn’t someone she could depend on, and she needed a reliable partner in life, not someone who would turn to pills when things got tough.

  She found him sitting at the kitchen table, looking down at a cup of coffee. He looked dejected, like he had already prepared for the conversation they both knew needed to happen. At the sound of her footsteps, he looked up and she noticed belatedly that she hadn’t taken her shoes off at the door—a sure sign that her mind was elsewhere. Her parents had always been oddly strict about shoes in the house, so taking them off was a habit she’d had her entire life.

  “Is James okay?”

  She nodded. “There is no way to prove conclusively that he has a concussion, but there is no internal bleeding so Kyle took him home. The doctor told us to give him Children’s Tylenol and make sure that he gets plenty of rest for a few days. I went back to Kyle’s house to make sure James was comfortable and all tucked in before I came home.”

  “Good. Good.” His head was down again as he picked at his nails. “Listen, about last night—”

  “I can’t do this anymore, Carlos. You need to go back to your apartment.”

  His head snapped up and she realized in that moment that he hadn’t been prepared for a breakup, merely a fight. “What? You’re breaking up with me?”

  “Carlos, I can’t have someone in my life who James and I can’t depend on. You obviously have an addiction that you need to work out, and I need to focus on the most important person in my life—my son.”

  He was shaking his head before she’d finished her sentence. “Bullshit. That’s bullshit and you fucking know it, Kelsey.”

  “How so?” She was amazed that she’d managed to keep her voice so level. She looked to the ceiling, willing the tears she felt pooling in her eyes to dissipate. If she cried now, she would never get through this.

  “We agreed to be honest and open with each other, Kels. But you haven’t done that. You aren’t honest with me about your feelings, you don’t talk to me about your issues, and you’re lying to me and to yourself right now. You’re not ending this because I messed up last night, you’re running scared. You’ve always been scared of us, and now you’re using any excuse you can find to pull away from me.”

  “Are you kidding me right now, Carlos? This isn’t about me at all! Do you think I didn’t notice how quickly your pills disappeared these last few months? You’ve been going through them like fucking candy. You need help and I can’t give it to you. We are breaking up because when I needed you, you were fucking high!”

  “You know what? Maybe you’re right. You told me once that you felt you deserved more than a marriage you had settled into, the marriage you had with Kyle, but what about me? Don’t I deserve more? You don’t open yourself up to me at all; you keep everything bottled up inside.”

  Carlos stood from the table, and Kelsey grasped just how out of control this conversation had gotten. For some reason, she’d come into this expecting him to understand that he’d messed up and she had to do this. Their breakup was on him, wasn’t it? In a deep, dark part of her mind she knew that he was right—she’d held herself back, not fully giving herself to him, not giving their relationship her all. Despite all of her pep talks, all of her bluster, she was still terrified of another serious relationship ending. Her divorce from Kyle had been hard, but a failed relationship with Carlos, a real one with her full heart invested, would be devastating—a heartbreak she didn’t think she could come back from.

  In a cruel twist of fate, the full depth of her emotions hit her in that moment, and she knew with a startling clarity that she loved Carlos. Unfortunately, her feelings for him didn’t change anything anymore. The two of them together were a disaster, too broken to come back from this. She had failed him by keeping her thoughts and emotions to herself, and he’d failed her by turning to pills. There was nothing to salvage here.

  “When you realize what we had, just know that it will be too late this time. I’ve waited around for you for over a year. I’ve been patient, and I’ve loved you. You may be right, and I may need help, but instead of talking this out with me, instead of fighting for us, you’re running away. Apparently it’s what you do best. You, Kelsey Byrne, are a fucking coward.”

  With those heartbreaking words ringing in her ear, Carlos left the kitchen. She sank into a chair and listened to him pack, throwing things into his bag loudly. Not even fifteen minutes after he’d left the kitchen, he left her house and her life, and once again, Kelsey found herself all alone in an empty and silent house.

  Chapter Twenty

  It wasn’t until Carlos walked into his apartment and was hit with a wave of stale air that he felt the full weight of what he had lost. Setting down his bag by the front door, he looked around the apartment that had been his home for five years now. Suddenly, it didn’t feel like home. His furniture was too clean, not stained by juice or any other James-caused stains. Instead of smelling like the dinner Kelsey had cooked, it just smelled…empty. There was no rack or basket near his door for his shoes and no small table to set his keys.

  He immediately missed the sounds of James playing, his squeals of delight when Kelsey or Carlos did something to make him laugh. He missed the little guy’s incessant chatter. He’d seen James only twelve hours ago, but the knowledge that he would only ever see the kid at group gatherings brought tears to his eyes.

  The thing he missed the most, though, was Kelsey. The smiles that were hard earned but well worth the effort. The way she danced around the kitchen when she prepared meals. Her quiet, calming presence—the perfect companion to his high-strung personality. He knew that he wouldn’t find any of the sticky notes that he’d taken to leaving around her house. He had an entire section of notes in his phone dedicated to facts he wanted to share with her. He’d even divided them into sections. Random facts were for days when she was in a good mood, romantic facts for when he wanted her to know that she was loved, and history facts for the days when everything seemed to go
wrong and he knew she needed a pick-me-up.

  Unlocking his phone, he pulled up the list of romantic facts that he’d found. It was an odd category, and the facts had taken some work to compile, but he had known the effort would be worth it. His personal favorite was that couples in love could synchronize their heart rates after making eye contact for only three minutes. He’d been so excited to share that one with her and even more eager to test it out. He wanted to count her heartbeats with his lips on her pulse.

  It wasn’t until his phone screen began to blur that he realized he’d started crying. He knew that he would never find another woman like Kelsey—she was it for him. How could he ever fall for anyone else when he knew that his perfect woman was out in the world?

  How long would it take for her to move on from their relationship? Imagining her with other men stole the breath from his lungs and he gasped, his tears flowing more freely down his face. He’d said that he was done and wouldn’t fight for their relationship anymore, but how could he ever let her go? When he imagined the next fifty years of his life without her by his side, he wanted to break things. He would miss James’s childhood, his graduation. Some other man would help Kelsey save for James’s college fund. He would never see the little guy get married.

  He’d held it together, but her words had cut him deeply. He’d never classified his dependency on pills as an addiction, but it was clear to him now that he needed help. Turning to painkillers every time he was hurting wasn’t healthy. If he continued on his current path, his dependency would only grow and it could cost him his career. Losing the job he loved after losing Kelsey would break him. He wiped the tears from his eyes, straightened his spine, and called the only person in his life who had always been there for him.