“Tristan.”
His back tensed and he turned slowly. A strong wind brushed past him in my direction, bringing me a soft scent of carnations mixed with his scent, making my hair flow back and my dress twirl in waves in the air, as we stared silently at each other.
Chapter Thirty-Four
One and Only
His sterling-silver eyes glowed with a light of their own. He didn’t smile or show any expression; he just stood still and stared fixedly at me.
He looked incredibly beautiful, his raven hair framing his pale, flawless face. But he looked taller somehow now and … stronger. He had cut his hair very short too, clipped sharply at the base of the neck and at the sides, his long locks completely gone, giving a clear view of his amazing gray eyes. He wasn’t hiding them under his hair any more. They were completely unveiled for the world to see, piercing and bold, holding a strength that I hadn’t seen before.
He had changed. A lot.
But it wasn’t just the physical appearance that made him look so changed, although that was quite a noticeable sight to behold. He also looked so … grown up; he had this older, wiser look about him, a perfect picture of masculinity. I realized it wasn’t just me that had been going through a life-changing experience of self-discovery. He had gone through a lot as well. I had made him go through a lot … I was the reason he looked so different, so changed.
This guy in front of me wasn’t the same Tristan I had left back home. He wasn’t the same boy I had left behind. This was no boy. The guy staring back at me with steady, piercing gray eyes was a man. When I looked into his eyes this maturity reverberated in his soul; it showed clearly in his whole stance, in the air all around him.
It was kind of intimidating.
The Joey of a few weeks ago would have crumbled at the feet of this glorious man. She would have buckled in insecurity and guilt. She would have thought she was beneath him, that she didn’t deserve him, that he was clearly so much better than her.
But the new Joey knew better. She knew nothing could ever stand between her and the man she loved. Even if he had changed so much that he no longer wanted her and was here to tell her that, she was still going to fight the hardest she could to win back his heart.
“Wow. Look at you,” I whispered, more to myself than anything. “You look so … different.”
I was about to take a step closer to him; all I wanted right now was to hug him. It didn’t matter that he held a guarded look, or that he might be mad at me. All I wanted was to feel him in my arms one more time. But before I could make a move he broke eye contact and turned to look at the view.
“This place is beautiful,” he said quietly.
The moment had passed. I stood still, not daring to walk closer. It was clear he didn’t want me in his proximity; his posture, his voice, said it all.
“Yes, it is,” I answered, and I was surprised at the steadiness of my voice. I was ready for whatever he had to say to me. I was ready for his anger, his disappointment and even his rejection. I knew that, no matter what, we would always be connected. No matter the outcome of this conversation, he would always have my heart, even if I didn’t have his any more. We could never be completely apart for that reason alone.
He looked at me again and his eyes flickered with an emotion, but I didn’t want to know what the emotion was. I didn’t want to rob him of his privacy.
Vigil’s words came back to me: I could control this. I had already done it once.
Then something shifted and I remembered that moment of insight I had of how to control Vigil’s powers. I used the same principle on my empathy-sight now. I simply turned it off, like an internal flick of a switch. The emotions immediately stopped flashing in Tristan’s eyes.
“I can control it now.” I breathed out in relief. “My sight. I can turn it off. You don’t have to worry about it. I will never peek at your feelings ever again,” I said calmly.
He seemed taken aback. “Is that so?” he asked, surprised.
“Yeah. At least I got something out of all this mess. It feels good to be able to finally control it.”
He nodded but didn’t reply.
I walked slowly to the railing and leaned over it, surveying the view. “I’ve been trying to call you,” I said, looking at the sea.
He had turned around and was leaning over the railing as well, right next to me. “I know. Harry told me. I had a little … accident with my old cell phone. I spoke to Seth yesterday and he told me you’d been trying to reach me. He gave me this address. So I came. I promised you I would,” he said matter-of-factly.
“I tried calling you at the house, too.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t home,” he said, staring ahead. “I was doing some soul-searching myself. Did a little traveling, too.”
“Oh. Okay.” I noticed he didn’t elaborate on his travels. It was only fair, since I hadn’t told him where I was going when I left the house … when I left him.
“You look very … different,” I said, peeking at him.
“I suppose I do,” he said, a quiet smile tugging at his lips, but his eyes never left the sea view in front of us. “I feel different.”
“I’m sorry I left the way I did,” I apologized. “I should’ve talked to you in person, but I would have just given up if I had and … I really needed to be alone.”
He leaned his arms on the railing and looked down. “I understand. I probably wouldn’t have let you leave anyway if we’d talked about it … I was really mad, though … When I read your letter. I felt powerless – I couldn’t control your impulsive actions. Then I got worried that something would happen to you on this trip. In the end I calmed down, after I’d read the letter ten times over, and I understood what you were trying to tell me. That’s when I wrote you that text message.”
“Thank you for sending it. You don’t know how much it meant to me,” I said.
He watched the sea in silence for a while before speaking again. “I’ve come to realize that, regarding you, Joey, it’s better to let you go free, to let you do what you have to do, than to keep trying to hold you still. The more I try to hold you, the harder you fight to slip through. So I packed some clothes, went for a trip myself and decided to just … let you go,” he said calmly.
I pursed my lips. “You’re still mad at me.” He sounded so distant; a quiet, calm tone hid stormy waters beneath.
It took him a few seconds to register what I’d said, and he blinked a couple of times before turning his head to look at me.
“Actually, no, I’m not,” he said, and his eyes lingered on mine, studying something inside. “You really have no idea what I’m feeling right now, do you?” he asked curiously.
I shook my head, feeling completely at a loss. His eyes and expression gave nothing away, and he had put such strong walls around himself I could barely even read his body language. I had no clue whatsoever what he was feeling. I was in the dark, begging for him to give me a sign.
He let out a deep breath and turned to look at the view again. “I was mad at you for some time, though. Mad that you didn’t let me in to help you get through this, that you needed to do this by yourself. I even smashed my phone against the wall one night.”
Ah, so that had been his little accident, then.
“After a while I realized that, deep down, I was really mad because you’d left me. I have always had this irrational fear that you would eventually leave. In my head it was only a matter of time before you did, and then it finally happened,” he said, brushing his hand over his now-short black hair. “And then I was stuck with this anguished pain and weight in my chest. And I hated you for making me feel that way.”
He turned and looked me directly in the eyes. “That’s when it finally hit me, and I understood what you’d been trying to tell me back then in our room … about how we were being crippled because we couldn’t stand on our own feet, because we couldn’t stand being apart. I was hurting because I was away from you. I was alone … and the pain was s
o strong that it even made me start hating you for it.”
I cringed a little as he used that word a second time. The thought of Tristan hating me pierced through me like a stab to my heart. Hearing him say it out loud was devastating. What had I done? I had made him hate me …
“But that’s just insane, isn’t it?” he continued. “Because you didn’t leave me, you’d just gone away. I get it now, what you mean about being addicted. It sure felt like an addiction. The withdrawal was painful, but without that pain I would have never understood. You were right about us … What we had, it wasn’t right. For any of us. I get it now. I was fighting so hard, throwing tantrums, trying to keep us together, that I never stopped to think about what you were trying to show me. That this was for the best, for the both of us. We both needed this change.
“When I finally let go of that old notion of us, all the anger, the hate, the pain faded away. Being alone no longer hurt me. It took a while, but now I can honestly say to you that I can stand on my own; I can walk alone and be complete without you,” he said, nodding to himself. “I don’t need you any more.”
I held my head high as I stared back at him. The old Joey would have cried, would have wished to be dead instead of hearing those words coming out of his mouth. But I was stronger now. I had walked through fire and endured such pain, but remained true to myself, despite it all. Tristan’s words would not make me lose sight of who I was. And they would not make me give up on him. I would fight for him until the end.
“And you don’t need me,” he said, brushing his thumb softly over my cheek. “I can see you have also learned to walk on your own now. You stand alone, right here, strong and proud. Look at you. Stronger than you ever were. Fierce and beautiful …” His eyes flared with admiration. All of his words turned around in my mind as I watched him in awe. I saw him with the same eyes. He was also standing alone, in front of me, strong and proud, a real man, beautiful and magical. A true miracle. My miracle.
“And now that we have learned to walk alone, learned that we don’t need each other in that desperate, dependent way any more … now we can be together. I don’t need you any more, like you don’t need me, not in that addictive way. Now I can have you by my side, as a companion, not as a crutch,” he said, giving me his first smile since he’d arrived. He held my hands softly in his. “So, will you have me, Joey?”
I slid one of my hands out of his grasp and cupped his face. “Tristan … you never need to ask me that. I will always love you, no matter what. The real question is, will you have me?” I asked with a sad smile. “Before you answer me, though, I need to tell you something.”
I stared into his eyes for a long time, and he held my gaze anxiously. Then I turned and leaned over the railing again, trying to gather the courage I needed to confess. This could destroy everything we had, but I had to tell him. No matter what, he deserved to know the truth. Then, he could decide if he still wanted me by his side.
I took a deep breath. “I kissed Harry.”
I felt Tristan grab the railing right next to me.
“It was different, though. It wasn’t like how we always kiss as friends. It was a real kiss. We’ve crossed a line. It was just once, but it happened. And we regretted it as soon as it was over. We’re just friends. Nothing more could’ve happened because my heart belongs to you. I can’t give him anything more than my friendship. And he wants nothing more from me than that. He told me so,” I said in one breath. “It happened while I had Vigil’s powers, and I wish I could blame it all on that, say that it was those powers messing with my head, but it wasn’t, really. I knew what was happening … and what we were doing. And I think you deserve to know, despite it being a gigantic mistake, and it will never happen again.”
Even though I was staring hard at the sea, I could still see Tristan in my peripheral vision glancing down where his hands gripped the railing. I couldn’t fathom what he might be thinking. So I decided to continue. Might as well go all the way.
“And I kissed Vigil, too. It was a kiss of gratitude, a way to thank him for saving me from my own insanity. I was losing my mind at the time; his powers were twisting me inside so much I could barely distinguish reality from anything else. But Vigil dragged me out of that madness and saved me from myself. I wanted to thank him for everything he had done for me, and I kissed him. It meant nothing but gratitude for me, but I think it meant more for him … and I know how you feel about me and Vigil … so … I thought you should know about that, too,” I finished, and we both stared straight ahead in silence for a long time.
“I wanted to tell you before … in the hospital, and after I got out of the hospital, but … I couldn’t,” I said after a while, breaking the silence.
“Why didn’t you?” he asked quietly.
“I guess I was too scared of how you would react. I felt like anything could crush me, like I would fall apart over the smallest of things. I felt scared of everything, and the thought of what you might do when you found out … I was terrified.”
“What did you think I would do?”
“Leave me. Give up on me,” I said plainly. “Even though you have every right to … At the time, I just couldn’t bear the thought.”
“And now you can bear it?” he asked.
I let out a big sigh. “Yes. If that’s what you decide, I will have to bear it. It won’t be too hard, though …” I said, leaning on one elbow and turning to face him. He mirrored my move, his face impassive and guarded again.
“Really? You’d take it that well, me leaving you?” he asked quietly.
I shrugged and his eyes flashed with something I couldn’t read. “It wouldn’t be too hard because you’d never leave me completely. We have this connection; it goes deeper than any hurt, any rejection, any storm; it’s a feeling larger than life. No matter what we go through, we will always be connected. Even if you leave, even if you find someone else, even if we go through different paths in life, something will always link us together, and pull us to each other again. So I’m not really worried, because we wouldn’t really be fully apart. Plus, you have my heart. So I will always revolve around you somehow. I can’t be too far away from my heart – it’s a commonly known fact. It would majorly suck if you have to be with someone else, though,” I said, smiling at him. “But like I said, we will always gravitate towards one another, no matter what. And I have to tell you that I have no intention of letting you go without a good fight. And let me tell you something else: I fight really hard for the things I love.”
I watched as he tried to fight the smile that was breaking onto his lips. “That speech was so good I’m tempted to leave just to see what you would do next,” he teased.
I grinned widely at that. “Does that mean you’re staying? You forgive me, then?”
“I’m tired of being angry, Joey, and of fighting over things that don’t matter,” he said, tilting his head up to look at the sky. “I got mad at you for all the wrong reasons, and now that I have something valid to be mad about … I just don’t feel like going there again. I’m tired of being upset all the time.
“I always knew you and Harry would eventually have to go through that. It took you guys long enough … but I knew you’d come to the same conclusion I did, when I first watched you together at Sagan. I knew you wouldn’t ever stop being friends. Now we can finally get past the what-ifs and move on. And I can’t really hold anything against Vigil. He saved you from that monster; I’ll be for ever in debt to him for that. Even though I know he loves you – very much – he doesn’t have your heart. I do. And that is that,” he said with finality. “Plus, how can I leave if you have my heart? I can’t go very far away from my heart, it’s a commonly known fact, didn’t you know?” he said, with a grin.
I smiled and moved closer to him. I had this one thing I needed to do which I’d been meaning to do since I first saw him standing on the balcony. I closed the space between us, stood on the tips of my toes and pulled him close to me in a deep embrace.
/> “I love you so much,” I whispered as I buried my face in his neck, feeling the warmth of his body, his pulsing heart pushing strongly against his chest. He snaked his arms around me and tightened his grip.
“I love you too,” he whispered back. He held me in silence, just reveling in our embrace. Then he leaned back a little and tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “Can I kiss you now?” he asked with a soft smile, his voice slightly hesitant.
“Why are you even asking me? You never needed to ask before.” I chuckled at his sudden weird formality.
His eyes twinkled, glowing with a new fire inside. “I know, but you look like a goddess now, it’s a bit intimidating,” he mumbled.
That made me laugh even harder. I mean, really? The man standing in front of me making my knees turn to jelly was surely joking at my expense now. “What on earth are you talking about, Tristan?” I asked, chuckling hard.
“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately? I came here to find the amazing girl I fell in love with, and I found this breathtaking, mind-blowing, beautiful woman instead. You look … God, I don’t even have words to describe it!” he said.
We locked eyes, his burning silver orbs ablaze in the sunset. And then he leaned in and took my lips, kissing me so deeply and with so much emotion that it left me reeling at the amount of love his lips bared to me. I matched his kiss with the same love he was giving me, and my body trembled, reacting to his every touch and the taste of him.
Soon we were tangled in each other, trying to pull closer and closer until our bodies were mashed into one. He grabbed me and pulled me up, and I wrapped my legs around his waist. We managed to stumble on to the mattress on the deck, swiftly discarding pieces of clothing along the way.
I needed to have him; I needed to release some of this excruciating heat which burned through my veins. My head was filled with pleasure and my body with a fire that pulsed stronger each time his hands touched me, each time his body rocked and pressed hard against me and his lips claimed mine hungrily. A fire that pounded along with my heartbeat, along with the strokes of his fingers, this inhuman heat consuming my very core, until there was nothing left but the feel of our climaxes exploding in unison.
The Lost Girl Page 30