To Have and to Hold: A Returning Home Novel

by Serena Bell

  He shook his head regretfully. He’d always prided himself on remembering stories his friends had told him. Remembering details, names.

  She sighed. “Yeah. It just feels so weird. Telling you again.” She shot him an opaque glance, then looked away. “Anyway. I was planning to go to L.A. with Phoebe’s dad. Before I got pregnant, that is. And then—well, he wasn’t ready. For a baby. Can’t blame him. I was sixteen. He was seventeen.”

  Hunter’s crossed arms and scowl made it clear what he thought of a guy who’d gotten a sixteen-year-old girl pregnant and not stood by her.

  Her lips curved in a slight smile of acknowledgment. “That’s pretty much what you said when I told you the first time.”

  He found that both comforting and disconcerting.

  “He went without me, and I stayed here and had her. I was angry with him for a long time. But I’m over it now, and I know Phoebe wants to have a relationship with him. She’s been reading everything she can find about him online. I accidentally saw her search history. I think it would be good for her to have a chance to get to know him as a person, and the timing couldn’t be better, all things considered…”

  Hunter was not at all sure it would be good for Phoebe to get to know Stefan. From what he knew of Phoebe’s dad, he couldn’t imagine that Phoebe had missed out on much. Besides, Hunter had seen Stefan Spencer’s TV show a few times, and Spencer was a pretty boy who couldn’t act. And yet women adored him—Dee had worshipped both the character on the show and the actor who played him, and so did Clara.

  He bet Phoebe worshipped Spencer from afar, too, which must have been a tough parental act for Trina to follow. He’d seen situations like that—hell, he’d been in one. When Clara’s mom had been deployed, Clara was always convinced that if only she’d been around, Mom would have let her do whatever Dad was refusing her. And he and Dee had actually done a pretty good job—despite their other difficulties—in keeping their parenting on the same page. He bet there was a lot of “If Dad were raising me…” in Trina and Phoebe’s patter.

  He wondered if Trina still had feelings for the pretty-boy prick. How much she’d cared about him to begin with. She’d said “Phoebe’s dad,” not “my ex,” so maybe they’d never been married, but she’d definitely liked him enough to do the dirty deed at least once.

  He wondered, if she went to L.A., if she’d end up sleeping with Spencer. If she’d end up falling for him all over again. The thought bothered him, and he shook it grumpily off.

  “Anyway, the short version is, Stefan’s going to help me with a set design job and a place to live…”

  And then he’ll be sure you owe him at least a really good blow job, Hunter thought. Which summoned another unfortunately vivid image.

  Fantasy? Memory?

  His body didn’t give a crap. All the right neurons had fired, either way, and for a moment, he wished very badly that he had the power to give her what she wanted. To offer her the things that would keep her here, in his house.

  But if he tried to be the man she remembered and failed, it would be worse for both of them down the line. Because while he didn’t recall what had passed between them, he could visualize all too clearly what it had been like not to love Dee the way she’d needed him to. The blaming glances, the cold line of her back as she turned away from him in bed, the pointed, bitter comments. And he didn’t mind all those things just selfishly. He hurt because he knew they were both missing out on something deeper. Something better.

  He didn’t want to ever do that to another woman. So the tease of Trina’s body and that nightgown, the lure of that willingness she’d shown him yesterday, would have to stay temptation only.

  Fantasy, memory, it didn’t—couldn’t—matter.

  “I’m glad you’re going to get a chance to follow your dreams,” he said, meaning it.

  “Thanks.” She smiled wanly.

  “What do you think, though? A few extra days before you go? Just to ease Clara’s mind a little?”

  “I just—I don’t want to be in the way.”

  She gave him a brief unguarded look. It was that same look that had made him feel so out of sync with her before—a look of intimacy, familiarity, even longing. But this time it didn’t make him uncomfortable in the same way it had the night before. This time, he got it. They were each alone in these parallel realities—his, in which the whole last year hadn’t happened, and hers, in which it might as well not have. And it was hard to say who’d gotten the rawer end of the deal.

  “Hey,” he said. “You will absolutely, one hundred percent not be in the way. Whatever happened, however weird this is, if you want to be, you’re still our friend. You’re incredibly important to Clara—”

  “Like a maiden auntie,” she said dryly. And then, “God, Hunter, I’m sorry. You don’t need me to guilt you on top of what you’ve got going on.”

  “Hey,” he said again. “It’s okay. This shit is real.”

  She tilted her head to one side. “You know, it feels weirdly good to hear you say that. You used to—you’d say that all the time.”

  She said it matter-of-factly, but now that he’d started to think about this whole thing from her perspective, he could imagine how it might have been. The two of them, sitting together somewhere quiet, her pouring her heart out. Him offering his brand of sympathy, which she obviously liked.

  And now all that emotional support and trust, everything they’d built, suddenly gone for her.

  Yeah, they’d both lost something.

  —

  “You should tell him!”

  Linda had cornered Trina in the back of the laundry room, where she was folding a mountain of the girls’ clean clothes.

  “I can’t tell him.”

  “You have to tell him! He has a right to know he asked you and Phoebe to move in.”

  Linda had gotten pregnant with Hunter when she was not too much older than Trina had been with Phoebe, and he was her only child. She could be fierce in protecting him, but this was the first time her ire had ever been focused on Trina. It was daunting. Linda was tall, five eleven or so, and couldn’t hide her emotions to save her life. Put a headband and a few bracelets on her and she’d be Xena with red hair.

  “It wouldn’t change anything if I told him.”

  “It might.”

  “Linda, it wouldn’t. I’ve thought about it. I even read up on amnesia on Google, and there’s no evidence at all that hearing about the past helps recover memories. It’s even possible that dwelling on the past may make it harder to move beyond trauma and get your memories back.”

  Linda looked just as fierce in her disappointment as she had in anger. She’d been the most upset of any of them when Hunter had told the whole family at dinner what the doctor had said. It was the first the girls and Linda had heard of his memory loss, and there had been three very shocked faces around the table.

  Not as shocked, though, as Linda’s face had been when Hunter had told her, over the dinner dishes, that Trina was going to stay another few days and then head to L.A. They’d be there in plenty of time for the start of the school year, so she could help Phoebe with that transition.

  “For a visit?” Linda had asked.

  “Permanently, I hope,” Trina had said, wondering if at some point she’d mean the “I hope” part.

  The unhappiness on Linda’s face had been a perfect reflection of Trina’s own feelings, and Trina’s fondness for her moth—

  But Linda wasn’t Trina’s mother-in-law. Not by a long shot. There was, in fact, no good title for the mother of your ex-boyfriend, was there?

  “I was so happy for him,” Linda said, and Trina realized Hunter’s mother was about to cry. She set down the socks she was rolling and put her arms around the older woman, who hugged her back ferociously. “I liked Dee well enough, but I never thought—I never thought she and Hunter— I just think you and Hunter make such a good pair. And I love you.”

  Oh. Well, that was nice, and so was the lavender-s
cented softness of Linda’s hug.

  Gah, Trina was crying, too. As if she’d needed, on top of everything else, to realize that she was losing one more thing. Linda hadn’t been around much this last year, but during her visits, she’d felt like family. Trina had come to think of her as, well, as a mother-in-law, and she had allowed herself to savor that. She missed her own mom so much. By the time she’d passed, Trina had felt secure on her own two feet, but the saying was true: a girl never stopped needing her mother.

  “Are you sure it wouldn’t help?”

  “I don’t want him to ask me to stay because he feels like he has to.”

  Trina said this very quietly against the silver-streaked red cloud of Linda’s hair.

  She knew Hunter, knew how highly he valued doing the right thing, the honorable thing, and she bet if she told him he’d asked her to move in—that he’d all but promised her his feelings for her wouldn’t change—he would feel like he had to honor that commitment.

  It would be even worse than his asking her to stick around for Clara. That one still stung a little.

  Linda stepped back from their embrace and reached out to touch Trina’s hair. Her eyes were sad.

  “You know I’m right, don’t you?” Trina asked her. “That if he knows he asked me to move in, he’ll feel like he has to go through with it, and—”

  “But what if—what if he remembers?”

  “If he remembers, that’s different, right?”

  “And you’d—you’d come back?”

  “If he asked me to.”

  But she realized that the possibility had already receded in her mind, that she hadn’t made space for it in her planning. She didn’t actually believe it would happen.

  And, if her expression was any indication, neither did Linda. The older woman bit her lip and closed her eyes for a second.

  “I’d hoped— You know, he’s my only child. And Clara is my only grandchild…”

  She didn’t have to say the rest. What she’d hoped for. A new daughter and a new granddaughter. A bigger family for her only son.

  It was strange to realize that she and Linda were connected in a new way, by this loss of what they’d both independently come to expect—and by being the only two people in the world who knew that it had ever been a possibility.

  Trina clasped Linda’s hands in her own. “You raised a good man.”

  Linda squeezed back, tight. “Thing is, Trina, when I did it, when I taught him right from wrong, when I taught him how to be a good man, I thought, ‘I’m doing this so when he meets a woman he really loves, he can treat her right and hold onto her.’ I’ve never seen him as happy as he was last summer. It made my heart absolutely soar. And this is—this is breaking it.”

  Trina let herself be drawn into Linda’s soft hug one last time, let herself take what comfort she could in their shared pain, and whispered, so quietly she wasn’t even sure Linda heard:

  “It’s breaking mine, too.”

  Chapter 6

  Trina woke in the dark, heart pounding, jolting her upright before she was fully awake.

  There was a sound from upstairs. One of the girls, crying.

  She turned on her bedside lamp and went to the door, pushing it open farther. She always slept with it slightly ajar so she’d hear the girls call out if they needed her. In a whole year, they never had, but she liked to know she’d hear them just in case.

  She crept past the foldout couch where Linda slept—snoring like the Amazon she was—and up the steps. It seemed crazy to imagine that Clara, who hadn’t wept once when her father had left for Afghanistan last summer, might be going to pieces now over the thought of a surrogate mother’s departure. But Clara had been even more upset than Phoebe when she’d learned that Trina was leaving, and not at all ready to embrace a few extra days as a consolation prize.

  And someone had called out in the night.

  It came again, another cry, and she hurried upstairs and into the hallway. She pushed the girls’ door open and peeked in. The nightlight in the hallway cast enough of a glow into the room that she could see that both slept soundly, not moving.

  Maybe she’d imagined it. Or dreamt it. She’d woken from a deep sleep before, certain she’d heard a sound, only to be unable to trace its source.

  She closed their door quietly behind her and started back toward the stairs.

  She heard it again.

  A groan. A sound like a broken half no.

  Hunter.

  He was alone in there. Asleep, dreaming.

  She knew soldiers back from deployment often had terrible nightmares, even the ones who hadn’t suffered physical trauma.

  She also knew she should continue toward the stairs. She had no right. No right to intrude into his bedroom, into his sleep, into his dreams.

  But his voice came again, strained, like something not quite human, utterly ground down, and the sound of him suffering mattered to her more than the fact that he couldn’t remember her or that he’d pushed her away. It was more primitive and more important than her pride.

  She turned his doorknob slowly and went in.

  He’d gone to sleep naked, or mostly naked—she thought he might be wearing underwear, but she couldn’t tell because he’d twisted the covers around himself, and he was fighting against them. In the nightlight’s dim glow, a sheen of sweat covered his skin, and his face was contorted with terror.

  I should leave.

  But she didn’t, and when he cried out again, she didn’t think, she just climbed onto the bed with him and put her arms around him.

  “Shh. Shh, Hunter. It’s okay.”

  He made a muffled, startled sound, and in the almost dark he turned to her and lifted his face to hers. Took her mouth without a word.

  In that mysterious middle-of-the-night time, outside of rational thought, she didn’t protest or try to stop him or ask him what he thought he was doing. She just pressed herself closer to him and wrapped around him tighter and opened to him. And it was so familiar, the pressure, the heat, the taste of his mouth. The sounds he made—relief, hunger, demand. More grunt than groan, but only barely, and his arms were around her, too, his hands in her hair, on her face. The kiss so dark and sweet, so full of emotion, that tears welled up in her eyes, until she could taste salt.

  Then he broke it off.

  “Shit. Trina. I was—” He sat up abruptly. Reached for the lamp switch.

  She scrambled out of his bed and stood, blinking in the light.

  “You were in my bed.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  His eyes were startled, the pupils huge, though from desire, shock, or the sudden light, she had no way of knowing.

  He was shaking his head. “What—?”

  “You were asleep. Having a nightmare. And I—I wanted to help, and I didn’t think. God, you must think I’m—”

  “No. No.”

  Her face was hot with frustrated desire and fresh humiliation. She covered it with her cool hands.

  He reached for her hands and pulled them back, one by one, from her face. Took them in his and shook them as if to restore her to her senses. “I know I have nightmares. They told me in the hospital. The nurses would come sit with me sometimes.”

  “I—”

  “Trina—”

  “No, I’ll go.”

  “Wait.”

  If he hadn’t been holding her hands, she would have been back in her room by now. Anything to get away from him, from the pity in his eyes. Anything to get away from what she’d done—taken advantage of a man who was asleep, suffering, a man who’d made his feelings about her plain enough.

  “Trina, this is a fucked-up situation. There’s no road map. We’re going to make mistakes.”

  “I—I can’t believe I did that.”

  “Trina, stop beating yourself up. I did it, too.”

  “You were asleep.”

  His gaze tugged away from hers, sought refuge in a corner. “Not the whole time.”


  The words hung there in the halo of the bedside lamp.

  “Why—why are you telling me that?”

  For a long moment, his eyes held hers, and something blazed hopeful and bright in her chest. Then his gaze dropped.

  “I don’t want you to blame yourself. I don’t want you to feel like you accosted me and I’m some victim. We both—reacted. We both made mistakes. We’re both feeling our way. We can agree to forget it happened, okay?”

  What a strange choice of words. Forget.

  What she’d done had been wrong. She shouldn’t have come into his bedroom. She shouldn’t have climbed into his bed. She shouldn’t have touched him when he was powerless to give her permission.

  But she wouldn’t forget that he’d responded.

  She wouldn’t forget the way he’d kissed her, or the sounds he’d made, or the way his hands had felt on her hair and her face.

  “We can pretend it didn’t happen.”

  If he saw the vast difference between forgetting and pretending, he didn’t say anything.

  And it wasn’t until she was lying in her own bed again, touching her lips, puffy and tender from his kisses, the stroke of his tongue still tingling along hers, that she said aloud what she’d been thinking:

  I can’t forget, Hunter. I can’t ever forget.

  —

  When she was gone, he eased himself slowly back down on the bed.

  What had just happened?

  She’d heard him cry out. She’d come in, gotten into his bed, and put her arms around him. And then—

  He’d half-woken from sleep and in that almost-dream zone had known her completely. Had found her utterly familiar and sought her without hesitation, his mouth desperate for hers.

  He’d known how they kissed, that she liked this much pressure, this much tongue. He’d known what her hair felt like between his fingers and what her tears tasted like when they slid along his lips.

  And then he’d struggled fully to wakefulness and her face was a near stranger’s face, the silk of her hair unfamiliar. Something in him recoiled and he was beset, suddenly, by that awkwardness that had occasionally overtaken him mid-encounter in his sexually busier days, particularly with women he didn’t know well. When he’d let things go too far and then come with a snap to his senses—fading drunkenness or a ringing phone breaking the spell.