To Have and to Hold: A Returning Home Novel

by Serena Bell

  The way he’d pictured her in bed, after that first night she’d climbed in with him? Apparently, that had been memory, not fantasy. But now it felt like fantasy come true.

  He gave her his finger, deep inside her.

  “You want more?”

  Her response wasn’t quite an actual word.

  He drew back, knelt beside her. Reached for a condom and rolled it down.

  She grabbed him. Squeezed, ran a thumb up the length along the ridge, over the head, that look in her eyes. Like she liked what she saw and felt, a lot.

  He braced himself over her. Before his cock even made contact with her, he could feel her heat, and every muscle in his body strained toward it, the injured ones griping but not enough to stop him. And then he was in her, just an inch, pressing toward what he desperately wanted, not just the softness and heat of her, the sense of being surrounded, the pleasure of her tightness, but the impossible craving he still felt for connection with her, for destroying the distance that his forgetfulness had imposed.

  She moaned as he buried himself. Each stroke brought another moan, his body trying harder to turn itself inside out inside her, her hips lifting, his pressing her down, her breath speeding, her eyes closing.

  Then, with a cry, she was clenching around him, coming hard, her body twisting—but it was her voice, her words, cracked and wispy, that took him over: “I missed you, Hunter.”

  He gave himself up, poured himself out, released what he’d lost and what he’d tried to hold onto, fell into what was left of what he hadn’t known was his.

  “Oh, God, Trina, I missed you, too.”

  And even though they both knew it was a lie, it was the whole perfect fucking truth.

  Chapter 21

  He was the first one to hear the crying. At first he thought it was a child, and he ran toward the sound.

  A woman. Behind a wall of rubble, but if he peeked through, he could just see her, crouched there, babbling in Pashto. Her eyes panicked in the dark.

  Her pleas…

  Her eyes…

  He never let himself think about the way Dee had died. The violent, dirty surprise of it. The pain, the dust, the debris. She would have been buried. If the explosion hadn’t killed her, she would have been crushed or suffocated.

  She might have known she was dying.

  She would have looked just like this woman.

  Suddenly he was digging, clawing, as if he were trying to claw at the thing that had him around the throat, around the chest, as if he were trying to rip away the thing that had stolen his breath.

  He had to get her out.

  He might have been calling her name.

  And in the darkness he saw her, her face, her eyes—

  And when the second explosion came, he had time to see the expression on her face, shocked and accusing.

  Dee’s face.

  The world slid away.

  He was awake in the dark. For a long moment, he couldn’t remember, drowning in panic. Where he was. Why he was there.

  There was a body beside his.

  A woman’s body.

  His heart jangled against the cage of his ribs.

  Not a body. A living woman.

  Not Dee.

  Trina.

  The clock glowing on Trina’s bedside table said it was five a.m.

  He’d walked her back from the tree house last night, late, both of them stumbling and giddy. He’d tucked her into bed in the guest room, then lain down beside her, just for a second. But then she’d rolled close and kissed him and he’d had no way to resist her pull. He was armorless.

  The dream felt real, and what had happened last night in the tree house felt like a dream.

  “You okay?” she whispered in the dark.

  “No,” he said.

  She rolled toward him, wrapping her warmth around him. But where last night it had felt like such a gift, her body giving to his, this morning it felt like a threat. He couldn’t help it; he flinched.

  He felt her equal and opposite reaction, the way she withdrew and stiffened, and he wanted to take it back, but he couldn’t.

  “Hunter, what is it?”

  “I remembered. I saw her. She was buried in there, and she couldn’t get out, and I was trying to save her.”

  “To save the woman who was buried under rubble?”

  “To save Dee.”

  She made a small, shocked noise.

  “It was Dee. I saw her in there, and—I’d never thought about it before. How she died. I’d made myself never think about it. And I couldn’t save her. It was Dee.”

  “In the dream?”

  “No. Not a dream. A memory.”

  “You couldn’t have remembered her there, Hunter. She wasn’t there.”

  His chest hurt. Where he’d been split open, but everywhere else, too. A squeezing, twisting sensation. “She was there, the day I was injured. In my head. It was her, and I couldn’t save her.”

  “Hunter,” she repeated. “It wasn’t Dee. It was some other woman. It wasn’t Dee, you couldn’t—”

  “I know!”

  His voice was sharp in the dark. It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice to her, and he felt her flinch.

  He took a deep breath. “Dee did this thing. She—she’d change herself. For me. Like she cut her hair and put highlights in it, and she said, ‘I know you like Tanya Freeny’s hair.’ I’d once said that, but only because she said, ‘What do you think of Tanya Freeny’s hair?’ and I said, ‘I like it.’ She lost weight, even though she wasn’t really heavy. Just—solid. And then she said, ‘I know skinny’s more your type.’ I never said that. I know I never said that. I’d never say something like that. It’s not even true.”

  He’d never told this to anyone. He could tell he’d never told Trina before, not only because of the surprise and pain on her face, but because of how the words felt coming out of him. Squeezed and narrow. But even though it hurt to say it, he couldn’t stop.

  “One time she took cooking classes. She said, ‘I know you wish I were a better cook.’ Even though I swear I never said anything like that to her. I tried never to say the things in my head, the doubts—but she heard them anyway, somehow. She didn’t say, ‘I thought if I did this, you might fall in love with me,’ but it was so clear. It was like she was shouting it all the time. Every time she baked me cookies or came home with a six-pack of my favorite beer or—there were things she didn’t like to do in bed, and I said she shouldn’t, she didn’t have to, but she did, because—”

  His voice broke, remembering. All the times she’d come home with a new look or newly gained knowledge or a gift. The way she’d gagged, trying to take him deeper, trying so hard to be the woman she was sure he wanted.

  The futility of it.

  “She was trying to make me love her. I couldn’t love her, Trina. I tried. And tried. And then—

  “We had a fight, right before she deployed. Where she said, ‘Just tell me, Hunter. Tell me what I can do to make this marriage work.’ And I knew. I knew I had to tell her the truth. Not right then, because she was leaving, but I had to tell her I wanted a divorce. Because it was so damn unfair to her, what I’d done to her. I had to give her another chance. To find someone who would love her the way she deserved.”

  Trina was very still, very quiet. “But she didn’t come home.”

  He shook his head. “No. She didn’t come home.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Hunter. You did the very best you could.”

  “It was,” he said. “It was my fault because I knew, even that first time I had sex with her, that I couldn’t do what she wanted me to do. But I wanted her, so I lied to myself. I told myself that I could do it, that it would just take time, that I would fall in love with her. As if all it would take was an effort of will. No one is going to—”

  His voice broke, but he pressed on, because he had to, because it was penance. It was only what he deserved. “No one will ever love her the way she deserved to be
loved now. I took that away from her. Maybe I didn’t kill her, but because I was selfish, she will never have that life.”

  “Hunter. Those things weren’t in your control. That woman’s death. Dee’s death. How much you love some—”

  “Don’t try to fix it, Trina. Okay? Don’t fucking try to fix it.”

  It was so quiet in the room that he could hear the wind blowing through the trees outside.

  “Do you want me to make you stop thinking about it?”

  He did. Desperately. He’d remembered and forgotten all the wrong things, and he knew she could make it better, if only for a little while. But—

  She slid down the length of his body, and he felt his resolve slipping. She rucked his T-shirt up and her breath swept the flat of his abs, above the waistband of his boxers. Her fingers were much surer now than they’d been earlier. “Lift up,” she instructed.

  He hesitated.

  “I don’t know what’s in my own head. I shouldn’t.”

  “Then don’t listen to your head right now. Lift up.”

  He did, and she slid his boxers down, and came back to nuzzle his cock, growing heavy now, reaching for her. She opened her mouth and let him in, but this time she kept him there only long enough to make him slick and hard, then released him and rose up over him.

  She reached for the box of condoms on the nightstand, rolled one on him, and eased herself down on him, her body parting to admit him, and then lowered herself in an abrupt plunge that made his stomach sink and swirl like a roller-coaster plummet.

  And it was so good, so sweet and dark and hot and wet, and she leaned down and matched her mouth to his, so they could feel each other that way, too, vulnerable parts to vulnerable parts, the intimacy so fierce and raw.

  Then she eased back, taking him deep and—rather than rising and plunging—rubbing herself tight over his pubic bone. He saw the look in her eyes, that searching-for-something-just-out-of-reach expression.

  “What do you need?”

  She cupped her breast and he took the tight nipple in his mouth, his fingers stroking the other one, and she made a hoarse sound and her movements got more ferocious. She rode him like that, her breasts in his mouth and his hand, his other hand curved from her hip around her ass, an ache blooming hard up his spine until he came just a second ahead of her, his last fierce push to inhabit her fully pressing her over the edge until he had to stifle her cries with his mouth.

  Chapter 22

  He was gone when she woke up, and she knew. She lay there and stared at the sun chinking through the blinds and she ached all over from her exertions yesterday, and that deep pain felt like a harbinger.

  He could be downstairs making her breakfast. He could be preparing a tray to bring up to her. He would show up in the doorway and say, “Look what I made for you!” and he would set it across her lap. Thank her for being there for him when he’d been hurting in the middle of the night. Apologize for having yelled at her. Tell her she’d done it, she’d fixed it, just like she’d said she would.

  Only she knew he wasn’t, and he wouldn’t.

  After a while, she got out of bed and took a long, hot shower. She dressed in jeans and a dark gray fitted T-shirt, and she went out into the kitchen and made herself a bowl of granola. She checked on the girls, who were rollerblading in the street outside the house.

  She crossed into the backyard, walked through the woods on what had become almost a well-trodden path, and found him just where she’d known he’d be. Up the tree. He’d just drilled a hole inside a larger hole.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting ready to sink a TAB,” he said.

  She wanted to see it. She wanted to watch as the tree house took shape, as he anchored it, as he built it. She wanted to design it and make it hers. Theirs.

  She wanted to stay.

  Part of her had probably always known she didn’t want to go. Part of her had always known that L.A. was a poor consolation prize for what she and Phoebe couldn’t have.

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

  It was disconcerting, talking up at him, but she knew she had no choice. She knew he wouldn’t, couldn’t, face her right now.

  He touched the edge of the hole he’d drilled, testing. Not looking down at her. But she knew that he knew she was there. His whole body radiated awareness and tension.

  She could walk away, but she’d never forgive herself if she didn’t lay everything on the line, despite the fact that she knew it wouldn’t change the way he felt. Or didn’t feel.

  “I don’t have to go, Hunter. I could call Stefan and tell him to offer the job to someone else. I could say I changed my mind. That I—”

  She was going to lose her nerve if she didn’t just spit it out.

  “—That I love you. And I don’t need any other reason to stay.”

  She took a deep breath.

  He’d stopped moving. He rested in his harness, his body an L, his legs slightly bent against the tree trunk. And then slowly he lowered himself, walking down the solid column of the tree’s strength, until his feet were on the ground again. His eyes drilled into her.

  “You think you don’t.” His voice was low. Angry. “You think you don’t, now, but you will. I know you want me to ask you to stay. But if I do that, a week, a month, a year from now, you’ll be looking at me with big Bambi eyes, asking what you can do to make things okay.”

  She shook her head, tears filling her eyes. “That’s not true, Hunter.”

  “You’ll end up hating me for not giving you what you need.”

  “No. No.”

  “And I’ll hate you for wanting more than I can give.”

  It was surprising how much that hurt. Like something splintering in her chest. The last few days, the blooming tenderness between them, the joy, the ferocious need—that he could have been with her through all of that and still doubt.

  She got angry then. Fast, like the anger had been waiting right beneath the surface, boiling there, brewing under her patience with the two-steps-forward-and-one-back, the forbidden connections in the dark, the slow dance in the light.

  “Don’t fucking tell me that, Hunter. Don’t tell me you can’t do it. Don’t tell me what you can and can’t give. I’ve seen you. I know you. And you fell in love with me. So if you’re not feeling it now, it’s not because you can’t.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “It’s because you won’t.”

  She was breathless and furious.

  “You loved me, Hunter. I know you did.”

  He turned away, gazed up for a moment at the thick TABs protruding from the tree. Like strange robotic branches grafted on, half organic, half man-made.

  “Maybe I did.”

  When he looked at her again, it was almost blankly, absently, the way he’d looked at her those first couple of days, as if she were vaguely familiar but he couldn’t quite place her.

  “But I won’t let you give up your life waiting for it to happen again.”

  There was such an awful finality in his voice. She felt like the wind had been knocked out of her.

  But the sound, the one like air going out of someone who’d been punched in the stomach, wasn’t her.

  They both turned.

  Clara was standing at the edge of the clearing. Stock-still, eyes wide.

  Hunter started toward her. “Clara!”

  But she was already running away.

  Chapter 23

  Trina found Clara up in the old tree house, facedown on the bed.

  She sat beside her almost-daughter and stroked her hair, until Clara said in a soft, tear-choked voice, “If he loved you, would you stay?”

  Oh, God.

  For a moment, it felt so complicated. The job, the possibility of Phoebe getting to know her biological father…

  Hunter.

  Clara.

  It seemed important, no matter how much it might hurt both of them, for her to tell the truth, so she took a deep breath and said, “Yes
. But he doesn’t. He can’t, right now.”

  “You said he won’t. You said he’s choosing not to.”

  She had. And she believed it. But she also knew it was more complex than that.

  “Sometimes—sometimes for grown-ups, things don’t feel exactly like choices. It’s like everything that’s happened to you before adds up to something—inevitable.”

  “I hate him,” Clara said. “I hate him for making you leave.”

  Trina’s throat felt so tight she could barely speak, and all that mattered to her in that moment was trying to make this okay for Clara. And for Hunter. So the two of them could begin the process of rebuilding their family.

  It hurt, so much, but it was what needed to happen now.

  “He’s not making me leave. I know what you heard, and what it must have sounded like, but grown-ups are complicated. Even though it sounded like a fight, we both know I need to leave. He can’t just magically love me. Love isn’t like a switch you can turn on and off.”

  Though God knew, she wished it were. So she could stop wanting what she couldn’t have. She’d worked so hard to forget Stefan, to get away from the experience of wishing for what wouldn’t happen, only to find herself right back where she’d started.

  “I wish he’d never gotten amnesia,” Clara said.

  Her voice had softened a little, some of the tension easing from her skinny little body, and Trina took her first full breath in what felt like hours. “Me, too,” she said. “But maybe it wouldn’t have worked out anyway. He was gone a long time. People change a lot in a year. They see things and do things that change what they want out of life. You know—” she told Clara. “You know this has nothing to do with you, right? You know I—”

  There was no way she was getting through this without tears, so she gave up right then. “You know I love you so much. You know I don’t want to leave you. You know I would stay if I felt like I could. You know I will always be available if you need me. You can call, you can email, and if you really need me, you can ask me, and I’ll come.”

  “If something bad happened, and I needed, like, a substitute mom, you’d come?”