by Julia Sykes
He nodded. “I enlisted straight out of high school. My family didn’t have much, and I wanted to go to college without burdening them or taking out loans. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life then, and the Army gave me a sense of purpose. Of worth.”
“But why did you continue your service? Didn’t you go to college?”
“No.” He hesitated, but after a moment, he took a breath and continued. “I got married when I was nineteen. She’d been my girlfriend in high school, and I’d see her when I went back home on leave. I was young. Naïve. I thought I was in love, but really, I was looking for something to fight for. Something to keep me going when things got…hard.” He used my word, but it carried more weight.
“What happened?” I prodded him gently. “To your marriage, I mean.”
“I saw things while I was in Afghanistan. I did things. They changed me. I’d come home, but I wouldn’t really be there. I couldn’t be the man she needed me to be, the husband she deserved. She fell in love with someone else.”
Anger surged. “That’s awful. You were out there, risking your life to keep your family—to keep all of us—safe. And she cheated on you while you were gone?”
His eyes tightened. “I don’t blame her. She needed someone who could be there for her in the ways I couldn’t. I knew then that I wasn’t cut out to have a family. The Army was my life. I had a higher duty than to myself.”
My eyes burned, my heart aching for him. He thought he was broken. I couldn’t begin to imagine the things he’d seen and done, but they’d made him believe he wasn’t worthy of love.
He wiped at my tears with his thumbs. “Don’t cry. It’s okay. I’m okay.”
The way his expression shuttered made pain knife through my chest. He was compartmentalizing, denying his agony. His loneliness.
My own loneliness and sense of brokenness seemed selfish compared to his. He had a real reason to feel damaged. All I had was self-pity and an inability to carry on, just because I thought my life was difficult.
He was so much stronger than me. He deserved to be loved far more than I did. He’d allowed me to be vulnerable with him, but this was the first time he’d been truly vulnerable with me since our first night together in Nashville.
“It’s okay for you to feel,” I whispered. “You don’t have to be so stoic.” I placed my hand over his heart. It beat faster beneath my palm. “Feel with me,” I begged.
“I do. I only feel when I’m with you. I haven’t felt anything in a long time, but I’m different when I’m with you,” he rasped, his eyes tightening.
“You make that sound like it’s a bad thing. Like it’s weakness. It’s not.”
“You’re my weakness.”
He sealed his confession with a desperate kiss, his hand cupping my nape to pull me close. My head tilted back, and I opened for him, giving him everything he deserved: tenderness, forgiveness, love.
I’d fallen for him, helplessly and completely. I wanted him to feel my love, to know he wasn’t alone in the world. It was too soon to say it aloud, our lives too complicated.
But that didn’t change the way I felt. My heart might still be in tatters, but it was his.
Chapter 16
We stepped into our apartment, our bodies covered in sea salt. We’d dried off on the bus ride back to Sorrento from the Baths of Queen Giovanna, but my skin felt too tight.
I trailed my fingers down his chest, plucking at the top button of his shirt. “Do you want to take a shower?” I asked, my voice sultry.
His jaw sharpened, but there was something other than hunger in his eyes. Something darker that I didn’t understand.
Before I could fully analyze it, he crushed his lips to mine, communicating the hunger I’d read in his features. There was something else in the kiss: desperation.
Did he feel as raw and exposed as I did after our intense afternoon?
We tore at each other’s clothes, stripping down to nothing and making our way through the apartment in a primal frenzy. He fucked me in the shower, pinning me against the wall as he took me hard. He claimed me fully, biting my neck and pinching my nipples to the edge of my pain threshold. I took everything, gave him everything he demanded of me. When he came inside me, I saw stars.
The water started to go cold, and we finally got out of the shower and dried off. He abruptly left the bathroom, turning from me so he could get dressed.
Cold closed over me, leaving me shivering in the absence of his embrace. I followed him into the bedroom without bothering to put on clothes. I was too concerned with his sudden distance to go through my normal routine.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, hating that he’d already covered his body.
He turned to me, his features schooled to an unreadable mask. “I have something for you.”
I stepped toward him, closing the distance between us so I could hold him. “What is it?”
He extricated himself from my arms and handed me a small black jewelry box.
I hesitated. “You really have to stop getting me gifts.”
“I wanted to get this for you. You need it.”
The answer was enigmatic, and my stomach dropped. Something was wrong.
My fingers trembled as I reached for the box. Dread flooded my gut, but I flipped open the lid.
My heart squeezed. “I can’t accept this. It’s too much.”
The Edwardian pendant I’d coveted in the window of Cavendish Antiques in York lay nestled in the black velvet lining of the box. Its elegant curves and shining pearls didn’t fill me with awe and longing as they once had.
“I want you to have it.”
I peeked up at him. His pale eyes were shadowed, his lips thinned. His jaw hard with determination.
“Why?” I feared his answer, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
“You said you wanted a symbol that you belong to yourself. You deserve to be free, Addison.”
A lump formed in my throat. “What if I don’t want to be free?”
I reached for him, but he caught my hand, denying me the contact I craved.
“I can’t be with you,” he said, his voice gravelly. “You were right, but I was selfish. I didn’t listen to you.”
“You can,” I insisted, desperate. “We can make this work.”
“No. I won’t do this to you. I can’t tell you when I’ll come back to you. I can’t even promise that I will. Anything could happen to me, and you’d never know. I don’t want you living your life waiting for a ghost. You deserve better than that.”
I flipped the box closed, the audible snap echoing my denial of his words.
“You don’t mean that.” Anger rose alongside my pain. “You think you don’t deserve better. But you do. You…” I choked on the words, but I forced them out. “You deserve to be loved.”
His expression hardened to granite. “I have to go.”
“What? No! You said you’d stay for the week. It’s only been three days.”
He was pulling away from me, shutting me out like he had in York when I’d asked him to be vulnerable with me. He clearly thought he’d shared too much with me while we were at the baths, and now, he was putting up walls between us. He thought he was protecting himself by denying his vulnerabilities.
“This is bullshit,” I seethed. “You’re scared. You stopped being stoic for fifteen minutes, and you can’t handle it. I’ve made myself vulnerable with you. I let you tie me up and spank me, but you can’t fucking talk to me about anything real without shutting down.”
His face hardened to stone, but he didn’t reply. He took a step around me, and I moved to block his path. His hands closed around my shoulders, and he shifted me out of his way, tearing away the barrier I’d tried to form.
Tears blinded me as I spun around. He was walking away. He’d picked up his bag, and he was heading for the door.
“Coward,” I seethed. “You’re a fucking coward, Scott.”
I couldn’t even rail at him properly. I st
ill didn’t know his last name.
I didn’t know anything about him, but I knew him.
He stiffened, and his steps faltered.
“Don’t go,” I begged.
I watched his shoulders lift as he took a deep breath and let it out again. He opened the door and stepped outside. He closed it behind him, locking himself out of my life.
Chapter 17
You disappeared from my life that day.
So, I decided to write all this down in a book, in the hope you might read it and come back to me. Of course, I changed the names and key facts, but you know who you are.
Scott: If you’re reading this, I’m waiting for you.
The End
Scott and Addison’s story continues in Mended Hearts!
I wrote down our story in a book. I bled all over the pages, laying bare my scarred soul.
But I revealed your scars, too. Will you hate me? Or will you come back to me?
I told you I no longer believe in happily-ever-after, but that was a lie.
Scott: I’m still waiting for you.
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