I looked at my oldest friend, fucking laying myself bare. “The first night I snuck into her room, I knew I was going to hurt her, Christopher. I knew it because I wasn’t right inside. And I’m never going to be completely right. You and I both know that. I’ve destroyed a lot of shit…”
I let my gaze fall, drift, and I slowly shook my head. “But Aly… I’m always going to love her. Pretty sure I have since we were all little kids growing up together. You can hate me all you want, but you’d better get used to seeing my face around here because I’m not going anywhere. And if I do leave, I’ll be taking Aly with me.”
My attention darted to the movement at the end of the hall. Aly was standing there tucked up against the wall, listening. Dark hair tumbled all around her shoulders, her eyes swimming with the assertion I’d just made. The girl was staring at me like I was her light.
I swallowed hard.
But she was mine.
And fuck, it hurt thinking and talking about everything I’d done, the past I could never outrun, the sins I’d committed, the destruction I continually left in my wake.
Still, she was there, her eyes flooded with all the love she felt for me.
I stretched a hand out in her direction, beckoning. She dropped her head, shuffled forward, and folded herself in my arms.
“I love you,” she mumbled when she buried her face at the side of my chest.
I kissed the top of her head before I ran my hand over it. Holding her close, I looked over at Christopher. He watched us with something that maybe looked like relief, all wrapped up with a ton of distrust that I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to erase.
Of course I wanted to fix the damage I’d done. Bottom line, Christopher was my best friend. He’d been my entire life.
But the girl in my arms?
She was the one who really mattered, the one I had to make things right with, the one I was going to love for the rest of my life.
TWO
Aleena
Warmth blanketed my skin, Jared’s admission like a balm that penetrated my soul. It filled up the places inside me that his absence had hollowed out, those places that had ached with abandonment and throbbed with the fear that I had to do all of this alone.
Like water to parched soil, that warmth filled me up until I felt it blossom into something else – pride.
I was proud of him. Because I knew how difficult it was for him to stand in front of my brother and say everything he had, to admit all of it aloud.
I burrowed myself deeper into his embrace because while his words soothed and nourished me, what I needed most of all was to feel.
“Thank you… for coming back to me. I needed you… I need this,” I mumbled almost incoherently. Once the words were released from where they’d been locked inside, I couldn’t stop them. “You don’t know how thankful I am.”
“Aly,” Jared said almost as if he was rebuking me, shocked by the confession pouring from my mouth. “Baby, it’s me who is thanking you. Without you, I don’t have anything. And you’ve given me everything.”
“But that’s where you’re wrong, Jared. I need you, too.”
His skin was hot and smooth, radiating the same desire he’d left burning in me since last night. Strength vibrated in his every move, his sinewy muscles corded and tight.
Jared was rough. Hard. The defined angles of his jaw were coated in coarse hair, and turbulence swam in the depths of his ice blue eyes.
But he was holding me as if I were delicate glass, as if he’d just been granted a gift, like I was the most fragile kind of treasure that he would guard with his life. There was something secure and strong and incredibly gentle in his hold.
Even as damaged as I knew he was, this gorgeous man was my perfection.
Almost on instinct, my fingers crawled up his narrow waist to the place where a haunting depiction of my eyes had been etched into his skin. The most intense green stared out from between two wilted petals on the dying rose sealed on the center of his chest.
That rose had always seemed a beacon to me. A key.
Almost every inch of Jared’s torso and arms were covered in ink, swirled colors and sweeping scenes of blacks and grays that represented all of his pain twisted across his skin.
But the rose that represented his mother on the center of his chest had always seemed the most profound because it wholly represented his love for her and how much he believed he’d lost when she died.
I’d been undone when I found he’d made me a permanent part of it. Like the moment that had defined him had defined me, too.
And now he’d allowed me to become part of his definition. Still, I hurt for him because I understood that he was a broken man. Last night we’d lain awake for hours in the quiet, me in his arms while he stared at the ceiling and let all the revelations of our reunion seep into his consciousness. He’d murmured into my hair that he’d never be good enough for me, even though he’d spend his life trying to be. He told me it was so much easier admitting he loved me than accepting that I loved him.
I knew he still felt unworthy of love.
Yet I loved him with everything that I was.
That love was enough to crush me.
I knew that from the pain I lived through in the months he was away and recognized it in the devastating relief I felt when I found him sitting at the top of the stairs waiting for me yesterday evening. It’d been blinding.
And God, I’d been so scared, telling him about the baby. But he had to know, even though I’d realized there was a very real chance the knowledge would drive him away once again.
This was no longer just about Jared and me. Now I had a baby to think about, too. And I understood the risk in taking Jared back. How vulnerable it made me.
I’d missed him so much, and I wasn’t sure I could deal with him leaving me again.
But it went far beyond that.
The little life growing inside me filled me with so much fear and anxiety, but even stronger was this surprising sense of anticipation. It filled me with love along with my worry, and wonder at the way that my life had been sent down a different course than I’d ever imagined.
So many nights had been spent praying and begging in the dark for him to return, drawing his face again and again in the pages of my sketch pads, those images that came to life in them the only thing I had left of him. Until last night, I’d never shown anyone my hidden drawings. They were so special to me, I didn’t think anyone could understand how important the faces I drew inside were to me, and I worried that others might minimalize the way I saw the people I loved as I brought them to life on a page. But last night, I’d shown Jared, because I needed him to know, to understand how significant he was to me and how he’d inhabited my drawings since I’d first picked up a charcoal pencil when I was just a little girl.
I’d desperately wanted him to be a part of my life.
I always had. But God, I couldn’t fathom how much I wanted him to be a part of our child’s life.
I believed in what we created. With all of me. In the beauty of it.
Last night, we’d talked very little about it. Instead, I’d found Jared’s affection in his touch, in the way he kissed across my belly and looked at me with fear and amazement shining in his eyes.
I searched for his left hand and lifted his knuckles to my mouth. I brushed my lips across the tattooed skin that marked the year Jared believed he had ceased to exist.
2006.
Jared had spent his life running from his past.
I thought of his right hand, where the knuckles were stamped with the year of his birth.
1990.
Jared had once believed those sixteen years were the only ones he’d truly lived.
But he returned now because somehow, through all of that, he’d seen a future with me, that he’d seen life beyond the date when he believed he should have died in his mother’s place.
I chose to believe in him because I knew no other truth.
I chose
to believe in his love, as fragile as it was.
I chose to believe he would be strong enough to face all the demons darkening the goodness of his spirit, the ones he’d etched onto his skin in images of horror, the ones that manifested as tremors that shook him in the night.
Jared had always been a risk I had to take. Risks always involved danger. But the only danger I felt where he was concerned was the possibility of him no longer being a part of me. That was a fate I refused to consider.
He shifted, taking my face in his hands and lifting it to his. He pressed his lips to mine, softly, yet wholly intense. Almost desperate. His large hands covered most of my face. His fingers dug into the back of my head, something that I felt all the way to my heart.
“I love you, Aly.” His voice was low, rough with the promise, like maybe he needed to remind himself. Blue eyes blazed as he pulled back and stared down at me. I’d seen his love for me in those eyes for so long.
It was unmistakable.
How amazing did it feel that he was no longer trying to hide it?
“I love you… so much,” I whispered back.
“God.” Christopher cursed from behind us, the sound a mixture of disgust and surrender.
These last months, I’d scared my brother. I knew that. I’d witnessed it in his expression as he’d watched me lying balled up on the couch. I’d seen the worry in his eyes and known he had no clue what I needed or how to help me.
But he had. Just being there and supporting me had helped me. Up until last night when I told Jared, Christopher had been the only one to know about the pregnancy. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to tell my parents, who lived so nearby. I don’t know what I would have done without Christopher to support me.
My face was still buried in the safety of Jared’s chest, but I could feel him and Christopher still staring each other down. Testing. Tension thickened the air, so heavy I could actually hear Christopher swallow.
“You want to stay here? With her?” Christopher finally demanded. “And I’m not talking some temporary bullshit. You know this isn’t some kind of fucking game.”
Jared placed his warm hand on the back of my head, as if he were shielding me. “It was never a game, Christopher. I already told you that.” He ran his fingers through my hair, and I shifted to look back at my brother. “I think you already know that,” Jared continued. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
A grimace twisted Christopher’s mouth and he looked to the wall again. He huffed a loud breath. “Guess I’m going to have to get used to the idea of you two.”
Jared’s heart thundered where I had my ear pressed to his chest. “Yeah, you’re going to have to get used it.” Jared brought his mouth to the top of my head, and I knew his words were whispered to me. “Because I won’t let her go.”
“Go,” Jared grumbled at my mouth as he bent me back, those strong arms holding me up while he kissed me again.
“I don’t want to,” I contended with a forced pout, clinging to the back of his neck.
At all.
I just wanted to stay there.
In the safety of his arms.
Forever.
The arms that promised my future. The arms that told me he’d missed me as intensely as I’d missed him.
The exam I spent the last week struggling to study for, the one I had to take to pass my class? It suddenly didn’t feel all that important after all.
The thought of leaving him physically hurt.
He pulled back. A smirk lifted one side of his full lips. “You think I want to let you out of my sight?” Tender amusement flickered around his mouth before he leaned in close to my ear. “Not in this century, Aly. I want to spend my life wrapped up in you, wrapped up in that body that has me itching to drag you back to your room and show you just how much I don’t want to let you go. Just how much I’ve been missing you.”
His teasing turned serious. “But you have shit to take care of, and I’m not going to be the one who stands in the way of it.”
I nodded in acceptance, in understanding of this good heart that I was sure Jared still didn’t understand himself. “Okay. But for the record, you dragging me back to my room sounds like a really good plan.”
My heart had begged for him. Whispered and pled for him. But God, did my body ever ache for him.
He chuckled through a groan, and a grin danced all over his flirty mouth. Chills slipped down my spine with the expression that lit on his face, with the affection that played in his blue eyes as they played across my face. He caressed my cheek with his thumb.
“Baby, I’m going to be making love to you for the rest of my life. Don’t worry about it. Go to class now, and to work. You can be sure I’ll make it up to you later.” His voice dropped low in suggestion, his promise resonating deep in the pit of my stomach.
I quirked a brow at him. He wasn’t helping things.
“Go,” he commanded through a closemouthed kiss.
“Fine… I’m going.” I hefted my bag up further on my shoulder. Tipping my chin up, I met his eyes when I stepped around him to open the front door. I paused in the threshold, caught in the million emotions that seemed to be fighting for dominance in him. Those emotions flitting through him had to be a mirror to my own.
I think we both got it. Neither of us really knew anything beyond the fact that he was here.
Last night, our discoveries had all been too deep, revelations that changed lives. Shaped them. We hadn’t gotten into details or plans, and I had no idea how we were going to manage all of this. How our lives would merge. Become one.
But as I stood there staring at him, I knew they would.
“I’ll be thinking about you,” he promised.
“Me, too,” I whispered. I stepped out into the day and shut the door behind me.
Sunlight shined down, fall’s warmth a caress to my skin. Yesterday when I’d left for class, the sun had stood so much the same, though it had felt completely different. It’d cast the promise of its rise and then fall, just another lonely day that would give way to another lonely night. Never had I imagined when I climbed into my car yesterday that my life was hours from being rocked, that once again, Jared’s return would come as something I couldn’t fathom.
An upheaval.
But this was a disturbance I’d been praying for.
I lifted my face to the warmth of the sky. Thin ribbons of clouds rode on the breeze, sweeping out in slow waves.
Thank you, I said, so low it could not be heard.
Jared’s mother, Helene, slipped into my mind. And I thought maybe… maybe she, too, was filled with joy. Maybe I had been heard.
I knew this was the way Helene would have wanted things, for Jared and me to be together, that she’d seen something between us long before either Jared or I could understand what the bond we shared as children really meant. I crossed the lot to where my white Corolla was parked in its spot.
I gasped when arms wrapped around me from behind, then melted when Jared buried his face in my neck. He spun me around and pressed me up against the cool metal of my car door. His hands were on my face, in my hair, slipping down my sides before he brought them back up to force me to look at him. “Thank you.” Desperation poured from him, his hold increasing as he stared down at the shock I felt lining my face. “Thank you for believing in me, Aly. For getting me.”
A lick of fear flashed across his face. Or maybe it was remorse. He swallowed hard, and his voice hardened with strain. “I’m scared to think of where I’d be right now without you.”
The fear that flashed on his face coiled in my stomach. Because I didn’t know where he’d been. I had no idea where the last three months had taken him. How far or how low.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“You’re here with me now.” I had to believe that was all that mattered.
He grimaced. Gripping my face, he leaned down and kissed me, hard and demanding. There was no soft affection, none of the playfulness from upstairs.
This was a seal. A branding. He jerked back. A storm raged in the blue of his eyes. “Don’t think I can’t see all those questions brewing in your mind, Aly. And I may not have all the answers right now, but we are going to figure this out. Do you hear me? I promise you that.”
And I saw it all there, the torment that plagued Jared, this beautiful man who had lost direction, the one desperate to find his way home.
“I’m not scared,” I promised.
Come to Me Softly Page 3