Chapter 17
The movie was horrible. Absolutely, horrendously awful. Gabe kept telling himself to talk her out of her clothes again, make her forget about the relentless tragedy of George Bailey’s life. But he never could find the words, the moves, and the movie trudged endlessly on until a whole crowd of people were singing “Auld Lang Syne” and Gabe wanted to scream.
No man is a failure who has friends. What utter bullshit. All the crap about a man’s life touching too many to count? He supposed it made some sense Monica was all sniffly over it. She had a soft heart for all her pragmatism. More, she did actually help people, loath as he was to admit it.
She sighed happily as the movie ended, and Gabe figured he should pretend it was fine. He should definitely ignore the claustrophobic feeling that the cabin walls were closing in on him. That the air was too heavy to breathe and everything…
“Isn’t it the best movie?” Monica sighed happily.
“You’ve obviously never seen Die Hard,” he managed to choke out, sounding mostly like himself instead of a dying frog.
“Die Hard is fine enough, but it doesn’t alter lives.”
“Now, you just don’t know that,” he said, pushing off the couch. He needed some air that didn’t smell like her or cookies or…life changes.
Nothing was going to change in his life, especially some sad sack old movie. Worth and meaning were fine enough on a movie set, war heroes could toast their heroic home-front brothers, and everyone could be so damn happy you wanted to smash in a TV screen.
But that was not real life, even when the words felt a little too real. A little too revealing. “I think I’m going to go…try to dig us out.” Anything, anything to find some air.
“Those drifts are almost as tall as your shoulders. We’re lucky we have power. I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere.”
Gabe shrugged, trying to smile at her. “Can’t sit around in here twiddling my thumbs.”
He ignored the little flash of hurt that chased over her face before she smoothed it out. He focused on finding his coat, his boots.
“I didn’t expect the movie to bother you,” she said quietly.
Oh, he hated that quiet, hurt voice women could wield, far better than any man he’d ever known. Alex and Jack might get stoic, silent, but it was never that quiet quavering infused with hurt.
Becca had laid that on him a time or two, and it had been enough to eat him alive then. Coming from Monica, it felt like razors cutting his chest to ribbons. But what might happen if he gave in to that feeling? If he said he was sorry, if he told her all the things that bothered him?
He knew how those stories ended. He wouldn’t go there again. Not with her. Not in this place where he’d found the closest thing to home he was ever going to get.
“It didn’t bother me,” he ground out as he shoved his foot into his boot.
“I told you not to lie to me,” she said, and it was laced with all that hurt.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” he grumbled, shoving the other boot on.
“I’m trying to understand.”
The look he gave her probably wasn’t fair, but at least he bit back the words Stop trying to be my shrink. He knew she wasn’t trying to. He understood that to an extent, after the conversations they’d had, but it was easier to lash out with that, make her back off with that, then try to understand this panic in his gut.
“I thought we’d gotten over this,” she said quietly. “I…I know I said I used it as armor, but that’s not what I’m doing. Not even close.”
“Then what are you doing, asking if that movie got to me? Just being friendly?”
“I didn’t ask. I observed it. Not because I’m your therapist or want to be, but because I’m your… We’re…” She huffed out a breath without finishing. It made him sick to his stomach that he was desperate to know what she’d call them. What she wanted them to be.
Nothing. You can only ever be nothing.
“When you’re friends with someone,” she began again. “When you have a care for someone, you want to know what’s wrong.”
Gabe wanted to inure himself to that tremulous note in her voice, because there was no shield or armor, not when she was showing her emotions too plain. On the surface and vulnerable. He never, ever wanted to see her vulnerable.
“I don’t know, you want to be there. Understand. Offer a shoulder. And, yes, maybe I’d fix it if I could, but because I care.”
“Don’t need a shoulder or understanding. Definitely don’t want it.” He got to his feet and shrugged his coat on. He’d go out that door and shovel his way back to Revival with his two bare hands if he had to. Anything would be better than this hell where emotion clogged his throat and feelings ripped at his insides and this awful, stupid part of him wanted to give in.
To her. To the hurt. To the change.
He reached for the door, and she all but leaped between it and him. She swung out her arms, slapping them back against the door as if she could actually block him.
“You think you’re going to stop me? I could have you off that door in five seconds flat.”
“When you see Jack or Alex hurting, do you ignore it?” she demanded, ignoring his threat. Ignoring every damn warning she should heed.
“I’m not hurting,” he said, and those words seethed out of him, that boiling emotion likely undercutting any chance he had at having her believe him.
“Then maybe that’s what I’m trying to understand,” she said, her voice breaking.
God damn it all to hell, why did she care this much? He didn’t want it. “Monica, I will give you five seconds to get out of my way before I physically remove you from blocking that door.”
But she went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Maybe I’m trying to understand why it seems you are so often hurting when you claim you’re not.”
“Claim. Isn’t that undermining my feelings? As if I don’t know what I’m thinking or feeling?”
“You don’t, or worse, you just don’t want to feel those things, so you think you can fight them by being an asshole to everyone who cares about you. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but no one at Revival, including me, takes it very seriously. No one, no one, believes that’s who you really are.”
He stepped forward, the tide of fury sweeping through him so hard and fast he slapped his palm hard against the wood of the door, right above her outstretched arm. “Of course it’s who I really fucking am.”
She dropped her arms from the door and reached out to him. She reached out to him, pressing her palm to his heart, splaying her fingers out right there in the center of his chest. His breath was coming too hard, his heart beating too fast.
“I can’t believe that. Do you remember what you said to me after we kissed that night? Out by the car?”
He remembered everything. Every second of that kiss, every roiling, traitorous hurt that had swelled inside of him, and every word she’d uttered in response to him. It haunted him.
“You said my actions had to back up my words. Well, yours don’t. You are one of the kindest, most generous and giving people I’ve ever met in deed. Sometimes in words too, but then you cover it up with that surly attitude, and it isn’t you. That isn’t you.”
But he wanted it to be. He needed that to be him. At least on the outside, at least in those actions. He needed to protect himself, and he’d learned how. He’d finally learned how. He couldn’t let her undermine that, even with words like care.
But her hand was pressed there, against his shirt. He could feel the warm, firm imprint of it, and things inside of him seemed to shift, reach out for that touch. He had the horrifying, unstoppable desire to tell her.
Everything.
And then, as if on cue, the lights cut out.
* * *
It was still light enough outside that they weren’t plunged into total darkness, but it broke whatever moment they’d been having.
Gabe stepped away from her, and all of that churning emotion Monica had seen in him, felt in him, was gone. She supposed tied up and buried deep, deep down again.
She’d seen glimpses of it here and there, but she’d never allowed herself to be quite so vulnerable in return. She’d never allowed her voice to break or her hand to touch him gently. Even though she hadn’t gotten anywhere, she felt cracked open at the possibility she could maybe break him.
What would she do with what spilled out? Would she be able to stay this person who only wanted to know him, or would she fall back into old, bad therapist habits to protect herself and maybe even him?
“Should get a fire started before it gets dark out,” he said, his voice all military, unemotional command.
She stayed where she was, leaning against the door, as he stalked toward the hearth. She simply stood and breathed and watched him start the fire they’d let die last night.
Last night, when she’d allowed herself to be thoroughly, repeatedly taken by this man, and she couldn’t even muster up any feminist outrage over the word taken because what was taking if she was giving?
Which did not have to be relegated to the bed. Maybe this was temporary, but even if temporary they should have a better understanding of each other. They weren’t having sex and then never seeing each other again. All of her future was tied up, at least peripherally, in Gabe Cortez.
She pushed herself off the door. “Truth or dare?”
He snorted. “What?”
“Truth or dare,” she repeated, only feeling moderately stupid, but maybe if she was stupid, she’d catch him off guard for once.
“I’m not a teenage girl at a slumber party.” The fire crackled to life, and his temper crackled with it.
She would not be deterred. “Fine. No game. A deal.”
He unfurled from his crouched position over the fire, crossing his arms over his chest as he did so. “Fuck your de—”
“I will ask you one question,” she said firmly, and maybe that was her mom voice that usually made Colin jump to attention, but Gabe didn’t need to know that. “You have to answer said question to my satisfaction. No lies, no evasions, no half-truths.”
“This sounds like a barrel of laughs and all, but—”
“In return, you can ask me two questions. Same rules apply.”
That had him hesitating, which she’d count as a point.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I want to get to know you better.”
Oh, what storms raged beneath those calm, dark waters in his eyes. Under the taut way he held his body. She wanted to reach out again, but instead, she faced him. A fighter’s stance. Ready to fight for something more. What exactly, she didn’t know, but she’d fight until she did.
“Everything that’s happened in this cabin is temporary. That’s what I want, and you said the same thing. That no one would respect you if this went any further than this week.”
It felt like a slap, no matter that it shouldn’t. It was true. She’d said those things. He didn’t want more with her. She needed to accept all that. “I know what I said.”
“Then what does it matter if you understand me?”
“We have to be friends after. If we leave not having understood each other any better, there’s no hope we accept the…there’s no hope I accept…” God, she hated struggling for words. “There’s no hope we put this behind us. Because we’ll be in the same sniping place we were before, but we’ll know the sex is good. And every time we snipe…” She gestured at the couch.
“So this is all because you’re afraid you won’t be able to control yourself. That’s sad, Monica.” He grinned that empty, sharp grin.
She didn’t react, didn’t budge. She simply held his gaze. “I get one question. You get two. That is the deal I’m putting forth. Aren’t you curious?”
“Why would I be curious?”
She nearly wilted at that, but he was studying her too hard, as if looking for that wilt or stab of hurt or…or maybe he was looking for something else. Something that would never make sense to her.
She only stared. Maybe her eyes were a little too wide and she wasn’t as collected as she’d been, but she wouldn’t give in to him. Not this fake, mean side of him that had to be protecting all that softness inside of him.
That sharp, empty smile slowly changed, turning down at the corners as his jaw tightened. “I have a condition,” he finally ground out.
She tried not to let her elation show. “All right.”
“Two rules. One, you have to ask first. Two, we play this little game once a day, and only once, until our deal is over.”
“Christmas.”
He shrugged.
That would give her six more days of questions, although she’d be in Denver for the last two. Four days of in-person questions. Which meant she had to be careful, and she had to choose wisely. “Okay.” Okay.
“I don’t suppose you have any alcohol I could black out with first?”
Her lips curved ever so slightly. “No, I don’t keep alcohol in the cabin.”
“Figures,” he muttered. He glared all around the cabin as if it had done him some personal affront. With the quickly fading afternoon light sneaking in through the windows, bouncing off all that snow outside, he glowed close to gold.
Someone should sculpt him like that—scowling and bronzed, the picture-perfect image of an angry, vengeful god.
Except, for all Gabe’s bluster, she didn’t think he had vengeance in him. Anger, yes. Fury, absolutely. But the thirst for vengeance required a kind of belief that you could bend the world to your will.
It struck her as interesting and confusing that confident, and at times bossy, Gabe seemed quite comfortable with the fact the universe ran the show and the rest of them were just pawns.
“Ask your damn question,” he ordered, bossy as hell.
She had so many questions. A million whys and hows and whens. But she had to be careful. Strategic. What were the things she needed to understand about him to go from being lovers to friends?
She supposed the simplest place to start was a question she’d already asked him before. “Why’d you join the military?”
He sucked in a breath, then let it out slowly. A coping mechanism he’d developed all on his own. “My stepfather didn’t give me much of a choice.”
Then he was silent. She waited for a while, thinking he’d find his voice again and explain that, but he didn’t.
“So, my turn?” he asked instead.
She frowned at him. “No. You have to answer it to my satisfaction, and your stepfather not giving you a choice isn’t an answer. It’s a sentence that creates a million other questions.”
“I’m sitting for this,” he muttered, stalking over to the couch and collapsing rather dramatically on it. She moved slower, lowered herself onto the corner of the couch carefully. She wanted to touch him, wanted to curl up next to him, with his arm around her, and have this conversation as if…
But there was no as if. She kept her distance, and she watched his scarred hand rather than his face. “How did your stepfather make you join the military?”
“Powerful man. A powerful man who always hated me.”
“Hate is a strong word. Sometimes when we’re young—”
“I was young, and then I wasn’t. He hated me. This was no up-for-interpretation, stepdaddy grounded me a few too many times. Hate. Pure, unadulterated hate. I was a stain. He loved my mother—well, his version of love. I was his not-fair-skinned, not-easily-folded-into-the-family reminder she’d loved someone else. Although in fairness, I did start a fire at their wedding. Quite on purpose.”
Monica gasped. Silly, all in all, considering she’d heard far worse. Still. She couldn’t imagine… She couldn’t…
“It was the first time they sent me to therapy. Hardly the last.”
He said it so offhandedly. So…dispassionately. She could hardly reconcile this man on the couch with the man she’d gotten to know over the past six months. “You…”
He gave her one of those rueful, awful smiles as if the world was a cruel, cosmic joke all the time. “Have to save questions about that for tomorrow, I guess.”
Except, now that she’d started it, part of her didn’t want to know how this story ended. All she wanted to know was that he was whole and real and here. A good man. She didn’t want to know about the tragedies that had shaped him—they hurt too much.
But she’d opened up Pandora’s box, and here was all the hurt he’d tried to convince her to avoid.
When would she ever listen?