Chapter 20

Gabe woke up the next morning wrapped up in dancing candy cane sheets, a warm woman tangled up with him.

Sadly, they weren’t naked. It was too damn cold for that. Anything that wasn’t covered or wrapped up in the approximately ten blankets they’d put on the couch bed felt like ice. He was pretty sure his nose would never thaw. But underneath the layers of blankets and clothes, there was a warmth he had no interest in leaving.

He tried to shrug the blankets closer to his face without actually unwinding his arms from around Monica, but that didn’t help, and since she was currently laying on top of his arm, he decided to use her instead of the blanket.

He nuzzled into her neck, cold nose against warm, smooth skin, until she shrieked awake. Then she slapped him. Hard.

“Sorry,” he murmured against her neck, trying not to grin against it.

“No, you’re not.”

“No, I’m not.”

She sighed but curled closer. “It’s freezing.”

“I hear that happens when your electricity goes out and it’s below zero. The snow is insulating us somewhat though.”

“Somewhat my butt.” She shivered, wrapping her arms around him more tightly.

He yawned into her hair, his face slowly thawing out. It was nice. Nice not to have to jump up and worry about chores, nice to be lazy and doze. Nice to have someone to wake up to, mumble sleepily to, feel…

He blinked open his eyes, everything inside of him unaccountably stilling at the horrible realization.

This was more than nice—it was like heaven. It was a joy to wake up with someone in bed with him, lack of heat or no. It was a comfort and a bone-deep contentment he’d never, ever, ever had. And it was as temporary as the snow outside.

He knew he could go without sex for months, and he also knew he could find sex if he wanted it. There didn’t have to be a lack of that after this was over. And if all else failed, he had his own damn hand. Dry spells happened. He knew how to handle a dry spell.

But he’d never… Well, he’d never had someone to wake up with, someone to cook meals with and just…live with. Which was what this blizzard had forced him and Monica to do. Now he’d experienced it, and he wanted it. To last. To be real.

It was like waking up in that hospital room all over again. His world changed, leveled, and the people he’d counted on, cared about, taken away.

Alone. He’d be that dark, ugly alone again. The only difference was the lack of physical injuries, and he had the sinking suspicion there’d be plenty of emotional ones to make up for it.

There wasn’t anywhere to go with this realization. He was stuck in this bed, the damage already done, even if he pulled away and started acting like a dick. Whether it was today or two days from now, the end was a reality that was going to crash down on him. Hard. Painful.

So why not enjoy it for those few more days? What was done was done, and no number of minutes or days would change the awful end result. Why not put it off?

Especially when it was damn cold beyond these blankets. At least there’d be work to do eventually. Here, all he could do was wallow, so he’d enjoy what he had and when he had to go back to not having her…

Well, he was used to that. Having someone and then not. He’d learned early and often that was life.

He started disentangling himself from her, suddenly not so worried about the cold. Sometimes cold was better than warmth. “I’ll go start the coffee.”

“Wait.” She held on tighter. “I have to ask you my question.”

He stiffened in spite of himself. He would have rather she not been able to feel that physical reaction, but he couldn’t exactly take it back. “You really want to do that again?” He hoped he sounded dismissive. He was afraid he sounded pained.

She burrowed closer, pressing a kiss to his neck. “Yes, I really do.”

“All right.” After all, yesterday’s question had ended in sex. Even if that had made everything weird. Weird sex was still sex, and the sex was good, no matter the circumstances.

Damn good. The best. Seriously, what the hell was wrong with him?

“What experience with therapists made you hate them so much?”

He should have predicted that was where she’d go with today’s question. He’d laid the seeds, and it was his own fault for allowing them to sprout. If he’d been thinking, if he had any self-preservation skills left, he would have made up some story in advance.

He should lie, and even as he told himself to come up with one right that second, he knew…

She’d asked him not to lie to her and he’d agreed.

“The fire thing… Well, believe it or not, people don’t take it lightly when you set fires indoors at weddings.” He said it lightly, even as his gut clenched against old memories of anger, confusion, pain. Having to sit at that table with a bunch of strangers while Mom and Evan sat with his kids at the head table. He’d realized at some point he was sitting with the help: photographer, reverend, florist. A little boy, left alone at his mother’s wedding.

Even now, he didn’t feel much regret at fooling around with the lighter he’d found in the bathroom. Even now, he got a grim kind of satisfaction remembering the way the flame had licked up the paper decoration that had hung in the hallway that led back to the main reception area.

Warped, sure, but he could accept warped. He wasn’t a liar, and he didn’t hurt people. He’d take messed up in the head over anything Evan was.

“Imagine that,” she murmured. Her leg was curled over his, her arm over his chest. She reached up and began drawing her fingers over his cheek, down his jawbone, then back up. Sweet. Comforting.

Just as he had last night, he felt a tightening in his chest. When she’d been crying over Colin, thinking she was a failure when she was the best mom he’d ever known. That clutching, painful knot that hadn’t dissipated till he’d reached out and held her while she cried.

Now the clutching, painful knot was there in his chest because she was offering him the same. Comfort. Touch. Care.

“Evan wanted me punished or sent away, but eventually they agreed on counseling. Over the years, that would be a constant. I don’t know how many offices I was dragged into, how many people tried to twist what I felt into something else or shove a pill down my throat so I felt nothing at all.”

“That isn’t what counseling should be,” she whispered against his neck. “I’m not a psychiatrist, but counseling isn’t about telling you what you feel.”

“But that’s what they did. Told me what to feel. Told Evan what he wanted to hear. I was warped and damaged and a threat.”

She leveraged up on her elbow, looking down at him, her eyebrows drawn together. “That can’t possibly be true.”

“And yet…”

“No, I meant…you’re none of those things. I’m not denying that those things happened to you. I’m expressing my utter confusion.”

“He paid them off, Monica. Or threatened them. I don’t know. But they were working for him.”

“Surely… You take an oath. You… Surely someone told him go to hell.”

He snorted a laugh at the idea of anyone saying that to Evan Milan. “No, not a… Well, I suppose there were a few they had me see that… I’d forgotten that.” Forgotten in all his bitterness and rage that there had been a few friendly faces. It was just he’d never seen them again.

“What?”

“There were shrinks they took me to who we never went back to. I suppose they didn’t fall in line with what Evan wanted them to say.”

Monica was quiet, her fingers still trailing up and down his jaw.

“Would you?” he asked, even though it was a stupid question. Of course she never would, and if she would, she’d never admit it.

But she was quiet for a few moments as if she was really considering it. “For money? No, I couldn’t manipulate a patient for money.”

“No amount?”

She shook her head. “Maybe it’s because I’ve never had to live in real poverty, but I can’t imagine any sum that would assuage the guilt I would feel. That being said…I can’t say I’d never do it.”

He frowned at her. “You can’t?”

She lay back down on the pillow as if considering her words. She looked downright angelic with her blond hair spread out all over the pillow, her blue eyes wide and serious.

“Maybe I’ve watched too many episodes of Law & Order, but I can think of a few situations where I’d capitulate, mainly involving any threats to my loved ones I couldn’t circumnavigate.”

“Most people would just say no, they wouldn’t do it.”

“I’m under no illusions that I’m a saint, Gabe. Or that I wouldn’t do something that repulsed me under the right awful circumstances. Maybe that comes from working with military men. Maybe I’m just too practical to fancy myself the most noble. Sometimes people have to do ugly things they never thought they would. That I do know.”

No one he’d ever spoken to had articulated it quite like that, even Alex and Jack. They didn’t discuss the things they’d done, the questionable choices they’d sometimes made because of war. Because they’d had to.

But she’d put it all into words that shifted something inside of him. Sometimes people have to do ugly things they never thought they would.

He knew in that moment she’d understand. All of it. The darkest pieces of himself, and she’d assuage all that guilt, all that wrong and warped. She’d say he was fine, and she’d mean it—another terrible realization in a long line of them. Because no matter that it was irrevocably true, that he was one hundred percent certain, it didn’t change basic facts.

She’d always love her husband. Colin would always come first. Hell, being a therapist would always come first. If he hadn’t lived through hell, maybe he could believe he could contort himself into the spaces that were left.

But he’d tried that too often and too much as a kid to think it was possible. There was only so much room a person had in their life, and she didn’t have much of any.

He wouldn’t cut himself to pieces to fit into them.

* * *

It was an odd thing to have this conversation while actually touching each other, practically being on top of each other. While he spoke, thought, breathed, Monica could feel the tension in him. The way he held himself still or purposefully relaxed. She could feel all that emotion roll through him, and it made it all more honest somehow. Connecting.

She shouldn’t want that, but after last night, she was under fewer and fewer illusions she had any control over this thing between them. She’d cried in front of him, sobbed like a baby. He simply undid her completely, and she knew he wasn’t trying to.

But very much against her will, she’d shown him a million vulnerable sides of herself, sides she’d held under lock and key so long she’d forgotten they existed. As if it was second nature, he’d opened that lock and Monica had poured out. Not the mother or the therapist, just a person.

She hadn’t been smart enough to ward it off, strong enough to walk away from all that. She’d fallen in love with him knowing nothing could come of it.

Can nothing really come from it?

She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure she was ready to answer that question. She certainly wasn’t anywhere near ready to ask it. So she focused on the other questions.

“What’s your second question for me?”

“Second?” He narrowed his eyes. “That was not my question, cheater.”

She shrugged in that same negligent way he always did. “It was a question. I answered it.”

He scowled at her, and she wanted to press a kiss to it. Press herself to him. She wanted to forget questions and realities and the future. For the first time maybe in her whole life, she wanted to dwell in a moment, relish it, and not worry about what was next.

But he asked his question.

“Cats or dogs?”

She huffed. “That is not your question.”

“Oh, but it is. A very serious, important question that will tell me all I need to know about you.”

She rolled her eyes. Well, if he didn’t want to take it seriously, that was fine. She still would, and she’d answer his questions with complete and utter honesty. “Dogs. Cats creep me out.”

He laughed way harder at that than he should have.

“What’s so funny about that? Cats are creepy. You never hear them coming, and they have those eyes that glow and just…stare.”

When he finally stopped laughing, he grinned, twirling a piece of hair around his finger. “That’s just exactly what I told Bec when she informed me I was living under the same roof as a cat. Not that I’ve ever seen said cat, thank God.”

“Oh God. Becca’s cat?” She shuddered for dramatic effect. “It has these weird, yellow eyes that glow, and I swear, with enough plotting, it could eat your heart out before you even woke up.”

“You’ve seen the fabled Hannibal?”

Monica nodded. “On the day of the wedding, we helped Becca get all the dresses out of her closet upstairs, and there he was. Glowing, creepy cat eyes ready to like…pounce and eat my soul.”

“But is it creepier than the goat?”

Monica fisted a hand to her heart. “How dare you insult Ron Swanson?”

“I’m deeply, deeply sorry for such an affront.”

Then they were both laughing, wrapped up in each other and a million blankets, warm in this little world they’d built while outside it was frigidly cold.

She wanted this. Camaraderie. A relationship. All those things she’d had with Dex. This was different. Gabe was different—she was different. But she wanted that experience again. Someone in her life. A partner. Since Dex’s death, no one else had even come close to making her want that.

Of course, the man who did… She wanted to laugh for a completely different reason. He wouldn’t agree to it in a million years.

But why was that? He didn’t want to settle down or build what his friends had, but why? Was it as simple as not wanting something, or did it go deeper, into all the ways he’d been hurt growing up?

Well, maybe that’d be her question for tomorrow.

He dropped a casual kiss to her temple. “I need coffee,” he said on a yawn. He unraveled himself from her and the blankets, and got out of bed, cursing as he walked to the kitchen, presumably at the cold.

She watched him in her kitchen, gathering the things he’d need, then fiddling with the coffeepot. As if he belonged there, doing little things for her—for them. She wanted him to belong there.

“We’re going to have to make an effort to get out of here today,” he stated casually.

It hurt, of course, that after everything, he’d still be eager to get out of here. But beneath the hurt was also a panic.

She didn’t want to lose this. A man in her kitchen making her coffee in the morning. A man who held her when she cried over feeling like a failure to her son. A man who relaxed when she traced his jaw.

Every second of being with him only reinforced what she wanted. What she was starting to think she needed—a partnership, this partnership. She liked it. It made her feel good, and it didn’t stop things from hurting. In fact, some things hurt worse.

But then he held her. Kissed her or made her coffee and… There had to be some way…some way. She just had to figure out how to get through to him.

“Why today?” she asked, attempting to sound as casual as he had.

“We’ll run out of firewood if we’re not careful. Who knows when the power will come back, and I don’t particularly want to freeze to death. Seems like a nasty way to go.”

“Well, there are a few piles of wood in the back. They’re just under approximately eighty gajillion feet of snow.”

“Eighty gajillion is the scientific term. I don’t know how much good it’ll do if it’s wet, but we can give it a shot. All else fails, if we can manage a path to the Shaws’ we can see if they have any extra wood or if they have power.”

Monica scooted beneath the blanket, trying to hide the wide grin splitting her face. He wasn’t trying to escape. He just wanted wood. It was a good sign. A positive sign that if she found the right combination of words, she could convince him that they could find a way to work things out.

Telling him she had fallen in love with him was certainly not the right tack to take, but if they had time, if he wasn’t running away, she could find the right path, the right words.

She could find them a chance.