CHAPTER NINETEEN
Serena knew she should put the top back on the box. She knew she should get back on the chair and eat the food he’d brought her. She knew she had no right to pry into Sean’s life, especially without his permission. She knew she should wait for him to want to share these pictures with her.
But all the things she knew, and how badly she wanted to know him better, got so blurred inside her head that she couldn’t stop herself from sitting cross-legged on the floor and reaching for the pictures.
Her hands were shaking as she stared at the woman in the photo. Serena recognized Sean’s smile on her face, so easy, so captivating. Because even though his mother was far too thin in the picture, and there was pain behind her eyes, when she smiled into her son’s camera, pure, sweet love shone through.
How many times, Serena wondered, had Sean taken out this picture to stare at it? And how many times had he wished that his mother had survived?
A tear fell unnoticed down her cheek as she carefully laid the photo down and reached into the pile for another. A large family stared back at her, their smiles slightly forced, but beautiful nonetheless. His three brothers were all big and handsome like him. His two sisters were incredibly pretty, the older one more elegant and serious, the younger obviously full of spunk.
But his father...all she could think, as she stared at the photo, was that his father looked broken. As if he simply couldn’t imagine going on without the woman he loved.
Serena hadn’t been able to see anything but the love in his mother’s eyes when she’d looked at that first picture, but as she laid the family photo down on the floor beside it and picked up another photo of the ocean tide on a smooth, sandy beach, she realized just how talented a photographer Sean was. Not, of course, that she was surprised. Everything he did, he did well, from schoolwork, to baseball, to kissing her.
But even though each of the three photos was very different—a candid of his mother, a portrait of his family, and a nature shot—each had a distinct perspective. Technically, they were all excellent, but it was the emotion in every one of them that held her captive.
One picture after another, she learned about the man she’d fallen for. Saw not only how much his mother and his family meant to him, but also how much he saw all around him. He’d joked about taking pictures of bugs as a kid, but now she knew that he saw even the smallest things that most everyone else—including her—never noticed at all. Things the rest of them never even thought to look for. It was just how she felt whenever he looked at her, whenever he called her beautiful, like he saw everything she was trying so hard to keep hidden. Not just from everyone else, but even from herself.
But it was a photo near the bottom of the pile that made her forget not to gasp out loud.
Sean’s mother was sleeping in the picture. She was in a hospital bed, with wires and tubes all over and around her. She was painfully thin and pale. So horribly pale that it was obvious there was nothing more to be done for her. Serena stared at the picture, her heart breaking for him all over again.
“What the hell are you doing?”
She was still holding the picture of his mother in the hospital as she slowly turned to face him. The utter despair on his face almost made her lose her voice. But though she’d totally screwed up and needed to apologize, she first needed him to know how much she cared for him. And that she wanted so badly to help heal his pain.
“I’m so sorry, Sean. Your mother—” She looked down at the heart-wrenching photo in her hand. “—she’s beautiful.”
In a flash, he ripped the photo from her fingers. Roughly, quickly, he gathered them all up and threw them back into the box.
“Careful!” she pleaded as she came to her feet. “Those pictures you took, they’re precious. You shouldn’t ruin them because you’re angry with me.” Despair had turned to fury in his dark eyes as he swung around to face her. Her chest, her stomach, all of her hurt, as she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to look. I swear I didn’t. I accidentally kicked the box and when the cover came off—”
“It sure doesn’t look like a goddamned accident to me, you sitting there with my pictures on the floor all around you.”
He was right. Even though finding the pictures had been an accident, poring through them hadn’t been. “I shouldn’t have looked at them. I know I shouldn’t have, not when you weren’t ready to show them to me.” She wanted to reach out to him, wanted to touch him again, wanted to try to close the huge distance that was growing between them. Especially when she’d never seen him look so anguished. “But I...”
He shifted just out of range of her fingertips. “But what? You thought you’d do it anyway just because you felt like it? Because you’ve always gotten everything you wanted so you figured this was one more thing that should be yours?”
She sucked in a shaky breath even though all the oxygen in the room had been sucked out by her stupid decision to pry into his past, his emotions, the most painful part of his life.
“I care about you, Sean, you know that I do,” she told him in a voice barely above a whisper. “And when I saw the picture on top, when I realized it was your mother, I—” Her voice broke on the single syllable. “I’m sorry.”
“How could you?” But he didn’t give her a chance to try to answer. “I thought I knew you.”
“You do know me.”
“Do I? Or was I just being an idiot, blinded by your face like everyone else?”
It stung, God, how it stung, to hear him talk about her looks right now, and to blame his feelings on them. Especially after the way she’d told him last night that he was the only person in her life who didn’t look at her face as a commodity.
“I’m so sorry for looking at the pictures without your consent, sorrier than you’ll ever know,” she said again as she tried to push away his heated words, words she didn’t want to believe he could possibly mean. He was grieving and in terrible pain over the loss of his mother, and her actions had obviously brought all of those feelings back up before he was ready to deal with them. “But I’ve seen the way you look every time your mother comes up and I want so badly to be there for you.”
“So this is how you thought you’d do it? By snooping through my things?”
Why couldn’t he see that she hadn’t meant to hurt him? That she’d only done what she had because she cared so much about him? And that it also hurt her the way he was shutting down, shutting her out so completely?
“You asked me from the start to trust you. You said it was okay to be scared, because you’d make sure that I didn’t get hurt, and that we wouldn’t move too fast. I’ve tried to keep trusting you, tried so hard that sometimes I actually think I’ve succeeded at conquering some of my own demons. But now, with these photos which obviously mean everything to you, why can’t you trust me, too?” When he didn’t say anything, even though something way down deep inside of her it felt like everything was starting to shatter, she still couldn’t let herself give up on him. On them. “I know I can’t understand what it must be like to lose your mother. But if you can just try to let me in a little—”
“How many times have you spoken to your mother since you’ve been on campus?”
“I…” Her throat felt as raw as if she’d been crying all night rather than sleeping in Sean’s arms. “I haven’t.”
“Do you know how many times I would have given anything to talk to my mom again? You haven’t even talked to yours at all, but now you want me to open up to you about mine being dead?”
She knew he was hurting terribly, but for everything he thought she didn’t understand about him, there was just as much he didn’t understand about her. And what he didn’t know about her mattered. Mattered a lot, even if it wasn’t life and death.
“Do you know why I haven’t talked to my mom? Because she won’t call me back. She won’t write me back, won’t have anything at all to do with me, because she’s so mad at me for finally making my own decisions about everything. But even though she doesn’t understand why I need to make my own decisions for once in my life, I’ve been trying so hard to make sure they’re the right ones.” God, she could hardly think it, let alone say it aloud, but she had to. “Now you’re making me think I haven’t. Now you’re making me wonder if the dumbest thing I ever did was trust you with myself. With my heart.” Her breath was coming fast and her ears were ringing as if she was in the front row of a hard-rock concert. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, so impossibly sorry that you’re hurting. I’m so sorry you lost your mom. I’m so sorry I pried into your private things. I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have kept looking at your pictures. One day I hope you’ll be able to forgive me. But most of all, one day—” She could barely get the words out around the tears that clogged her throat as she reached blindly for the doorknob, needing to run so he wouldn’t see just how broken she felt about opening up her heart to him just in time for him to break it in two. “One day I hope you’ll find a way to be happy again. Because there’s nothing I want more for you than that.”