Chapter Ten
Why was this happening? Why had she said any of that? She should have ignored him. She’d yelled at him. Horrible things she’d wanted to keep to herself forever. Like him wanting to wait to have a baby had planted an awful fear inside of her, and how everything about the following months had made it grow.
She’d never wanted him to know all that, but he wouldn’t back off or down and now she was crying in front of him and it changed nothing.
Nothing.
“Can’t you just leave me alone?” Alone to cry and hurt and give in to all this without him seeing it.
“It seems as though we’ve done a little bit too much of that.”
It somehow hurt more because it was true. There had been too much alone and too many silences, but it was too late. You didn’t fix silences because you couldn’t go back and talk instead. They existed forever. They were a symptom of something else.
She tried to calm her shaky breath, the tears overflowing. She had to be strong somehow. Because if she gave in to more of this she wouldn’t just have a failed marriage, she’d have to remember this horrible, horrible moment for the rest of her life.
“If you won’t leave, I’ll leave,” she managed to say, though she didn’t think it sounded as strong out loud as she’d hoped it would. But it didn’t matter. She moved for the door, certain, certain, Carter wouldn’t follow.
But he moved in front of her, and he didn’t stop with getting in her way. He took her by the shoulders, his big hands enveloping them, holding her tight and in place.
She wanted to push him and yell at him and tell him to let her go. She wanted to run away. But all she could seem to do was sob out a breath.
His hands came to her face, holding her there between them. Hands that had healed people and helped people and she’d never understood why he held her with such gentleness when there was so much inside of him and so little for her to offer.
There’d been blind faith once, but now it was gone. Still she couldn’t seem to do anything but stand here and cry. Stand here and let him touch her as though she were something precious to him.
“Why do you always run away when it matters?” he asked, and his voice was low and rusty. Emotional. And confronting. She didn’t want him to be hurt. Didn’t want him…wanting things from her. Emotions and truths.
The silences had been better than this. Than ripping herself apart for the sake of nothing. The having him ask her in that hurt voice why she was running.
“Sierra. This matters. To you. To me. It’s going to end up mattering to our child no matter what happens. I know it’s hard and it hurts…” He gripped her face more firmly, tipping it so she looked up at him.
She closed her eyes against seeing all that hurt in the depths of his blue eyes.
“Cole gave me advice and I thought it was wrong and stupid, but maybe he really was right and I was wrong. Wouldn’t that be funny?”
“Car—”
“Love is showing each other your cracks. Maybe more than that, maybe it’s trusting each other with your flaws. Your imperfections. Neither of us have done that at all.”
“I can’t. I can’t trust you with that,” she managed to whisper. Even though the words were welling up inside of her. All those flaws. The things she’d ignored but here they were.
She opened her eyes when he said nothing, and it was worse than the determination and hurt that had been there when she’d closed them. His confusion was evident along with that hurt, and then a spark of desperation in the way he held her face, in the way his eyes were a little wild.
It was that more than anything that had the words tumbling out of her mouth. Broken up by sobs, but said nonetheless. He wanted her flaws? He wanted to make this harder than what it was? What choice did she have? He was the one who knew best. The one who made the choices.
“Just let me go, Carter. I’m not good enough for you.”
“Sierra—”
“No. No, don’t argue with me. You finally saw it—I know you did. Because you didn’t turn to me when you were in your darkest hour. You shut me out because you knew I wasn’t good enough to be at your side. And you were right. Completely, utterly right and I won’t go back to wondering when the other shoe’s going to drop. I’m not good enough. I was stupid to think I could pretend. So, let me go.”
He exhaled, something close to a gasp as if she’d physically harmed him, and then his hands weren’t on her face, they were around her, pulling her close and against him. He held her there, so tight she could barely breathe enough to cry, but the tears poured out of her anyway. The pain searing and deep.
But he pressed his forehead into the crook of her neck, holding her, whispering against her skin. “No. God. No.”
She wanted to argue with him. Yes! Let me go! Now! But all she could do was cry into his hair. She shouldn’t let him hold her, but it felt…
She’d been holding herself so tight, so apart. Even that night they’d made this child growing in her there’d been a silence, an edge keeping them apart. But this…
Against her will, against all her determinations, her muscles relaxed. She melted into him, truly and really. She cried all of her broken-hearted dreams out and into him, and he held her. Whispering words of love. Promises she couldn’t ever believe again.
She didn’t know how long it lasted, how many tears she had. But he held her through it all. He murmured everything she’d wanted to hear months ago, but even with all the crying she was numb to it.
“I love you,” and it was said in that same vehement voice he’d used when she’d laughed the first time he’d said it to her. She’d laughed because she’d wanted so badly to tell him she loved him too. Because she knew she shouldn’t. And he shouldn’t.
She’d always known, but he’d used that voice and she’d been a goner. Look at where it had gotten her.
She had to find her strength. She had to walk away, but he punctuated those weaponized words with the brush of his mouth against her shoulder where her collar had slid down. He held her and he kissed her there.
“You’re beautiful and bright. You make my dull, plodding life sparkle.” He kissed her again, the brush of his lips up the curve of her neck would never, ever fail to make her knees go weak.
But she had to be strong. Tell him to stop. Words didn’t change what they were, and what they couldn’t be. Neither did the warm, lazy sensations spilling through her.
“You don’t want your life to sparkle, Carter. You want it to matter.”
He paused briefly before his mouth brushed her cheek, featherlight, sweet. “I want both. I want you. I want to fight for this.” His mouth closed over hers, insistent, needy. Vulnerable.
Carter McArthur vulnerable. She really had ruined him. Spread her brokenness or something and she couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t stand it. She had to do something to prove to him this was a mistake.
So, she kissed him back, because they’d done this a few weeks ago, hadn’t they? Come together and he’d disappeared. Maybe they hadn’t talked then like they’d talked now, but it was all the same.
A weakness. A lapse in judgment.
When she was gone when he woke up in the morning, he’d know, really know, how right she was.
And it’d all be over.
*
There was a strange moment in the kiss when Carter didn’t think Sierra would reciprocate. He’d kissed her and for seconds she’d stood there like a statue, as if figuring out a difficult math equation while he poured his heart and soul into her.
But then her mouth moved under his. Not soft—and if it had been anything like the last time they’d done this he would have found that amazing. New. Hot.
But he was raw. Raw. Cut open and bleeding and he needed some softness. Some healing. So he swept his fingers into her hair, cupping her scalp, angling her head so he could settle himself at the corner of her mouth and make his way to the other side.
She let out a shuddery sigh, and though there was some acquiescence in that, there was also a band of tension in her. Even in kissing him, in crying into him, in holding each other, there were pieces of herself she was holding apart. Saving to give herself the fuel to run away.
He couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t give her that, because while he was an expert in thinking he knew what was best for people, and probably being wrong on occasion, this wasn’t like that. It wasn’t in knowing better than her. It wasn’t in having a better view on the situation.
It was seeing her fear, her insecurity, her cracks and needing to fill them. With love. With all the certainty he felt. Because she was wrong. She thought his silences had been about her, about her lack of worth.
Guilt, dark and vicious and ugly swept through him, but he didn’t let that leak into his kiss, into the gentle way he held her hair.
He’d been worse than an idiot, worse than blind, but the only way to fix that, to make up for it, to learn and heal and grow from that horrible mistake was to show her the opposite of what he’d shown her then.
No silences, no keeping himself apart because he’d felt less and worthless from the knowledge of his parentage. No withdrawing until he connected all the dots by himself.
Marriage and love weren’t about only giving the best to each other, something he still had trouble really wrapping his head around. But the truth of it existed in her tears, in this pain. Making a relationship work was about turning to each other, even when it was hard, even when it didn’t make sense, even when the thing you most wanted to do in the world was turn away and protect your already bruised heart.
“I’ve made such a mess of things,” he murmured against her mouth, and then her temple. “We’ve made such a mess of things,” he corrected, because silences went two ways. They’d each been silent for similar reasons, both been too afraid to reach out for the other.
“Yes,” she agreed, tilting her head so his mouth could trail down her neck. “It’s not the kind of mess you can clean up.”
He stopped, though he kept his hands in her hair as he pulled his head away to look down at her. Misery, exhaustion, and yet she didn’t push him away. She didn’t tell him to stop.
He dropped his forehead to hers, looking into her wary eyes. He couldn’t cure her wariness. Couldn’t convince her it was a mess they would clean up. Not in all the ways he was used to or understood. Reason and talking wouldn’t solve this problem.
He vowed to solve it anyway. To talk through it. To keep showing up. To ask Cole for a million pieces of advice. To never turn away from Sierra again no matter how much he wanted to keep his hurt to himself where it felt like it belonged.
But a vow he made to himself didn’t count, did it? Wasn’t that the point of all this? It didn’t matter if she believed him, if she thought he was weak or wrong. The vow, his intention—telling it to her was the thing that mattered.
“I don’t believe that. We can fix this,” he said roughly, holding her tight when she tried to look away. “I love you. I want you. The whole of who you are, the whole of what I love, is not the mistakes we made, Sierra.”
“I need you to let me go.”
He knew she didn’t just mean physically. Because she could certainly pull his hands off her face. She could move out of his grasp.
But she didn’t. She didn’t.
“I’m not ever letting you go,” he said. “You need me to hold on.”
“Don’t tell me what I ne—”
He covered her mouth with his, pouring everything he was into that kiss. Everything she meant. Words were important, and so were actions. The whole of it was important, not just one thing or the other. Not just being perfect or being imperfect.
It was the all of himself that he needed to give her, and maybe if he could do that, she’d trust him enough to give it back. Even if she didn’t now, he’d keep doing it until she could.
“We did it all wrong there for a while,” he said, punctuating the words with kisses as he moved her back toward the bed. “But we can fix that. We can change that. I believe that.”
“I don’t,” she whispered, but her eyes were wide and open instead of hard. When he laid her out on the bed, she went easily, stretching out on the soft blankets and big mattress. “I don’t believe it at all.”
Now, he told himself. She doesn’t believe it now, but you can change that. He had to change it. “Let me,” he murmured.
“Let you what?” she asked, new tears forming in her eyes. But she lay there, and he had to believe this was a start. An opening.
This was what Cole had talked about when he’d said hard work and trying hard weren’t the same. Trying hard meant hurting and failing and going on anyway. It meant things took time even when you didn’t want them to.
It meant giving yourself even when you weren’t guaranteed anything back.
He slowly lifted the hem of her sweatshirt up. She didn’t stop him. In fact, she moved so he could lift it off of her completely, and then she lay back down. He tugged down the stretchy pants she wore, until she was lying underneath him in nothing but her underwear.
His gorgeous wife, pale skin and the colorful smattering of tattoos on one arm. Freckles on her shoulder and nose like gold dust. She looked impossibly vulnerable when he’d always seen her as a force of nature.
She was both, of course, and it was a revelation to realize she, and he, could be both. Weak and strong. Right and wrong. Insecure and sure.
“Let me show you.”