Addicted (Ethan Frost #2)(56)

But he also has a point. I saw Ethan with his mother at that fund-raiser, saw how happy they were together, saw how much he loves her. This is the same woman who haunts my nightmares, with her bright red lipstick and strident voice and insistence on protecting her son no matter the cost. For me, she’ll always be the wicked witch, my own personal Maleficent just waiting to tear me apart with her vicious nature and too-sharp claws.

When we got back together, I told him I didn’t want to talk about his family. I didn’t want to know them, didn’t want to hear about them, didn’t want to have anything to do with them. I thought that would be enough. That if I put up a wall between us then I would be able to live with who they are and what they’d done to me.

Because they don’t matter. I won’t let them matter. It’s Ethan I love, Ethan I want to be with.

The only problem, the only flaw in my logic, is that they do matter … to him. As they should. I wouldn’t wish my relationship with my parents on anyone. The disdain, the distrust, the out-and-out dislike. The betrayal. No, I don’t want that for Ethan. But at the same time, I’m not sure I can take anything less than his total repudiation of them.

It’s not fair, maybe it’s not even right, but it’s how I feel.

Because I was good. For so long, I was doing okay. I had a life—maybe not a great, exciting life—but a good life. A steady life. One that made me feel strong and secure and healthy.

And now—now I have a great life. I have Ethan’s love for me, a job I adore, and I have my feelings for Ethan. Feelings that the word love doesn’t come close to touching. I don’t think there’s a word in the entire English language that encompasses the depths of emotion I have for that man.

And yet my life has gone to hell. I don’t feel safe, I don’t feel steady and I sure as hell don’t feel healthy. How can I when every day is a new roller-coaster ride? When every moment is a terrifying journey into one more unknown?

I’ve survived this long because I made a plan and I stuck to it. It gave me something to focus on, something to aim for when everything else in my life had gone to hell. Now, it feels like my only goal is to get through the day without an emotional breakdown.

It’s not enough. Not nearly enough—especially when I so rarely even make that goal.

Is this what my life with Ethan is destined to be? Great passion, towering emotions, but rudderless? Directionless? A joyride without the joy? The thought terrifies me as nothing else could.

And so I run. I run and run and run. I run until my back aches, until my lungs feel like they’re going to burst, until my legs are nothing but limp noodles beneath me. And then I run some more. For miles, for hours.

I’m way down the beach when my headlong flight catches up to me and I collapse on the sand, my trembling legs refusing to take me one step farther. It’s a long time since I’ve run like this, since I’ve used physical exertion as an exorcist as much as an exercise.

I look around me, try to figure out where I am. Try to figure out how far I’ve run. But none of the houses look the least bit familiar and I’m too tired to walk up to the street and try to find a sign.

Besides, I just don’t care enough. There’s a part of me that would be more than happy to lay here forever—or at least until the lifeguards come upon me in the morning.

With that thought in mind, I turn my music off—it’s Imagine Dragons now, as I’ve long since exhausted my 1975 playlist—and toss the phone next to me on the sand. And then I listen—to the sound of the ocean rolling in, to the water lapping at the shore, to the far-off sound of a car making its way through the dark and empty streets.

It’s peaceful, in a way nothing in my life has been peaceful in so long. Even as the cramps set in—partly from the running, partly from stopping without stretching out, and partly from lying here on this cold, wet sand—I find myself loathe to move. Loathe to do anything but take these moments as they come.

But it can’t last. Nothing does. And only a few minutes go by before my phone starts to buzz. There’s a part of me that wants to ignore it, to just let it go, to stay in the moment—and the headspace—that I am currently occupying. But there’s only one person who would be calling me now and he doesn’t deserve to be ignored.

I pick up the phone, am shocked to realize that it’s nearly three-thirty in the morning. That I really have been running for hours. And that I have already missed three calls from Ethan. Shit.

“I’m okay,” I tell him the second I pick up the phone.

There’s a couple of beats of silence, as if he’s trying to get a grip on his temper and himself. Then, “Where are you?” It’s clipped and stilted and calm, so calm that I know he’s absolutely furious.

“I’ve been running on the beach. I’m fine,” I tell him again.

“I’m on the beach and I don’t see you. Where. Are. You?”

“I don’t know. I ran pretty far.”

“I am aware of that—I’ve been looking for you for the last hour.”

Shit. His tone is perfectly modulated, perfectly polite—and lacking any and all warmth. He really is furious. I sit up, glance around the shadowed beach looking for something that will tell me where I am.

There are a couple of signs farther up the beach and I walk toward them, ignoring the cramps in my legs. One of the signs reads Coastal Preservation Project and suddenly I know exactly where I am.