Finding It (Losing It, #3)(48)

My hands shot out, and I gripped his arms.

“Don’t. Don’t do that.” I repeated the words he said to me in that café bathroom.

“Kelsey …”

I tugged on his arms, but they were immovable stone columns. I said, “Come back to me.” I tugged again, and this time the stone gave way. His hip hit the bed beside mine, but his chest draped across mine. He dropped his face into the hollow between my neck and shoulder, and his hands went to my shoulders, his touch now soft and soothing.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“Ssh.” I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and held on to him as tightly as I could. I didn’t know what plagued him, but I could guess, and all my guesses put my problems to shame.

“I never wanted to hurt you,” he whispered.

This was why he’d pushed me away. He’d thought I couldn’t handle this or wouldn’t want to. But the truth was … I’d grown up in the kind of world where people hurt you on purpose. To prove a point or to play a game. I’d take Jackson’s kind of hurt any day.

“Hey,” I said, pulling his face up until his eyes met mine. “You haven’t hurt me. I’m fine.”

He shook his head. “You don’t know, Kelsey. There’s this thing …”

“We’ve all got things like that, Jackson. I don’t care.”

I grasped his jaw and pulled his lips closer to mine.

Millimeters away from my mouth, he jerked back. “You should care. You don’t know anything about me.”

“Then tell me.”

He rolled over onto his back next to me and ran his hand across his face. I shifted onto my side, and laid my head on his chest.

He said, “Kelsey …”

I closed my eyes, settling into him. “You’re going to have to pry me off because I’m not going anywhere. And I can be pretty damn stubborn.”

He paused, and then breathed in an impression of a laugh. After a few seconds, breathing became breathing again and the laughter disappeared, but his arms settled around me. And that was enough.

We stayed locked together in bed for the rest of the day. Sometimes sleeping. Sometimes not. But no matter how we shifted or in what positions we lay, we never stopped touching for more than a few seconds.

And each time I was shocked by the ache I felt in those moments. It uncoiled quickly, piercing and pulling and opening a hole in my chest that echoed like an empty cavern until his skin met mine again. Each time I would sigh in relief, and hold him tightly, probably too tightly for a few seconds. But he never said anything. Neither of us did. Not about his dream or the way I was clinging to him. Not about the darkness that was so clearly lurking in both of us, filling up the spaces between the skin and muscle and bone.

We didn’t say a word, and I was reminded of those first few seconds when we’d leapt off the bridge in Prague. There had been so much noise and fear and adrenaline, but most of all there had been a permeating, inevitable, and calming silence as we fell and fell and fell.

When we finally climbed out of bed, we spent the evening walking around Florence. We did get that gelato. And we saw the replica statue of David outside the museum, which was close enough to seeing the real thing for us.

We had dinner on the garden terrace on the roof of our hotel, and we slept in each other’s arms again that night.

But still … all we ever did was touch.

And feel.





20


I WAS FAIRLY certain that Hunt had meant to leave and jet off to another place the next day, but he hadn’t counted on spending the whole first day in bed. I’d thought once that Hunt was like gravity, but the real gravity was between us. Neither Hunt nor I had anticipated how much that pull would take over.

It was irrational, but I kept feeling like we’d lose whatever this was if we left our little hotel in Florence. Sometimes, I felt like we’d lose it if we even left the bed. It was an awful thing to be terrified of waking up, of standing, of going outside.

It was stupid, and when I wasn’t petrified, I was berating myself for it.

I was not this girl. I was not the girl who let her whole world revolve around a man. But then again, I’d never really let my world revolve around anything else but me. Now that I had stepped out of the center, and put someone else there, it was hard to go back.

So, he didn’t admit it, but I think he changed his plan. Instead of heading to another city, we stayed in Florence. Sometimes we ventured outside the city, like the day we took a bike tour of Tuscany. We spent an entire day, exhausted and sweaty, exploring hill towns that weren’t the typical tourist destinations. In most of the towns, we were the only tourists to be found. Hardly anyone spoke English, but they were so excited to have us.

In one village, we toured an art studio where the artist worked with alabaster, crafting everything from statues to lamps to chess sets. I bought a pale alabaster heart pendant, and looped it onto the necklace I was already wearing.

Outside one walled city, we found the most stunning ruins of a Roman theater. We couldn’t get very close, but we found a great view of it from the wall of the city, and I told Hunt everything I knew about Roman theaters. I told him the Roman names for all the parts of the structure like scaena frons and the cavea and vomitorium. I’m sure he didn’t care, let alone remember what I said a few minutes later, but he listened and smiled.