Love Me (WITSEC #3)(39)
“Shiloh?” Keelan said, his tone turning serious.
“Please come over,” I said numbly.
Keelan hung up after saying he was on his way. I let my phone clatter onto the wood floor and sat up. My whole body trembled and felt weak.
“Shi,” Logan said.
Slowly, I looked in his direction. He was still kneeling in the same spot a handful of feet away. He studied me with an expression that approached a glare. Did my lack of trust piss him off? Did he expect me to forgive and forget that he had drugged me? Regardless of the reasons, what he’d done had consequences.
I wiped away the last of the tears I’d let fall down my cheeks. “The sheriff paid me a visit.”
“Did he hurt you?” he asked in a detached way. I couldn’t tell if he was asking only out of obligation or if he was having such difficulty talking to me, he had to dissociate.
I shook my head.
Keelan walked in then and took in the room quickly. When his eyes landed on me, I saw a flicker of relief in them. Logan stood and a not-so-friendly look was exchanged between them as Keelan passed him to come to me. For only a second did he stare at the guns laid out on the island before he knelt next to me. He cupped the sides of my face. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” Strength returned to my voice with that one word. Pushing up on my knees, I wrapped my arms around his neck and buried my face in his shoulder. I breathed him in deeply before exhaling slowly, and as I did, I tried to let go of some of my hate.
I’d gotten up. I’d done it on my own. It was one step forward and I had to believe it was significant. My mother had.
11
Sitting at the dining room table, I told Logan everything. I told him about Jacob and how he had approached me at the grocery store, about Gabe and how he had threatened me at the mud run, and lastly, everything the sheriff had said. Keelan asked how the sheriff had gotten in with the alarm set in the first place. Logan's assumption was that the sheriff had had the security company disarm it, intercepted the call from the alarm company after he’d set it off, or snuck into the house in the time I’d disarmed the alarm and rearmed it.
“There’s no way to prove the latter to be true because all the cameras around the house were covered with pieces of duct tape. And I won’t know if the alarm went off until I call the alarm company,” Logan said tightly as he glared at the table.
After that, he didn’t say anything for the longest time. Not that he needed to. He may have been silent, but the irritation that radiated off of him said enough. With the way Keelan squeezed my hand under the table, he must have sensed it, too.
Abruptly, Logan scooted his chair back and made his way over to the guns lined up on my kitchen island. “When is your next session with Dr. Bolton?” he asked as he picked up one, released the magazine, studied it as if to see if it was full or had been tampered with. When he didn’t find anything amiss, he reloaded the gun and moved on to the next one.
“Tomorrow,” I answered.
“Good. You can tell her how you still get panic attacks.”
My stomach sank. I was unsure why he felt the need to announce that, but I was sure I was about to find out.
Logan’s eyes flicked to Keelan. “You know she has those, right? I know you know about the nightmares. What about the PTSD? Have you witnessed that yet? One minute, she’ll be standing there talking to you and the next, a noise or something you say will trigger an episode. She won’t see you. She won’t hear you, and don’t think about trying to pull her out of it. She’ll think you’re X and things could get violent.”
Keelan eyed Logan in an assessing way. “Is there a reason you’re telling me this?”
For a moment, I wondered why he hadn’t admitted he knew about the PTSD or that he’d helped me through multiple episodes. Then I saw Logan’s reaction. Something flickered in his eyes. Triumph? Glee? Arrogance? All three? “It’s not easy taking care of someone with PTSD.”
I looked down at the table to hide the hurt I knew was showing in my eyes.
Keelan squeezed my hand again. “When you love someone, you are there for them, even when things aren’t easy.”
I glanced at Keelan. Did he just admit he loves me?
Without taking his eyes off of Logan, he brushed his thumb over the back of my hand.
“That sentiment right there is what makes you naive. Until you realize how much you’ll constantly need to be there for her and how it interrupts your life, you will never understand.”
“So what you’re saying is that being there for Shiloh is inconvenient?” Keelan asked with a tight voice.
The triumph in Logan dimmed a little. “What I’m saying is that being there for someone with PTSD is hard.”
“Is that why you turned a blind eye to it?” Keelan questioned. “Shi’s trauma was too hard for you, so you ignored the fact that she was self-destructing?”
Logan’s nostrils flared as he exhaled. “Don’t twist what I’m saying. You have no idea—”
“No idea of what?” Keelan snapped. “No idea how to be there for someone I love? Or how about being there for someone while I’m suffering, too?” Keelan’s chest rose and fell rapidly as his anger started to show. “I watched my mom die slowly when I was eleven. I held her hand in the last hours of her life as she fought to breathe. She died in pain and scared and unable to take in enough air to say the last words she wanted to say to us. My family’s world was shattered with her loss. My older brother withdrew and was hell-bent on self-destructing. My father shut down for years, and in that time, I was left with taking care of my little brothers who didn’t fully understand that their mom was gone or that Dad was too grief-stricken to be there for them. At eleven, I set myself and my pain aside so I could be what they needed. Then I did it again when my dad died.”