Crush(80)

The louder those footsteps grew, the harder my heart beat.

I began to lose my stability. The dresser I was clutching became the only reason I was still standing. My legs had gone limp, my knees weak, my feet numb.

The more audible the creaking, the closer he drew, the more intense the aching pang in my chest grew, and then suddenly the air in the room felt thicker.

“Elle,” he said with that familiar rumble in his voice.

Like always, my body responded to his tone, but I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. The high and the low that came with his arrival was hard to bear. It meant he was okay, but it also meant he had left me. I took a breath so deep it lifted my shoulders. “Why did you come back?” I asked.

“Elle,” he repeated, but this time he sounded pained.

It didn’t matter. My heart was in pieces, splintered and shredded. I just couldn’t look at him. “You should have taken everything when you left, or at least come back for the rest of your things when you knew I wasn’t home.”

The floor creaked from behind me and I knew he’d stepped inside my room.

I couldn’t stand it. Didn’t know what to do. I opened the drawer I had cleared out for him expecting it to be empty, but it wasn’t. Everything was still inside it, and so was the small silver box his grandfather had given him. The one he never would have left behind. It meant the future to him, not in the monetary conversion it could provide, but in the hope he saw in it. The hope that life could possibly be normal for him someday. All the air was sucked from my lungs. Something wasn’t right.

“Elle,” he said my name again and it was like a plea. “Please look at me.”

Ever so slowly I turned around, and I quickly glanced away. He was standing in the doorway, unmoving. For no good reason, the world seemed to right itself, no longer tipping and throwing me off balance.

Light and shadow painted him as he always had been. I didn’t have to see him to know what I was looking at. Broad shoulders, chiseled jaw, and the strong lines of his face were the first things that came into view. His face, with the scar just below his eye, was both a warrior’s face and beautifully exquisite, at the same time. And his eyes, those ever-changing sometimes brown, sometimes green eyes, were eyes I wanted to get lost in. If he smiled at me they would crinkle ever so slightly, and everything hard and rough about him would instantly soften.

I made sure to keep my eyes anywhere but on him. “Why did you come back? I told you the last time that I wasn’t going to do this back-and-forth anymore. I want you to leave.”

“I never left.” His words were a whisper.

“Don’t lie. You did. You couldn’t handle the truth and you left.”

“That’s not true. I told you, your inability to carry a child doesn’t change how I feel about you.”

My chest constricted and pain stabbed my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. I wasn’t certain my heart was even beating, as many pieces as it was in.

“Look at me.”

At his command, I had to raise my eyes. My head snapped up to completely take him in. And when I did, for a moment, just one, the room went black. I wanted to die. I knew I had been so wrong, and that I should fall to the ground and beg forgiveness. Pinching my eyes closed, I tried to stop them from stinging, but that was useless. I had to see him. I opened my eyes and stared at him through blurry, wavy vision. Before me was a bone-weary man. Logan had a black eye, his head had been shaved, and he was wearing the same clothes he had been wearing on Saturday.

Yet still, when I met his gaze, the heat in his eyes was so intense I thought it would burn right through me.

He took a tentative step my way.

My knees buckled and I had to grab the dresser. “Logan, what happened?” I tried to ask him, but my throat tightened so much my words would only come out as fragments of a whisper.

His voice was gruff as he spoke. “I’m so sorry. I would have been here if I could have. I never would have left you doubting me. You have to believe me.”

The tone in his voice told me nothing he was saying was a lie.

I clenched my hand to my heart and let my painful sobs convey what I couldn’t at this very moment. I didn’t know what happened to him, but I knew he was telling me the truth. Something had happened that had kept him away from me. And here I thought he’d left me. The reality of how wrong I was shattered my already broken heart.

As if reassured I wasn’t going to turn him away, he rushed to me and fell to the ground. He was on his knees and his arms were wrapped tightly around me. “Elle, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Tears rolled down my cheeks before I could stop them and I, too, crumpled to the floor. “I thought you couldn’t handle what I’d told you and you left me.”

His hands went to my face. “No, no, no. I would never, ever leave you. I love you more than I love anything in this world.”

“Oh, God, Logan, I love you too,” I whispered, and then buried my face in his neck. I let my sobs rise from my belly, and I cried for everything that was happening in my life, and in his. I wanted this man so desperately and I knew he felt the same about me, yet I’d let my own insecurities drive me to doubt that.

“Don’t cry, baby, I’m here. I’m here,” he whispered in a soothing tone.

We stayed like that, in each other’s arms, for a long, long time. When I felt strong enough to pull away, I did. My fingertips traced the discoloration under his eye. My palms caressed his head. Somehow I managed to speak around the painful feeling in my throat. “What happened to you?”