Uncharted(55)
My heart clenches at those words.
He leans closer. “And while we’re on the subject, how many details have you revealed to me about yourself? How much have you offered up about your past? Snippets of overhead conversations with Ian don’t count.”
My mouth goes dry.
He’s right. I’ve never told him a thing. Never volunteered any meaningful information about who I used to be.
“Violet…” The pain in his voice makes me tremble. “The truth is, it’s never been about who we were before. I don’t know that girl from that tiny New Hampshire town. Maybe I caught a glimpse of her at a Los Angeles airport one afternoon. Maybe I thought, fleetingly, that she was beautiful, with a smart mouth I wanted to slam against mine the first instant she opened it and called me an ass. But if circumstances were different, if we’d never boarded that plane… that girl wouldn’t have ever crossed my path again. We’d have gone our separate ways, lived totally disconnected lives, and never even had an inkling of what we were missing.”
“Maybe that would’ve been better,” I murmur, feeling broken. “Maybe we weren’t meant to meet. Maybe all this is one giant mistake.”
“I don’t believe that, and neither do you. You and I… the people we’ve become, though all this struggle… it’s the one thing I understand with perfect clarity. Maybe it’s wrong, maybe it’s unconventional, maybe no one else would even begin to accept it. But that doesn’t make it a lie, Violet.” He sighs. “If you want details, I’m happy to share. Eventually, I’d love to hear yours as well. But I think we both know, this connection between us runs a hell of a lot deeper than trivial details about favorite colors and college majors and how you take your coffee in the morning. What I feel when you look at me, when your hands touch my skin—” He physically shudders, as though the effort of keeping himself in check is damn-near killing him. “I’ve been looking for that feeling my whole life, in everyone I’ve ever met, half-convinced it didn’t exist at all. Never thought I’d find it on a deserted island, of all places. Never would’ve guessed I’d find it with you.”
The tears gathering in my eyes threaten to spill over. All those words — more than I’ve ever heard him speak in a single stretch — are tumbling around inside me, filling up the vacant chambers of my heart, taking the pressure off my lungs until I can breathe again.
Beck’s eyes lock on the single tear that’s escaped down my cheek. He reaches out to brush it away with his left hand, moving cautiously, as though he’s afraid I might flinch back from him. I hold myself perfectly still, staring at his empty ring finger.
“You don’t wear a wedding band.”
“Does this mean you’re ready to hear the story, now?”
My hesitation is relatively brief. With a nod, I settle a few purposeful paces away from him on the sand, not trusting myself when he’s within reach. I watch as he paces by the water’s edge, struggling to find the right words. My heart thunders inside my chest as I wait for him to begin.
“I met her in D.C. — that’s where I’m from, where I went to school, where my whole family lives. We were young, still in college, when we met. I was studying photography; she’d signed up to be a model in one of my portrait classes. She was a beautiful foreign exchange student from Paris; I was a starstruck shutterbug in need of a muse. We hit it off immediately. We both wanted to see the world — I thought we’d see it together. Join the Peace Corps, teach English classes in Spain, anything we could think of, so long as it took us far from the bubble of political prosperity I’d been raised in.” He swallows roughly. “When we graduated, her student visa expired. She gave me an ultimatum: either we got married, or she was going back to France and I’d never see her again. I was so young, barely twenty-two, and she was the first woman I’d ever been crazy about. I thought I was in love. I didn’t want to lose her.”
“You gave her a ring.”
He nods. “We were married a few short weeks later. The first year was fine. The next two were not.” A grimace contorts his features. “Turns out, all those things she’d told me about seeing the world, experiencing new cultures, traveling to far off destinations… All lies. She’d filled my head with exactly what I’d most wanted to hear, spun her web of exaggerations so thoroughly I didn’t know I was trapped until the life began to leech from my bones. Instead of a partner, I found myself married to an aspiring fashion model, consumed entirely by her looks. A woman who wouldn’t leave the Virginia suburb she’d insisted we move to as soon as we signed the marriage certificate. The only trips she’d go on were to the posh resorts her friends frequented for spa treatments, or expensive hotels the night before callbacks for modeling gigs she never landed.”
I’m hardly breathing, awaiting his next words with bated breath.
“I tried to make it work. Surprised her with plane tickets to Africa on our second anniversary so we could spend the summer on safari, fixing our marriage while volunteering with an organization that protects endangered elephants. She turned me down flat. Resented me for asking. Wouldn’t even consider going.” Pain crosses his face at the memory. “Suddenly, I was a twenty-five-year-old man, stuck in a marriage I didn’t want to a woman I no longer recognized.”