Addicted(94)

Chapter Twenty-four


“I’ve got it,” Tori says, and it’s a good thing, because I think I’m frozen in place. She grabs her shoes and Louis Vuitton bag on the way, then flings the front door open with great pomp and circumstance.

Sure enough, Ethan is standing on the other side of the door, looking paler and thinner than I have ever seen him. Tori looks him up and down, and doesn’t for a second betray that she’s been lobbying for him for days now. “Fuck up again and I’ll chop your balls off myself,” she says with a sniff. And then she’s gone, slipping out the door and down the hall before I can even figure out how to say hello.

Then again, I don’t have to. Because suddenly Ethan is standing in my kitchen, a huge bouquet of flowers in one hand and his heart in the other.

“You were right,” he says.

“About what?” I ask, because there’s a voice inside my head screaming that this is the most important moment of my life and I need to be very clear about it. It’s good advice, smart advice. Too bad my heart is pounding so hard that I’m afraid I won’t hear one word that he says.

Which is a problem. But one I’m willing to work around if it means I get to listen to Ethan’s beautiful voice. And if I get to stare at his beautiful face. Somehow, he’s more gorgeous than ever, despite the dark circles under his eyes and the sudden sharpness of his cheek and wrist and collarbones.

“About everything.” He sits down at the table without touching me, gestures for me to do the same. “Will you sit? Let me tell you a story?”

“Of course.” I nearly break a leg in my eagerness to comply with his request.

I expect him to start the story once I’m settled, but he doesn’t. Instead, he reaches for my hand and long minutes tick by with Ethan doing nothing more than running his thumb back and forth against the back of my hand. I wait him out, wondering even as I do if it’s the right thing to do. Should I prompt him, try to figure out what he wants to say? Should I—

“You know my dad was a soldier, right?”

I nod. “Of course.” The whole world knows that.

“And you know he died in a military operation when I was little.”

I nod again. “He got the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

It’s Ethan’s turn to nod. “He did.”

“That’s why you went into biomedical research, right? To help develop treatments to prolong life and better quality of life for injured soldiers.”

“Yes.”

Again I wait for more and again it takes him forever to speak. But when he does, it’s worth all the things he’s never said before, all the trust he’s never given me. “The day he left for that last mission, I begged him not to go. He was always gone, you know, always missing out on things that other kids’ dads were around for, and I was sick of it. My first baseball game was that Saturday and I wanted him to come to it. I wanted him home.”

“That’s understandable.”

“Yeah. I know. I was just a kid who wanted his dad. But when it came time for him to leave two days later, I wouldn’t come out of my room. I wouldn’t say good-bye to him. And when he came to me and tried to hug me, I told him not to bother coming back. I told him if he couldn’t be the kind of dad that my friends had, then I didn’t want him at all.

“Those are the last words I ever said to him.”

“Oh, God. Oh, Ethan.” I reach for him then, wrap my arms around him. He doesn’t fight me, doesn’t get me to try to let go, but he doesn’t really yield, either. He just sits there, like telling the story has made him numb.

“I’ve never told anybody that before.”

“I know. Thank you for telling me.”

He nods. “I do love you, Chloe.”

“I know.”

“And it’s not you that I don’t trust. It’s me.”

I rest my hands on his cheeks, turn his face to mine so that I can see his eyes and his expression. “I don’t understand.”

“My whole life, I’ve let people down.”

“That’s not true—”

“It is. My father wanted me to take his absences like a man. He wanted me to be the man of the house while he was gone. Instead I told him that I hated him and I cried every night.

“My mother wanted me to follow her family into politics. She wanted me to capitalize on my father’s service record and turn that into a political career for me that would hopefully culminate in the presidency. Instead, I went into biomedical engineering and she pretty much forgot I existed unless she wanted something from me.