Crashed(book three)(176)

When he refers to the baby as ours, my breath catches in my chest and my hands reach out to hold onto his biceps.

“I sat in that waiting room, Ry, with your blood, our baby’s blood, on my skin and I don’t think … I don’t think I’ve ever felt so f*cking alive.” That soft smile is back on that magnificent mouth of his, but it’s his eyes that captivate me. Those sparks of green that are pleading, asking, and searching to make sure I understand the words—spoken and unspoken—that he is telling me right now.

He looks down at his hands for a beat, emotion flickering over his face as he remembers how he felt before looking back to me. “The blood of a baby I’ll never meet, but that was something we’d created together …” The gravel of his voice breaks on his last words, but his eyes remain steady on mine, making sure I see everything in his—grief, disbelief, loss.

“All the emotions … everything that was happening … trying to process it all felt like taking a sip of water from a f*cking fire hose.” He exhales another breath, closing his eyes momentarily as he becomes overwhelmed with the memory and how to best explain it. “And I still don’t know if I’ll ever be able to process it, Ry. But the one thing I do know,” he says, his fingertips tightening on my cheeks to reinforce the certainty of his words, “is that when I sat in that waiting room and the doctor told me … about the baby … feelings I never thought possible filled me,” he says, eyes unflinching and complete reverence in his voice that causes my heart to swell with hope for things I never thought I could imagine.

His thumb wipes away a tear that runs down my cheek I didn’t even know I’d shed and he continues on. “And sitting there in that damn hospital room, waiting for you to wake up … I realized what you meant to me, what we had created together—the best parts of us combined. And then it hit me,” he says with so much tenderness in his eyes that when I go to open my mouth to say something nothing comes out. He smiles softly at me, darting his tongue out to wet his bottom lip. “I realized that what she did to me doesn’t have to happen again. That I can give someone the life I never had, Rylee. The life you showed me is a possibility.”

I bite back the comments that rush into my head as Colton’s words break down every last form of protection I’ve ever woven around my heart. My fingers tense on his biceps and my chin quivers from the emotions coursing through me.

“No, don’t cry, Ry,” he murmurs as he leans in and kisses the tracks of tears coursing down my cheeks. “You’ve cried enough already. I just want to make you happy because f*ck, baby, it’s you that’s the difference. It’s you that allowed me to see that my biggest fear—darkest goddamn poison—wasn’t really a fear at all. It was an excuse for me to not open myself up by saying all I could do was bring pain and pass my demons on. But I know—I know—that I could never hurt a child—a baby that is my own flesh and blood. And I sure as f*ck know you could never hurt one just to spite me.”

Tears well in his eyes as he lowers them for a moment and shakes his head, the confession and cleansing of his soul finally taking its toll. But when he looks up at me, despite the tears swimming in his eyes I see such clarity, such reverence, that my breath is stolen. My heart that was robbed long ago is undeniably his. “It’s like out of the horrible darkness I’ve had to live with my whole life came this incredible ray of light.”

His voice breaks and a tear drops as we sit in this beast of a bed, bodies bare, pasts no longer hidden, hearts naked and completely vulnerable, and yet I have never felt more certain about any other person in my life.