Fade Into You (Shaken Dirty #3)(54)
To his credit, Wyatt didn’t ask what she was talking about. But he did stiffen beneath her, his heart jolting hard in his chest before it started racing. “You don’t want to go there,” he finally said.
“I do,” she murmured, running her lips over his shoulder, his sleeves, any place she could reach. “I know there’s something there—I can see it in your eyes when you don’t think I’m looking. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s why you thought you needed to quit the band. I know it’s what made you go out and sit in that bar last night. It’s causing so much of this mess and I’m afraid if you don’t deal with it, you’ll—”
“Leave it alone, Poppy.”
“I can’t. It’d be easier it I could, but I can’t. It’s hurting you, Wyatt, and I can’t stand that. I want to help. I want to—”
“Stop it.” He rolled out from under her then, grabbed his jeans off the floor, and started tugging them on.
She was right behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist and pressing more kisses to his back, his shoulders. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I’m not trying to hurt you. I just want to make things better—”
“You can’t make them better!” he said, and though he didn’t shrug her off, it felt like he had. It felt like, suddenly, he was a million miles away. “What do I need to say to convince you of that fact? Nothing can make this better.”
“That’s not true. Maybe I can’t help, but maybe a counselor could. Therapy—”
“Fuck therapy!” This time he did pull away, striding toward the bedroom door at a rate that had her scrambling to keep up. “You think I haven’t done the therapy thing? I’ve been in rehab three times. All they f*cking do is talk to me, talk at me. It doesn’t f*cking work.” He shoved his feet into his boots, bending down to tie the laces.
“Okay, not a counselor then. One of the guys from the band. Me—”
He didn’t look at her as he said, “I already told you. You don’t want to hear this shit.”
“I do, Wyatt.” She crouched next to him, rested her hands over his. “I do want to know.”
“Why?” he demanded, his beautiful blue eyes wild with a pain and torment so real she swore she could reach out and touch it. If only he’d let her. “We spent one f*cking night together. Why is it so f*cking important that you know all my secrets?”
She tried not to flinch at his description of what they’d done. He was angry, she reminded herself. In pain and lashing out. And she was the one pushing him. The one who had refused to drop it when he asked. “I just don’t want to see you hurt any more than you’ve already been—”
“Jesus, Poppy! Stop! Just stop.” He stood up so fast that she nearly lost her balance, nearly fell flat on her ass at his feet. “You can’t fix me. I know you want to, but you can’t. Some things that are broken can’t be repaired.”
“I never said you were broken.” She stood up, tried to touch him, but he shrugged her off. “You’re not broken.”
“I am. I am broken, and the sooner you accept that, the better we’ll both be.”
“I don’t believe that. I won’t believe it. Just talk to me, Wyatt. Just—”
“What the f*ck do you want me to say? What the f*ck do you think is going to make it better? You think my telling you how it felt to watch my father get pulled under the thresher at our farm is going to make it better? Do you think if I tell you how I’ll never forget the look on his face when it ran over him for the first time that it will somehow make me okay?”
She gasped at his words, tried to reach for him. But he was having none of it. The dam had broken and so, she was afraid, had Wyatt.
“Is it going to make me forget the fact that, even though he’d taught me two or three times how to turn it off, that I couldn’t remember how? That all I managed to do was turn the wheel so that it went in a circle and ran him over again and again and again until the f*cking thing ran out of gas? Do you think it’s going to make me forget what he looked like lying there? Or my mother’s face when she found us in the field hours later, me still sitting on that goddamn tractor and him…him…”
Oh God. Oh God. Ohgodohgodohgod. All the things he’d said before made sense, as did so much of what she’d read. About his mom not cooking dinner after he was five or six, and him coming to Austin to live with his aunt when he was in eighth grade, and—
“Would talking about it somehow have made my mother forgive me? That’s how she died, you know. She couldn’t even look at me unless she was drunk. Couldn’t talk to me. Couldn’t be around me. And since she couldn’t get rid of me, she just kept drinking to make it better. Drank herself to death before she was forty. Before I was thirteen. You think talking to a counselor is going to make any of that better?”
His chest was heaving when he was done, loud strangled sobs coming from him even though his eyes were dry. She went to him then, because she couldn’t not go to him. Couldn’t not try to hold him. She didn’t know if he’d let her, but she had to try.
To her shock, he did. When she went to hug him, he grabbed on to her like she was a lifeline, his arms around her shoulders, his face buried against her neck.