Page 72 of Craving Their Omega

“It’s nothing,” he says, waving my thanks away.

“No, it definitely is something. I love soft things, and I had been thinking about that blanket for a while. You picked something really nice that will really add to my nest. I appreciate it.”

His eyes flick up to meet mine, and he nods. There’s something that might even be a tiny smile playing around his lips, and I find that I can’t look away. He looks… pleased that I like his gift. It makes me feel warm inside to have put that look there.

“Mariana loved soft things too,” he murmurs, almost to himself.

I can’t help my curiosity, so I have to ask, “Who’s Mariana?”

Tristan’s eyes go a little hard, his jaw tightening. For a moment, I worry I asked the wrong thing or said something I shouldn’t. But he’s the one who brought her up, and I keep watching him, hoping he’s not going to shut me down.

Finally, he sighs out a breath. “She was a Beta I cared for once,” he says softly.

“Oh. Is she… you just used the past tense, so…” I don’t know a polite way to ask if he lost her.

But he nods, answering the question I can’t bring myself to finish. “She died,” he says shortly. “In a car accident. The one that left me with this scar.” His fingers come up to trace it.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Blackwell,” I tell him. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I shouldn’t have asked.”

He looks at me, and for the first time, I can see pain in his eyes. I don’t know if it’s because he’s letting me see it for the first time or if there’s just so much that he can’t hold it back now.

Either way, it’s hard to look away from the sight of it. Tristan has been holding back for so long, keeping his emotions under wraps to the point where it seemed like he didn’t have any, and now that I’m face to face with them, all I want to do is help him feel better.

“No, it’s—” He breaks off, like he’s not sure what he wants to say. “Maybe it’s better if I tell you. I don’t know.”

“I’ll listen, if you want to,” I promise.

He’s quiet for a bit, but there’s an expectant quality to the silence, like he’s ordering his thoughts. “I talked about how I started my business,” he says. “Do you remember?”

I nod. “You said you built it from the ground up, right? You revolutionized a lot of things.”

“Something like that. I needed an escape. I needed something to focus on that wasn’t feeling lost. That wasn’t just losing people. After Mariana died, I was… .a mess. I was broken. I cared for her so much. I was supposed to protect her. But in the end, there wasn’t anything I could do. She was gone. Dead. And it was my fault.”

“What?”

“I lost control of the car because of a storm. We crashed into a tree.”

“That’s not?—”

Tristan cuts me off, shaking his head, his jaw tight. “I didn’t have a lot, growing up. Not like Dominic. Not even like Xavier. My father worked in a factory, and he scraped by enough that my mother could stay home and take care of me and the house. We didn’t have money, but we had… each other. And I had Mariana. And then I had nothing. After Mariana died, I pushed my family away. I left the town I grew up in. Everything there reminded me of her. My family wanted to help me, wanted to be there for me. They suggested therapy, told me I could talk to them. But I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to talk about it or think about her or be in a place where so many memories happened. So I left, and I started my business. I poured everything I had left into it.”

It’s such a raw, intense revelation from Tristan. A stark glimpse into why he is the way he is. Loss can carve a person up, I know that much, and the fact that he made somethingof himself and came out of it with a strong company is very impressive. But I know he won’t want to hear that. Not when it was made because he was fleeing something so painful.

It hits me then that it explains so much about him and his attitude about the marriage. He didn’t want to marry me because he’s clearly still in love with Mariana, the woman he lost.

That hurts for some reason. It shouldn’t, and I know it seems selfish to be jealous of her, when she’s dead and I’m not. But I know I can never fill her shoes. I can never take her place, and Tristan seems to be constantly making it clear that he’s not interested in opening up a new place for anyone else.

More than anything, it breaks my heart for him to have been through so much. Especially since it sounds like dealt with it all alone.

“How old were you?” I ask him.

“Twenty.”

So young. So new to life and everything, to end up so alone.

His vulnerability is touching in a way I didn’t expect. He’s being open with me for the first time since we met, and it makes me want to offer something up to. Something to share about my own past.

But I can’t really figure out how I’d do that. I don’t talk about it, not with anyone, and I don’t really want to bring it all up now. So I just keep my mouth shut about it and focus on him.

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