Page 40 of Fierce Love
“You organized a clothing and toy drive to support all the women’s shelters across the island before I even met you. I found that out from Aunt Verna.”
“That was a Tucker family initiative.” But it was my idea—mine and Sawyer’s, and I was the one who pitched it to my parents. A goodwill gesture that would benefit a lot of women and children. My parents only appreciated charity endeavors that raised their profile.
She takes a shaky breath. “And then there was me.”
“You werenotwounded,” I say, a reflex.
“I was. You know I was. In so many ways. In ways you never heard about, in ways you did. I survived in Bellerive, but I never thrived.”
“You were my Helen of Troy, Hols. I would have waged all the wars for you.” I can’t keep the husky emotion out of my voice. “The people who pushed you around, tried to manipulate you, I would have stood at your back and let them know there was a brick wall they couldn’t cross or scale or knock down.” I let out a whoosh of air. “If you’d let me, I’d have done it even more than I did.”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” She’s staring out the window again when I glance at her. “You tried to help me, and you were also the only person I could say no to.”
“I like to think I was the only person you knew you could say no to. That I wasn’t going anywhere. I would never punish you for saying no.”
“I made so many mistakes,” she whispers.
“We were young. We were bound to make mistakes. But our older selves don’t have to keep paying for those mistakes. We can move past them.”
“Can we?” When she looks at me, there are tears in her eyes.
“We can.” I keep my voice firm, but her tears are making my heart expand in my chest, make me want to pull over the car and soothe all her hurt. I want to tell her that whatever spooked her back then is long gone. But I’m worried if I remind her too much of the past, she’ll dwell too closely on why she left. And I want her in the present, in this moment, where the air between us is filled with sadness, but also possibilities. We’re on the cusp of something.
“I just don’t see how you can forgive me,” she says, her voice thick with unshed tears. “Not this easily. It doesn’t make any sense. I ruined everything.”
“Not ruined,” I say, and I pull over to the side of the road so I can face her fully. The balance here is delicate, and I need to give her my full focus. “Delayed, not ruined.”
“There are things…” She visibly swallows. “There are things that happened back then that might change your mind.”
I take a beat to search inside myself for what could have possibly happened that would cause me to believe we were ruined. There’s only one thing. “Was there someone else?”
Hollyn goes pale in the bright sunlight streaming through the window. “What?”
“Did you leave because you cheated on me?”
“No!” Her eyes go wide, and she looks genuinely shocked. “No. Never. I can’t… Even after I left, there was no one for a really long time.”
I want to tell her it was the same for me. That she ripped my fucking heart out and I was never able to give it to anyone else the same way again. But a guilt trip isn’t going to get me what I want. Whatever she’s not telling me left a deep wound in her, the same as it left in me. At some point, maybe we’ll talk about those wounds—we probably have to—but I need her to trust me again first. I need her to understand that I’m not going anywhere.
Maybe it’s rash and sudden and completely ill-advised, but I’minthis, as deeply as I was the first time. She’s still in my blood, and while this feeling might have lain dormant for years, it’s back raging through me again. The last two weeks, it’s been painful to pretend we’re merely colleagues. I can’t just let her walk away a second time.
Her phone rings in her bag, and she digs through it, sniffing. “It’s Kin,” she says to me, a hint of apology in her voice. “Hello? Yep. No. We’re almost there.”
With reluctance, I put the car back into drive and signal onto the highway.
“No, no, I’m fine,” she says, but I can hear the wateriness in her voice, the same thing Kinsley must hear or sense. “Allergies, probably.” She listens for a few minutes, but she’s shaking her head as she does. “We’re going back to New York in a few months. We can’t keep a puppy. It would be miserable in our apartment.” She listens again for a beat and presses her fingertips to her forehead. “Yes, wearegoing back. Look—we can talk about this when I’m there, okay?”
She hangs up, and heaviness settles between us again. We haven’t resolved anything, but we can’t move forward unless she wants to.
“Maybe the clean slate should be erasing the hurt but keeping the connection,” I say.
It sounds so simple, and right now, on the edge of something new with her, I think I can let go of the past. If there is more towhy she left and she never comes clean, I won’t care enough to seek out the truth. Why would I prod that wound? But if I really let myself consider that, it’s naïve to think I never will, but I also have no desire to head in any direction that puts a second chance at risk. I want her. I want what we once had so badly that I’ll negotiate anything. If she wants me to pretend the past doesn’t matter, that her reason for leaving doesn’t matter, I’ll grit my teeth and do it.
As I pull into the parking lot of the campground, Hollyn’s wounded eyes see right through me. “There’s no world in which you can just erase hurt, Nate. Hurt can’t be ignored. Maybe you think you can set that aside, but I know from past experience that hurt coats everything, even when we don’t realize it.” She opens her door and leaves before I can say anything else.
Chapter Twenty
Nathaniel
