Page 74 of Wilder Love
Manslaughter. Such an ugly word. It had been an accident. Shane was not capable of killing anyone. “I never got to see you again. I never got to talk about anything…you could have let me visit you. Why wouldn’t you let me see you?”
He stared at me for a moment and then turned me around, grabbed me by the shoulders and shoved me in front of the mirror on the back of his closet door. “Look at yourself, Remy. Take a good long look.”
“I know what I look like.” I knew every flaw too. They’d been pointed out over the years, spoken aloud as if I wasn’t in the room.
“I don’t think you do. I don’t think you ever did. You were always so fucking oblivious to how you looked. To what it did to people when they saw you. Tomen,” he added, his voice tight. His fingers dug into my shoulders, his body vibrating with anger. With frustration.
“Don’t go there, Shane,” I warned.
“I thought you wanted to talk. Change of heart?”
I’d had seven years of therapy. I should be able to handle a conversation with Shane. “Fine. Let’s talk.”
“Not until you look at yourself. Take a good, long look.”
I looked in the mirror, but I wasn’t looking at myself. I was looking at him. Shane was gorgeous. He always had been. His muscles didn’t come from working out in a gym. They came from manual labor and from surfing. They came from sweating in the hot SoCal sun. And his face… I had always loved it. The broad cheekbones and full lips. The square, firm jaw and the little lines around his hazel eyes from squinting into the sun.
I miss your face.
“Shane,” I whispered. He was still holding my shoulders, but his grip had relaxed. His callused hands were warm against my bare skin. He leaned in closer, the heat of his body and his nearness making me dizzy.
“Remy.” My name on his lips sounded like a plea or a prayer. I heard the desperation in his voice, felt his chest rising and falling against my back as I leaned into him, needing his strength.
Kiss me. Hold me. Never let me go.
“Shane. I’ve missed you. So much,” I whispered.
He dropped his hands to his sides and took a step back. “I can’t do this. Not again.”
It felt like he’d poured a bucket of ice water over my head. I shivered, wrapping my arms around myself for protection. I was losing him again, before I’d ever gotten him back, the moment we shared too much for him.
He ran his hand through his hair. “I was in prison, Remy. Do you really think I would expose you to that? Did I need to know that guys were jerking off thinking about your face and your body? Trust me. They would have, and I would have heard about it. All. The. Damn. Time. They would have taken one look at you…” He stopped and exhaled, and I watched his face in the mirror, the pain etched on his features. His raw, naked emotions on display. All I wanted to do was comfort him, but he wouldn’t let me. “You didn’t belong there. I never wanted that for you. Not after everything you’d been through. It would have killed me to see you.”
I swallowed hard, wanting to say something, anything that would make this better for him. He lowered his head and rubbed the back of his neck.
“Just go, Remy. Please go.”
He didn’t sound angry anymore. Just tired. Resigned. Like this was our fate and he’d decided to accept it rather than fight it. Maybe we were never meant to be together.
I nodded. “Okay.” I nodded again. And then I walked out of his childhood bedroom, but I stopped in the hallway, my back to his room. “Why didn’t you answer my letters?”
“I never read them,” he said.
I shook my head. Shane wasn’t a liar. Why was he lying about this? “But… they’ve been opened…”
“Not by me. Inmates don’t get to open their own mail.”
Another liberty that had been stripped from him. And yet, he’d kept the letters without reading them. All this time, and he still hadn’t read them. “Why didn’t you read them?”
I waited for an answer, not really expecting one. But still, I waited.
“It hurt too much,” he said quietly. So quietly that I strained to hear him.
Without turning to look at his face again, I walked out of the house and I drove away. All I was to him now was a painful reminder of everything he’d lost. He wasn’t the Shane I’d known so many years ago and I was no longer the same Remy.
It hurt too much.
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