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Blue knew he should leave her to it. He should go now, and not make this any worse. Let her cry about whatever she needed to cry about and disappear. He could be a part of the memories she had of these awful weeks when her normal life had gotten strange. As time passed, who knew? Maybe he’d fade away entirely.
All he had to do was leave. Now.
But instead he found his hand on the doorknob. Then he was pushing open the door and stepping inside. Steam enveloped him, shrouding him in thick heat. He found his way to the stand-alone shower stall next to the wide tub, and opened the door.
Everly was crouched down in the corner of the shower, pillowing her head in her arms.
He couldn’t bear it.
Blue reached in and turned off the water. He grabbed the towel hanging on the hook outside the shower, then leaned in to wrap it around her. Then he lifted her up and into his arms.
She was a sodden mess, and she nestled her face into the crook of his neck. And he couldn’t tell the difference anymore between the fault lines inside him and Everly. They were all wrapped in and around him, and now she was, too, and he didn’t understand what he was supposed todowith this. With her.
With all those things he didn’t want to feel, but did.
“I thought you were dead,” she said, her mouth against the side of his neck.
“You keep saying that.”
“I don’t think you get it, Blue. I had to live with it. However long that was, fifteen minutes? Five? You were dead.”
That clawed at him.
He followed the light into a bedroom down the hall, figuring it was her childhood bedroom. There were pretty lamps on matching bedside tables. There was a frothy pink comforter stretched across a full bed piled high with unnecessary pillows.
It was exactly the kind of bedroom he would have imagined for her, if he’d imagined it.
But she’s not the girl who lived here.
Blue didn’t want to have that argument, even if it was only with himself. He didn’t want to think about the fact that he’d seen the bedroom she’d put together in her apartment, and while it had been feminine and suited her, it hadn’t been pink. It had been comfortable and pretty, sure. It hadn’t been a little girl’s room.
But that uncomfortable truth wasn’t going to help him walk away from her, so he shoved it aside.
He carried her over to the bed and set her down on the edge of the mattress.
“I’m alive,” he told her, his voice dark.
It came out sounding a lot like a promise. Worse, a declaration.
“Blue,” she whispered. “Blue, I—”
He had come here only to leave her. To say his good-byes and make sure that this thing between them was cut straight through. No ties. No entanglements. That was the way he liked his life. He barely spoke to his own mother, for God’s sake. He didn’t want or need anyone else out there in the world hoping that he might show up again one day, when he knew that would never happen.
This was supposed to be a good-bye.
So he had no idea why he moved closer to the bed sohe could fit himself between her legs where they dangled over the side of the mattress. And then gently, carefully, fit his hands to her face.
Everly opened her mouth as if she meant to speak.
Blue bent and captured it with his own.
And inside him, a storm raged.
He couldn’t make her promises. He couldn’t stay. He didn’t know how to be the man she saw when she looked at him, and he hated that there was a jagged, yearning part of him that thought he should try anyway.
He thought it would stop at a kiss, a sweet taste of the things he couldn’t have and needed to leave here, but Everly had other ideas.
She surged against him. She wrapped her arms around him, gripping his T-shirt in her fists, and then tugged him over her until they both tumbled back onto the mattress.