Page 208 of Phobia

That hadn’t stopped him from hovering like a mother hen since. I appreciated his concern. I never found the phone I’d left at the mansion and had to get a replacement. When I’d logged into the new one, it had blown up with missed text messages and voicemails from Gage and Nate from the time we were gone. The same had happened to Kellen’s phone. They’d almost called the police to file missing persons reports, but we’d gotten home just in time to prevent that. It was nice knowing that they truly cared.

I sometimes wondered what the three faceless men were up to. I’d be sitting down to share pizza with Kellen and wonder if and what they were eating at that moment too. Or when we popped in a movie, I wondered if it was something they’d ever seen. It was unhealthy, and I knew it.

“Babe?” Kellen called out from the kitchen. I’d spaced out again. I found myself lost in thought a lot more since we came home, sometimes even mid-conversation. My therapist said it was normal, and a way for my body and brain to cope with everything, so I just rolled with it.

“Yeah?” I walked down the hallway and joined him.

He popped the top off a beer and tossed the opener back in the silverware drawer. “You seem distracted. Everything all good?”

“Yeah…”

“Hmm,” he murmured. He stroked my cheek with his knuckle. “I know what you need.”

“Yeah, extensive therapy,” I joked.

Kellen reached over and pinched my ass. “Let’s go to bed.”

“Your dick is not therapy,” I taunted.

“But it is extensive,” he fired back, smirking when my mouth closed. I had no counterargument to that. He changed tactics, not that I really needed convincing to get into bed with him. “Why don’t you grab a shower while I clean up down here, and then I’ll come find you?” We’d finished lunch just before Nate had left and abandoned the mess to walk him out.

I smiled demurely. “And will you be naked?”

The sweet, sexy smile he gave me melted my heart. “You can count on it.”

***

Twenty minutes later, we were snuggled up together—naked—in my bed, but we hadn’t gotten to the sex yet. I’d beaten him into bed, and while I’d waited for him to finish up downstairs, my thoughts had once again started tumbling and twisting, winding down a path so familiar to me now that I could navigate it in the dark.

I was going to bring up the topic of the kidnapping directly, and not just as an in-passing reference when I’d tell him something from a therapy session that I wanted to share with him, or by making an off-hand joke like my “extensive therapy” one earlier. I thought, as did my therapist, that one of the reasons I kept fixating on the three men was because it was easier to focus on them, on that aspect of the kidnapping, rather than to face the guilt that gnawed at me.

There were two specific things I’d continued feeling guilty about, and I was ready to talk about them with Kellen. I loved him and trusted him and felt that getting this weight off my chest was what I needed to do.

After he’d slid into bed beside me, I’d given him a heads up and he was now patiently waiting for me to speak. But I first needed to calm my nerves. I took a moment to go through my senses, a trick that usually served me well.

I ran a finger along Kellen’s upper lip, and he kissed it gently. His lips were soft and smooth, and a shade that fell somewhere between pale pink and beige. I’d turned some instrumental holiday music on, with the volume just loud enough to register. The sounds of Tchaikovsky floated quietly around the room. I brushed my lips against Kellen’s and let my tongue slip inside. The scent and taste of mint toothpaste greeted me. I exhaled slowly, and then began to speak.

“You probably regret the day you set foot in this house and met me. I wouldn’t blame you if you did.” He opened his mouth to interject, but I pressed my fingers to his lips. As was often his way even outside of the bedroom, he gently but firmly took my hand off his mouth and kissed each fingertip.

“I donotregret that, Graysin. And I never will.”

“You’re just too damn sweet sometimes, you know that?”

Kellen poked me in the ribs, making me squirm. “What you fail to realize is that I’m a better, happier person for having met you, babe. That’s just the way it is.”

We hadn’t said theL-word yet, but I knew I loved him, and the way he was looking at me right now, I suspected he felt the same. Which was even more reason to get this stuff off my chest.

“I never really apologized, Kellen, for accidentally dragging you into what happened on Halloween. If something more serious, or God forbid fatal, had happened to you, I would never forgive myself.”

Kellen rolled to his back and stared up at the ceiling. “Well…” he said slowly, “nothing worse did happen. You don’t need to dwell on the ‘what ifs’ because it’ll just drive you crazy.” He turned his head toward me. “We all have a path of ‘what ifs’ a thousand miles long that would keep us stuck in the past, if we let it.” He looked up at the ceiling again. “I know I do.”

“That makes sense. You’re right.”

His advicedidmade sense. Hewasright. Maybe after this, I’d be able to put the past in the past and keep it there. It was just like with my fear of masks, and the damage that Alex and my parents had done to me when I was younger. I had been molded into the man I now was in part because of the things I had experienced with them, but that didn’t mean I held on to my worries, fear of rejection, and literal fear of masks anymore. The same could hold true with this, at least when it came to Kellen and my guilt toward what he’d had to endure.

The other guilt that plagued me, however, was more difficult to work through, and wasn’t something I could discuss with my therapist. It was about Blaine. She and I talked about what Blaine had done to me, but I’d left the ending as just that we had parted ways. I wasn’t sure that Kellen could reason me through this guilt either. His body had been found on an abandoned construction site a few days after we returned home. I didn’t know how they’d managed it, but his death had been ruled an accident.Because he’d spent so much time on construction sites prior to that. Yeah, okay.I refrained from poking my nose too deep into it though. I didn’t want to set off any digital alarm bells.

“I’m scared, Kellen,” I whispered.