Chapter Eleven
No sarcasm. Just genuine, unabashed insecurity that she didn’t know where they stood. And the way she’d yanked back a moment ago triggered a warning. She’d never done that before. At first, he’d thought it was because the phone had rung. But no…
The shock on her face indicated something that she wasn’t telling him. He needed to proceed with caution until he knew what that meant. His thumbs, brushing over her nose, over her lips, pushed the flesh out of shape as he leaned in and placed a single kiss there now.
“What about her?” he murmured, petting back her sunshine hair, his fingers snagging on her adorable knot. He didn’t want those sparkly eyes to be so guarded when they looked upon him. “I can’t lie to you, sweetheart. I was planning to ask her out, but that’s all over now. I haven’t been seein’ anyone. She would have been the first”—he cleared his throat, disgusted with himself that he’d gone on a drunken spree so long ago while Skylar had grieved—“in a long time. Nobody was you. And I—” His words caught.
He dragged in a ragged breath, willing his erection to ease, his lungs filling with that familiar peach scent. He wanted it rubbed all over his pillows, wanted to bask in the comforting smell on lazy mornings with Sky tucked snuggly against him. He should’ve stepped back after her flinch, but he couldn’t. He’d been holding on by a thread ever since seeing her again, and the photographs on her wall had snapped something. He’d fucked up over the years. He’d fucked this up, he’d screwed his family, and he hadn’t known how to make everything right.
She gazed at him with those sky eyes, shimmery with guarded emotion, sweet freckles, well-kissed lips all puffy from him softening them as the beast within cut loose. She was right. He couldn’t just kiss this away. Anything worth doing was hard. Med school had taught him that. Hell, physical therapy and recovery from the bombing had taught him that, too. Avoidance was a convenient tactic, but all things worth doing required elbow grease. Skylar was worth that effort, if he could convince her to give him that second chance. The old flame was still here. She’d practically ripped his shirt off and tore his jeans open right here on her clinic counter.
He cleared the rattly sound from his throat as she slid off the counter, gripping him for support, and the tiny gesture made his chest puff up an inch more. With a missing leg that for so long had made him feel like less, it felt damn good to be her support and hold her steady, to feel this warmth passing with more ease between their bodies. She rezipped his jeans, and his soldier down south gave a needy salute against his fly.
He finally continued. “I know it ain’t good enough to just say I’m sorry. I was in a dark place back then. I’m sorry I’ve hurt you because after knowing Rhett, hurting you was the last thing I ever wanted to do.”
She exhaled, a cautious release of air, her fingertip swirling thoughtful circles on his forearm. “I wish you’d tell me what happened,” she said. “You were hurting, too.”
I wish you’d tell me, too.But he knew firsthand how hard it was to put things into words.
He shivered at the tender acknowledgment when any number of women might push a man away. Caressing a palm up her back, his brow furrowed as he palmed her nape and whispered words that tremored with self-disappointment.
“Don’t make excuses for me. My family’s been doing that for years. I’ve been doing that for years.”
Skylar’s ear pressed reverently to his chest. Her fingers slid around his waist, making his whole body jolt with need again at the unassuming touch—she wasn’t seducing him. Just holding him. But fuck if his body didn’t want to distinguish the difference. His heartbeat drummed beneath her ear. He dropped an arm around her back to hold her snugly. Cupped her head against him with the other. He could feel her inhaling. Could feel her warm exhales breeze across his T-shirt. The impulse to sink into another kiss hit so strongly, and yet he stayed the urge as he rested his chin atop her knot, encompassing her, protecting her, as he always should have been doing, if only to bask in this turning point and not ruin it by letting chemistry override the dose of reality that had just been thrust in his face.
“Where do we go from here?” she asked, a rhetorical question he didn’t think she sought an answer for.
“I don’t know, baby,” he replied, nuzzling that knot of sunshine for another dose of peach. “But I do know I’ve got you now.” He chewed his cheek. Dammit, he was going to work a hole through the flesh if he wasn’t careful. “I think I wanna pick up where we left off. I never stopped wanting that dream with you. Just thought I could never provide it.”
“How can it be so easy?” There she was with the ice water, ready to douse the flame. He wasn’t going to let her.
“It don’t have to be hard, either.”
“What happens if the going gets tough? Do you leave again?”
“I ain’t gonna leave. Are you?”
He swallowed hard. He hadn’t meant to verbalize that sentiment, but she’d run away, too. He’d once promised her the world, promised to get her out of her dad’s hellhole, then left her with all the bills and receipts unpaid, but she’d promised to be there for him, too. It seemed she didn’t take him at his word anymore, and he was a large part of this insecurity. He’d abandoned her for the army, even if he’d never seen it like that. He’d thought more about himself and his pops’s pressure than he’d thought about her.
“It takes time to build trust,” she said, as if thinking along the same lines.
And it was so damn easy to snap that trust in half. At least believing him dead had offered Skylar a sense of finality, a sense of peace thinking he’d gone to the grave never forsaking her.
“Stubborn, just like your daddy. Stubborn as a mule when you decide to dig your heels in. Trav, sweetheart, I can only help you so much. I can cook for you, take you to your appointments,beg you to try, to care, but only you can do the work to fix this tear inside of you.”
He thought on his momma’s infinite wisdom, wisdom he’d too often ignored as she’d pet his hand with frail fingers, beseeching him as he lay semi-conscious after being nearly comatose, a canula pumping oxygen into his nostrils, IV dripping steady fluids into his arm, monitors softly bleeping in measured rhythms, after Toby had found him convulsing on the floor, overdosing. He’d never get those sounds out of his ears, of Toby screaming for help. Of Toby shouting at him that he was such a shithead. Of Toby’s anguished face as he grabbed him and shook him and begged him not to die as his pops raced into the bedroom with a flurry of EMTs behind him…
“And I know when the moment comes that you realize you need to make a change, you’ll dig those heels in and go for it. Maybe it’ll be a girl who finally wakes up that need. Maybe you’ll find Skylar again. I don’t know… I just hope I live to see the light start shining bright inside of you again, my baby boy, because this darkness is killing me…”
He’d made strides. After that rock bottom, he’d buckled down with college, med school, counseling. When the VA counseling program had introduced him to Yoda, he’d readily jumped at the chance for a dog to help with his continued progress. He’d sure painted a pretty picture of himself healing and recovering for his momma’s sake, even if he’d still felt so alone among a cohort of normal grad students who went out for drinks, went to clubs dancing, went to wine events he could no longer attend. He’d discovered orthopedic trauma medicine, and he’d seen a chance to do some good. To mold those experiences that woke him up at three a.m. in a cold sweat into something useful for others. Just like Sky had done with veterinary medicine. But medicine simply offered another shield. Another coat of armor.
If he was ever going to be a man worthy of a woman’s love, he needed to do that hard work that he’d still, to this day, been avoiding and had gotten so good at avoiding, he could convince himself most days that he was fine.
He’d always gotten what he wanted when he put his mind to it, and he wanted Skylar.
He took a deep breath, dusted a kiss atop Skylar’s head, conviction gripping him. He’d never stopped wanting that future with her. Through the blur of women, faceless now in the depths of his memories, through his recovery and hard work and teaching himself to not care, to let her go, he never had.
“I’ve got you now. And I’m sure as hell gonna try.” Lopez’s therapy stable. Brandon. There was a lot to consider but a lot to work with, too. “Let’s start building that trust back. Right here, right now. Let’s pick up—”
His hospital pager beeped. His eyes flashed to the clock on the wall over her desk. Noon. On the dot. His call shift was just starting. Dammit…