And so she had spent the past seventeen years trying to do her very best to avoid being left again. To hold people at a far enough distance that she would be able to handle it if she lost them. To make herself palatable enough that maybe people wouldn’t want to leave.
She was doing a terrible job of it now. She had just alienated her brother in a huge way, and now she was breaking into tiny pieces in front of the only man she had ever allowed to touch her. He was seeing her naked now, even though he had never seen her naked in the physical sense. She was completely bare to him.
And she was too caught up in her misery, in her brokenness to care.
Gage was holding her now, and that made it feel better too. Just like he had done last night, he made a shelter for her out of his arms; his broad chest and shoulders were more than enough to shield her from almost anything that came from the outside. But he couldn’t help her with this. He couldn’t stop it. The storm was inside. There was no hiding from it. There was no escaping it.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said, mostly because she imagined it was what any decent person would say in this situation. But it didn’t make it true. It had been the thing that pushed her mother away once and for all.
Even if it wasn’t fair it was true.
Fair didn’t have any place in life.
At least, not in hers.
She nodded, feeling that his shirt was wet beneath her cheek. Great, she was crying on him. She was too miserable to care. “I want to go home,” she said.
“Your home or mine?”
“It doesn’t matter. As long as you come with me.”
* * *
WHEN THEY GOT back to her house it was cold inside. The fire in the woodstove had gone out and Rebecca wrapped her arms around herself to keep from shivering. She felt like the cold was coming from inside of her. She doubted a fire would help.
Still, Gage set about warming the interior of the house. She supposed the rest of it was up to her. Figuring out how to deal with her own self. How to get a handle on the emotions that were rioting through her.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to get a handle on them. She never let them break through. Never let these thoughts form all the way. They just sort of hovered in the back of her mind, a vague kind of dread that she never allowed herself to truly look at. Never allowed herself to understand. She could see it all now. All of that vague, often overwhelming anxiety now taking its full form.
For some reason that realization, the full understanding of exactly what she was afraid of made everything feel so tenuous. Like Jonathan really might pull away from her completely. Like her friends would all desert her.
Made her feel as if even this, this connection that she had with Gage, was a kind of thin, fragile line.
She watched him as he put pieces of wood into the woodstove, moving them around with his bare hands, trying to get them to ignite. She watched the tattoo, that thick black band that signified their shared past, shift and ripple over his muscles, and a shiver ran down her spine.
She was the only one that knew. The only one that knew the entire story. Other than his father, at least. But not even his father had the full picture. The years that had passed in between the time he had left Copper Ridge and when he had come back. Rebecca knew. She was the keeper of Gage’s story.
And he was the keeper of hers.
Somehow, this relationship had shifted, changed. They had become each other’s confidants. They kept each other’s worst secrets, had done so for years. Not to protect each other, but initially to protect themselves. Everything seemed like it was turned on its head now.
Somehow, that thread that had connected them for so long had wound around them both, drawing them together inextricably.
Nobody, not a single person, knew more about her than Gage West. And she had a feeling that nobody knew more about him than she did. Still, she was hiding her body from him. Protecting them both. It was their very last secret.
The one that let them hide. The one that separated their being lovers