The Lost Recipe for Happiness - By Barbara O'Neal Page 0,112
She blinked, plainly disoriented, and Julian put a protective arm around her. “You’re all right,” he said quietly. “You’re here with me.”
“Don’t do that,” she said, exhausted. “Don’t do that.”
“Come, lie down.” He tried to nudge her back to the pillows, to the piles of softness and comforters. She pulled against him, and despite himself, he was aroused by the sway and supple plumpness of her breasts in the soft pink light, the curve of flesh beneath her arm, the crease at the bend of her hip, revealed by the comforter falling back. He leaned in and pressed his forehead against her upper arm. “You need to sleep.”
She turned her shoulder away from him. “I felt you tracing the scar.” She reached a hand backward and scratched the place as if it itched or was irritated by his caress. “I hate that. I hate it!” She stood up, throwing the covers off, and he was pierced by the spectral sight of her, moving away, awkwardly, her body stiff, her back a curve in the darkness, her shoulder, her hip each catching a cupful of light.
He leapt up, touched her. “Elena, come back to bed.” He tried to draw her body to him, put his warmth against her stiff cold body.
But she flung him away. “No. You just don’t know. You don’t understand. I hate that.”
She seemed like someone else tonight. Hostile and fierce and sparking with that thick darkness, a lure and sharpness that put him off and drew him in all at once. “I’m sorry. I’m worried about you. It’s cold. Come back to bed. I won’t touch you, I promise.”
“Oh,” she sighed, almost a sob, and covered her face, “it’s not that, that I don’t want you to touch me, but I feel like I’m breaking. I can’t break right now, Julian. Not this minute.”
He reached for her hand, capturing one finger, so dry and ragged that bits of skin were like cactus. “Climb under the covers,” he said, and pulled her under the quilt, tucking it close around her. A choppy spray of fine hair fell inelegantly over her brow. He pushed it away. Vast tenderness welled in him. He traced her eyebrow. Her hand slid from below the covers and clutched his wrist.
“Stop,” she said, her eyes closed tight. Tears leaked from beneath her eyelids. “I can’t bear it tonight. Kindness, compassion, your sweetness. It will demolish me.”
He nodded, pulling back to his own pillow, just one arm over her, over the top of the quilt. “Is that all right?”
She nodded tightly, as if any large movement would cause pain. Tears pooled in the small indentation of her nose. He simply lay there next to her, hoping it was some comfort or warmth. Her foot found his under the cover.
After a long time, she said, “When I woke up in the hospital, it had been three weeks since the accident. My face was so wrecked I didn’t even recognize myself. I was in a body cast and couldn’t move anything except one arm. There wasn’t anybody in the room when I woke up, and I couldn’t figure out what had happened to me. I didn’t remember the accident right away.”
He didn’t move anything except his thumb, just a sweep of it to let her know he was listening.
“When I did remember, I wanted to see my sister and Edwin, and when they told me they were dead, I didn’t believe them. I remembered Isobel holding my hand after the accident. She sat right there in the ditch and kept me company until they found me.”
He pulled out a word. “Umm-hmmm.”
Elena ducked her head deeper into the pillows, and he understood that she was crying. “They had been dead for three weeks by then. Three weeks and I didn’t even know.” She cried very quietly, very intensely. “I don’t know why I lived. I don’t know why I lived. I don’t know why I lived.”
He pulled her into him, holding her as gently as he could while she wept. He said nothing, stroking her hair, careful to keep his hands away from her scar, and he thought, For me.
When she awakened in Julian’s bedroom, her eyes heavy and tired, Elena only lay there for a long moment. The space between her eyebrows, that place of the third eye, felt thick and shrouded. Julian had moved away in the night—neither of them were cuddly sleepers—and she slid out of the bed, not daring to look at him.