Written with You (The Regret Duet #2) - Aly Martinez Page 0,51
hand was gone and I was flipped over, first to my back and then to my side, facing him. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and as his head came down, sharing a pillow with mine, his face was the picture of desolation.
“You didn’t save my life that day because you made me get medical help. You saved my life because you forgave me.”
Chills exploded across my skin. “W-what?”
“It’s taken years, but I do realize that I’m not responsible for what he did. But that doesn’t mean I’ll ever be able to stop blaming myself for what happened. It’s haunted me since the first shot was fired. I was the only reason he came to the mall that day. But then there was this little girl who, at the very least, had lost her mother and was bleeding out of her stomach, with no idea at the time if she was going to survive or not. And she forgave me. Truly forgave me. Knowing that someone was out there who didn’t blame me was the only way I got through a lot of really dark times.”
I rested my palm on the side of his face. “There was nothing to forgive you for. I was eight and I knew that.”
His hand slid around my back to my side, holding me where the exit wound should have been.
But that bullet hadn’t left my body at the mall.
It’d ravaged me from the inside out before the doctors had removed it.
“You can’t have kids, Willow. There’s still a lot to forgive me for.”
God, how could he be so smart and still so wrong?
“Okay, fine,” I said. “Let’s for a minute say that the bullet that you did not fire damaged one of my ovaries and destroyed the other along with the majority of my uterus and it’s all your fault. But we also have to factor in that if it weren’t for you, I more than likely wouldn’t have made it out of that mall at all. I was going to run or scream or… I don’t know. My parents were gone and I was freaking out. You calmed me down and gave me hope in a hopeless situation.” I paused, waiting for the lump to clear from my throat.
He inched impossibly closer. “You don’t have to say anything else. We don’t need to talk about this. Not now. Not ever.”
“Yeah, we do, Caven. Because no matter what happens between us, you will always be the boy I owe my life to. You don’t get to claim that I figuratively saved your life by forgiving you and then negate the fact that you literally saved my life when you chose to help a stranger, a terrified little girl, escape a madman. Last I checked, dead women can’t have babies, either.” My hands were shaking by the time I finished.
He didn’t understand what he meant to me. But how could he when I’d spent the first four months lying to him about who I was?
“Jesus,” he breathed, tipping his forehead to mine.
The tears finally escaped my eyes. “I have loved you since I was kid, but back then, it was something different. You were almost this fictional character in my head—a white knight who saved me. And there were so many times I leaned on the memories of this hero—”
“I’m not a—”
I kissed him. I didn’t think or consider the implications of what it would mean. I just did it because in my heart it would always be right.
His strong body sagged as he let out a long exhale, as if he’d been holding his breath for the last eighteen years. And maybe he had.
Because, while I’d kissed Caven numerous times, that was the first time he’d ever kissed Willow.
His head didn’t slant. Our mouths didn’t open. But there was a soulful exchange all the same.
He drew me in close, holding me against his lips and speaking silent apologies that didn’t need to be issued.
I took them.
Accepted them.
And lived inside them for every single one of those seconds.
When he finally broke the kiss, he didn’t move far before coming back in for one more lip touch.
“The elephants are suffocating us,” he whispered.
“I know. But I still love you. And not because you were that boy at the mall. You have no idea how many times I’ve wished you weren’t Caven Lowe. Because then you could be mine.”
He closed his eyes and came back for another lingering kiss capped off by another exhale ripped from