Loving You Always (17 page)

“I won’t leave you.”

His tone was sure, but she was not.

“Oh, that’s reassuring.” Kerris’s short laugh and the look she finally gave him had soaked in uncharacteristic sarcasm and bitterness. “They all leave eventually.”

“Kerris, I’m not them.”

“No, you’re not.” She balled her fists together at her waist, clenched in a nervous knot. “You’re much worse. I could live with my mother splitting. And then, when I lost Mama Jess, it was like losing my mother all over again. And I knew my foster parents never loved me. And then my husband leaves me after I lost our baby. I mean, what is wrong with me that
everyone
can walk away so easily?”

“Walking away from you is impossible for me.” Walsh reached for her, but came up empty when she backed out of his reach. “I’m not them.”

“I know. You’re not them.” She knew if she unballed her hands they would shake. “Because I could live through all of them leaving. I
did
live through losing every one of them. But you…if you left me now, Walsh, it would break me in half. It would wreck me.”

“I’m not going to leave you. Not ever.” He caught her around the waist and pulled her to him. He stroked a steady hand down the silky fall of hair at her shoulders.

“You will.” She cried into his crisp shirt. “You will, and it’ll destroy me.”

“Baby, I won’t. I promise I won’t.”

“Walsh, I can’t…I can’t do it. I can’t…if you leave me, too—”

Her words became incoherent, muddied by the sloppy tears she wept into his strong shoulder. She didn’t protest when he sat on the bed and pulled her into his lap. He just held her until it seemed there could be no more tears. Kerris wondered if these were from a reservoir she’d been filling up since the day she was born. Since her mother’s first leaving, which had cut so deeply—cut her to the bone. Her tears were for that original pain, and every one that had followed.

After her tears subsided, she finally sniffed, plucking at the buttons of his shirt with restless fingers. He shifted so she faced him, her legs falling on either side of his strong thighs. He pressed against her back until her breasts rested against his chest, only the duvet separating them. She clutched his shoulders, keeping the duvet aloft with only the press of their bodies together. She couldn’t look at him and wondered if he could feel the gallop of her heart.

He leaned down, nudging her face up with his nose.

“Better?”

“I’m still scared.” Even with everything she’d ever wanted only a breath away, her throat burned with a lifetime of tears.

“Me, too, sometimes.” He pulled back, studying her wet eyes. He ran a thumb along her lashes and pressed a kiss there. “But there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m yours, Kerris. Completely. There’s no one else for me. Now you say it.”

When she looked up into his waiting eyes, she had the sense of falling. Like something had been chasing her for a long time, and she had finally tripped, plunging forward into a blessed darkness, unsure of where she would land.

So this was love. This fear; this need. This insatiable thirst that racked her soul when she thought of him. The tremble of her hands when he was near. The catch in her breath at the thought of his hands on her body. The tenderness when she considered what an amazing man he truly was. The possessiveness that sluiced through her at even the thought of him with someone else. Was he truly hers?

“Say it, baby.” The loving heat in his eyes warmed up every frigid place left by all the hurt she’d endured.

“I’m yours.”

“Completely.” He ran a firm hand along her back under the duvet, his hand warm against the naked flesh.

“Completely.” She hovered over his mouth before leaning the last few inches, closing her lips over his and losing all sense of space. It was only them. No fear. No apprehension. No one else. And she knew that if they went down, it would be together.

K
erris glanced at her watch. She was due in court in an hour, but something had drawn her here. After almost a year of Dr. Stein urging her, encouraging her, sometimes begging her, to visit her baby’s grave—she was finally doing it. It was a day to close old chapters and begin new ones. First, visit Amalie. Next, her divorce.

She would see Cam for the first time in more than a year. There had been no phone calls, texts, or emails. He had truly gone his own way in Paris. Kerris could only hope he had found as much peace as she had, but she somehow doubted it. He and Walsh were no closer to reconciling, but she had to keep trying. She had promised Ms. Kris she would bring them back together, and Kerris knew that once friendship was restored, everyone would be better off.

Her steps were tentative, but not because she wasn’t sure where to go. Meredith and Mama Jess had practically drawn a map. They were both so happy she was finally taking this step. No, her feet hesitated because she wasn’t sure what she would find there. Not the grave itself, but how much of herself had she buried with Amalie? Sometimes it felt like handfuls of her heart were still missing. Would this simple act of visiting the grave give any of it back? Or was that part of her heart gone forever?

She plodded her way through the cemetery, heartbeat ricocheting in her chest the closer she got. Nothing could have prepared her for what she found when she finally reached the tiny headstone with angel wings sketched in the granite.

“Cam?”

If she hadn’t been so shocked to see him, she wouldn’t have spoken. Would have tiptoed backward and left this first visit for another time. But seeing him, after a year, unexpectedly, and here at their daughter’s grave, stole her caution. And his name had slipped out.

He looked up from where he knelt in front of the headstone. His hair, even longer than she had last seen it, dark and nearly to his shoulders, was tousled from the torture of his own fingers. His eyes, red-rimmed, held so much pain that Kerris’s breath caught like she’d been punched in the throat.

He didn’t get up. Didn’t pretend he hadn’t been weeping over their baby girl. Elbows on knees, eyes turned to the ground, he didn’t speak.

“Cam, I didn’t expect to see you here. I can come back later.”

Kerris turned to leave but his words, low like a moan, stopped her.

“Why do I fuck everything up?”

Kerris turned back to him, hesitating only a moment before squatting beside him in front of the monument to their baby girl. She pulled on a blade of grass, manipulating it into a tiny circle.

“We both messed up.”

“But if I hadn’t left the house that night, Amalie would be alive.” Cam closed his eyes like he wanted to block out the world.

“And if I hadn’t driven out in the rain…”

They’d said these words before to each other, and she realized neither of them had banished the guilt. She stowed the words in her head where she collected regrets and wishes and dead hopes.

“I’m sorry you never got to hold her, Kerris. She was beautiful.” Cam ran his long, sensitive fingers over the headstone. “She was perfect.”

They nursed a quiet between them for a few moments, both lost in their private thoughts, until Cam spoke again.

“I think about her every day.”

“I do, too.” Kerris worried her bottom lip between her teeth. “They say it gets easier, and in some ways it has. In other ways…”

“In other ways it feels like it keeps happening over and over again, and the pain gets no better.”

“Yeah, some days it does feel like that.” Kerris tossed a handful of grass away. “I wanted her so badly.”

“I did, too.” Cam snapped his dark brows together. “Maybe I wanted her for the wrong reasons. I thought having a family would be some kind of reset, give me some kind of clean slate. Make the past…hurt less.”

“Me, too. And I thought she could save us.”

“Nothing could have saved us. I see that now.” Cam paused before looking at her, his eyes filled with certainty but no peace. “I saw that when I left for Paris.”

“I think I knew that, too, but it still hurt when you left.” Kerris’s hollow laugh bounced between them in the eerie quiet. “A lot of things hurt when we were together.”

Cam caressed the headstone again, swallowing and clenching the muscles in his strong jaw.

“Nothing has ever hurt like this, and I’ve been through some shit.” He looked at her for a moment before returning to the headstone. “We both have.”

Kerris wasn’t sure what emboldened her to reach for Cam’s hand, but she did. After all they’d been through—how he had hurt her, how she had hurt him—she expected him to flinch from her touch. He didn’t. He looked into her eyes, a teary mirror of his own grief, and held on, somehow hallowing this moment between them for their baby girl. Something in that contact healed more than words. Like their hands were conductors for forgiveness, for resolution. For peace?

“Did you find any peace in Paris?”

“Pshht.” Cam blew his cynicism out as a truncated breath. “I thought marrying you would bring me peace, but we just ended up adding new wounds. I thought having Amalie would bring peace, but I’m standing here in a graveyard, more fucked up than I’ve ever been. I’m done looking for peace, Kerris. It knows where to find me.”

Kerris knew from experience that any peace she had obtained over the last year, she had relentlessly pursued. She had ripped her insides out, dumped them on the table, sorted through the hurt. It had been hard. It had been work. Peace didn’t come looking for you. It sometimes hid in the pain. Sometimes camouflaged itself in the disappointments of the past, and until you looked hard enough to understand, to put it in perspective, peace could not be found. That wasn’t a lesson you could relay in a conversation. You couldn’t walk through that fire for anyone else. She certainly couldn’t walk through it for Cam.

Kerris shifted on her haunches, legs getting stiff, and decided to stand, brushing the last of her tears away. Cam eased himself off the ground, too, wiping grass and dirt from the dark slacks he wore with a crisp white poet-collared shirt. He was dressed for court.

“So you and Walsh, huh?” Cam didn’t look at her, but looked at his black boots.

“Yeah.” That one word told Cam what she should have told him years ago. That she was in love with his best friend. “He’s in Tokyo.”

Cam nodded, and Kerris searched his eyes for bitterness and the lines of his face for anger. She didn’t see those things, but what scared her was that she saw nothing else either. Cam, who had always been like a wire over water, volatile and crackling with the promise of explosion and passion, had vacant eyes. It frightened Kerris. Before she could probe, poke around the emptiness she sensed in him, he spoke again.

“We should get going. It’s almost time.”

He was right, and Kerris was ready to sever her ties to the past, to make her way into the future, but more than ever, with Ms. Kris’s promise lodged in her heart, she was determined they would not leave Cam behind.

W
ell, I guess that’s that.” Cam opened the cottage door for Kerris. “You’re a free woman.”

“And you’re a free man.”

Kerris hoped her eyes weren’t shining with the promise of her new life, but she was afraid they were. Afraid the happiness ahead for her and Walsh would be an insult to this man who had once been such a close friend to them both. The thought of seeing Walsh tomorrow literally made Kerris’s heart flutter. He returned from Tokyo tonight. Ten days had turned into three weeks as negotiations dragged out. It was probably best that he and Cam weren’t here at the same time.

“I just need to grab a few things from the office and I’ll be outta your hair,” Cam said.

“Don’t rush. It’s your house.”

“Take your time about leaving.” Cam settled onto the couch, the line of his lips not quite committing to a smile. “I’m headed back to Paris tonight and have no plans of coming back here anytime soon.”

Kerris sat on the couch across from Cam. They were newly divorced, but still had so many memories and a lot of pain looming between them, like a smear on their hearts that might not ever be wiped completely clean. Kerris hoped they’d be able to find a cleaner slate. If for no other reason than restoring the friendship that she knew, beneath all of the enmity and bitterness, both men still missed and needed. She wanted Cam in their lives. She missed the easy friendship they’d once shared before her misguided choices wrecked everything. Not just for her, but for Cam. And for Walsh.

“Cam, can I say something?”

He considered her warily from the corner of the leather couch.

“What?”

“I wanted a family, a home, a future with someone I could spend my life with.” Kerris ran damp palms across the pleat in her tailored slacks. “And when you offered that to me the night of the scholars dinner, knowing I couldn’t love you the same way, I thought it was possible, but I was wrong.”

Cam continued watching her, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees.

“But I don’t ever want you to think I didn’t love you.” Kerris swallowed the lump burning a hole in her throat. “And I know you loved me. It just wasn’t the love marriages are made of. We were so good as friends. I just wish we could have left it that way. I’m sorry…I’m sorry for everything.”

She forced her eyes to remain glued to his, hoping the détente they had reached in the cemetery could hold through what she needed to say.

“I grabbed what you offered me with both hands and ran, thinking I could ignore or bury what I felt for Walsh. And I was doing okay with it, until he was kidnapped. That was such a scary day.”

“Yeah, for me, too.”

Kerris knew how important Cam and Walsh had been to each other. She just had to figure out how to get them to see it and admit it again.

“When he came home from Haiti…I don’t know. We just…the walls I’d built up to protect the three of us just fell, and in that one moment, we kissed.”

“Yeah, I was there for that one part.” A smile tugged at the corner of Cam’s mouth, and Kerris marveled not for the first time at his twisted sense of humor, a blessing and a curse.

“I felt so guilty and so broken after that. I knew I had ruined something special between the two of you, and between you and me, but I was determined to make good on the promise I made to you.”

Kerris wondered, not for the first time, how she would ever keep her promise to Kristeene.

“And then I got pregnant,” she said. “And I thought that was our miracle to make everything right again, but nothing was right. I was only half there, and I knew you sensed that. I’m sorry for so much.”

“You may not believe it, but so am I.” Cam swallowed visibly, emotion twisting his mouth until he straightened it. “What I made you do the night I saw you with Walsh—”

“Cam, don’t.” She couldn’t talk about that. Not now. “You didn’t force me.”

“Didn’t I?” His eyes carried the apology before he voiced it. “I’m sorry, Kerris. Sometimes I just…sometimes I’m not a good guy. Can you forgive me for that night?”

“I do.” She reached across the space separating them to grip his hand. “And I know you feel guilty for leaving me after the accident. Don’t. It was the best thing for all of us. I would never have been the one to leave. You saved us both by leaving. I understand that now.”

“I’m glad.” Cam offered her the kind of smile they hadn’t shared in years. “I guess.”

“Cam, we used to be friends.” Kerris brushed tears away with one hand and gripped his hand harder with the other. “You remember that?”

“Yeah.” Cam stood to his feet, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. “I remember.”

“I want that back. I want the best for you. For you to be happy and healthy.” Kerris paused, knowing the subject she needed to broach would take her toward an injured animal that might claw her flesh at any moment. “I’ve been seeing a therapist.”

Cam narrowed his eyes at her, a warning to not go where she was about to go.

“Good for you.”

“It could be good for you, too, Cam. You still have those nightmares?”

Cam raised the beautiful, dark slashes of his eyebrows.

“Oh, is this the part where you give a fuck?”

“Cam, I want you well.”

“Well?” Cam’s laugh boomed in the room. “Baby, I have more money than I ever imagined, can
still
get any woman I want, and am painting—living my dream. I’m more than well. I’m fucking marvelous. Trust.”

“You’re deflecting because you don’t want me digging into this.”

“Deflecting? Is that a new word your therapist taught you? Just because you’ve got screws loose—”

“I do have screws loose, Cam.”

Kerris checked the anger she knew he was provoking to throw her off this topic even after the ground they had gained.

“I had…have…abandonment issues. Self-worth issues. And not dealing with those drove me to make bad choices, like marrying a good friend when I wasn’t in love with him. Like ignoring my feelings for Walsh because I thought I wasn’t good enough. My point is maybe you made some bad choices, too, because you may have…issues.”

“That’s your point? You can do better than that, Kerris.”

“Okay, I will.” Kerris held his eyes with hers, firming her mouth to say what she had realized over the course of her time with Dr. Stein. “I think you settled for what we had as much as I did because we both thought we weren’t worth more. As damaged as I was, you probably thought I was the best you could do.”

Horror washed away the impolite disdain Cam had so carefully held in place. Only for a moment, but long enough for Kerris to know she wasn’t too far off base. Even if he didn’t realize or want to admit it yet.

“Cam, get help so you can be ready for the girl who will love you the way you deserve to be loved.”

Cam shook his head, something ugly twisting his beautiful face. It was hate. And it wasn’t for her or for Walsh. It was for himself.

“If you still think I deserve to be loved,
you’re
the one who needs help.”

“Cam, our abusers—”

“Screw this. I’m getting my stuff and I’m out.”

Cam turned away, walking with brisk strides toward the office.

The doorbell cut into the response she hadn’t formed yet. Kerris wiped the last traces of tears from her cheeks and composed herself. She recognized that self-hatred, and knew it had less to do with anything Cam had actually done and much more to do with fundamentally who he believed himself to
be
because of the abuse he’d suffered. That lie would take a long time to untangle. In some ways, she was still untangling it herself.

Mama Jess had gone to visit her sister in the hospital after minor surgery. Meredith was at the shop. She wasn’t sure who would be stopping by. When she opened the door and saw Walsh, she wanted to hurl herself at him, wrap her body around him like cellophane, but he moved first. He pulled her up and into his arms until her feet didn’t touch the ground, his mouth hot and hungry against her, his tongue searching and licking heat into her with each kiss. He shifted his arms, moving one under her butt and stretching one up her back, his hand cupping her head and stroking her hair.

He pulled away long enough to whisper against her lips.

“Tell me you’re free.” He kissed down her chin, licking the tendon in her neck. “It’s official. Tell me you’re mine.”

“Walsh, we should—”

“Wow, you got some balls,” Cam said from behind them, just inside the house. “The ink is barely dry, and you’re here already.”

Kerris glanced over her shoulder, wriggling to the ground and stepping out of Walsh’s arms, only to be pulled back and pressed against his chest.

“Sorry, I couldn’t wait,” Walsh said.

“Some things don’t change,” Cam said.

“Before I hid everything, buried my feelings, and didn’t tell you what the hell was going on.” Walsh held Cam’s eyes without wavering. “And it cost me the only thing that really mattered. You and Kerris should never have gotten married.”

“You’re a little late to this party, dude,” Cam said with wry bitterness. “We just had this conversation.”

“Not with me, you didn’t. I need to say this. You can be a selfish, egotistical, spoiled bastard.”

“Well, this is off to a great start.” Cam slid his hands into the pockets of his pants and rocked back on his heels. “Is there a ‘but’ coming?”

“But”—Walsh paused for emphasis—“you were the best friend I’ve ever had. Maybe will ever have, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you how I felt about Kerris. I’m sorry I kissed her when she was married to you, but I’m not, could
never
be, sorry that I love her or that she loves me. I’m not sure things will ever be the same between you and me—”

“Doubtful.” Cam looked down at his boots.

“But I have to be honest with you this time. It’s all got to be out in the open.” Walsh squeezed Kerris an inch closer. She felt the heavy, frantic rhythm of his heart beat at her back. “I’m marrying Kerris.”

Not a twitch. Not a blink. Kerris saw nothing on Cam’s face until he drew a swift breath.

“I know that.”

“Soon.” Walsh reached down and around until his hand surrounded hers. “Very soon.”