Maddie and Wyn (40 page)

“I don’t know her well, but from what I do, she seems to be a levelheaded and loving woman.” Maddie’s gaze went cloudy, and Wyn had to wonder if she was thinking of her own late mother. Unlike Janet Carson, the late Mrs. Morgan had not been calm nor had she felt unconditional love for all of her children. “I’ll call Jayden tomorrow to remind him he still has a shift to work, and I expect him to be there.”

“That’s good. He’ll need the stability you provide right now.”

“I hope I’ll be able to help.”

Wyn brushed Maddie’s hair behind her ear, struck once again by how lovely she was, both inside and out. “You always do.” He studied her, the light in her eyes, and a rusty old nail started poking at his core. “So we solved the mystery,” he said, a tightness he couldn’t control edging into his voice.

“You solved it.” Maddie linked her arm in his, and her adoring smile cut a deeper jagged line into Wyn’s core. “I’m proud of you.”

“Thank you for giving me the credit.” He dipped down to kiss her hand, all the while silently ordering himself to calm the fuck down. “But I wouldn’t have been able to do it if you hadn’t opened me up to Mrs. Corsini and Nico, and if you hadn’t given me permission to live in your house.”

Lying back on the porch, Maddie muttered, “I’m just happy it’s all resolved,” and stretched her arms high over her head. “I can finally stop worrying about it every day. That will be nice.”

Not closed at all, the pit in Wyn’s belly turned into a chasm. “Our new deal stated that I stay until we figured out the mystery.” Words spilled out of his mouth unchecked, ones he wanted to swallow back down, but he couldn’t stop. “Are you saying you’re ready for me to go?”

Maddie bumped her leg with his. “Why would you say that?”

“That was our deal,” he reminded her, his tone ragged yet soft, without looking back at her. “I don’t want to disrespect it or you. If you want me to leave, I will.”

“Hey.” Springing up faster than a grasshopper, Maddie yanked Wyn around to face her. “Why do you keep doing this?”

Wyn plastered his back against the railing. “Doing what?”

“Asking me if your time here is up, when things have actually started to go really well for us.” Open bewilderment muddied the silver in Maddie’s eyes, turning the color to clay. “It’s like you want to leave, but you want me to be the one to do it. It’s like you’re trying to break us up.” Maddie’s face suddenly fell, and it was as if she was seeing a ghost again, only this time a menacing one. “It’s like what you did on my birthday four years ago.”

Wyn reared, although he was already fused to the porch beam. “What?”

“You wanted to break us up that night,” Maddie said quickly. “I always knew it, even though you’ve tried to tell me over and over again that I was wrong and that it was just a horrible mistake. And now you’re doing the same thing again, but in a different way. The question is,” with one look Maddie penetrated straight into his soul, “why?”

All the blood drained from Wyn’s body, leaving him numb and cold.

Wyn sat two feet away from Maddie, but for her, it felt like a mile loomed between them. He looked like a zombie, yet Maddie’s heart ached to put life back in him and bridge the divide between them. Personal madness lived and thrived inside his head. In hers too; she could own that now. But if neither of them could let the demons go, they would hurt each other again, and this time maybe destroy each other in a way from which they could not recover.

Go back to where your friendship began.
Maddie’s heart threaded fast and her stomach clenched, much as they had on that dark snowy night by the creek so many years ago.
Give him the most vulnerable pieces of your heart first and pray he can find a way to do the same for you.

Exhaling some of the nerves out of her, Maddie notched her chin and managed a small, she hoped, encouraging, smile. “Back when you finally started listening to me about the ghost, and you opened yourself to the thought that I might know what I was talking about, that was when I was able to start letting go with you again. That was when I opened myself up to listening to you and believing in you again. I fought doing it. I fought it because I knew that once I let go of my anger with you, once I let myself start experiencing the absolute joy I feel whenever I’m in your company, it would be a quick slide to being madly in love with you all over again. And I was right.” She chuckled, but her chest banded tightly too. “I fell right away, but God did I resist telling you I loved you or letting you know. Holding back wasn’t to punish you, or so I could maintain some power over you, although if that’s what you thought, I wouldn’t blame you.”

His focus like a laser, Wyn quickly shook his head. “No.”

Her mouth dry, and her hands clammy, Maddie admitted, “The reason I didn’t tell you I loved you is because I was afraid. Afraid to even admit to myself how I felt, and definitely terrified to let you know anything. At first I told myself I didn’t dare say anything because I didn’t want you to have that power over me again, but that’s not the truth. At least not the complete truth. I was lying to myself. The truth is I was afraid to tell you because, for all that we are getting close again in so many ways, for all the history and intimacy we’ve shared in the two weeks in this house, I still don’t know why you cheated and hurt me all those years ago.” The tightness in Maddie’s chest squeezed harder, but she ignored the inner signals to run and hide, and poured her most secret self out on the porch between them. “If I don’t know why you did what you did, then I feel so vulnerable to it happening again.”

His voice gruff, Wyn whispered, “Maddie…” and grabbed her hand.

The warmth in his touch so incredible, Maddie forced herself to untwine their fingers and put her hand against his lips. “Just let me get this out, because it’s hard to own, and if I stop I might not get going again.” Once he nodded, she pulled her fingers from his mouth and clutched her hands in her lap. “We are so close to perfect now, and if you want the truth, I could probably push down or ignore when I get that little poke of uncertainty about you, and we would be fine. I love you so much, and to have you in my life, there’s a big piece of me that would live with those little bubbles of fear and pray for the best. But that poke of uncertainty would always be there. And I don’t want it to be. I don’t think you want it there for me either.”

“Never.” The truth in Wyn’s utterance reached into Maddie’s chest and grabbed onto her heart.

So she told him, “Then the only way this panicky fear is going to go away is if you tell me the truth about why you had a woman at your house on my birthday. That’s the only way I am going to feel completely safe in the knowledge that you’ve moved past what drove you to bring that woman to your house on my birthday and do what you did with her, knowing I would see it. I think you need to get whatever is so clearly eating at you off your chest too.” Studying Wyn, the hard edge of his jaw and the unblinking returning stare, Maddie’s soul ached. Feeling that pain though, and watching him, she suddenly realized she no longer hurt for herself; the pain inside her was for him.

Scooting closer to him, sitting perpendicular, Maddie put her leg across Wyn’s thighs and her arm across his back, surrounding him. “I wonder, do you even know why you took that woman the way you did, on that particular night? Or is the truth buried so deep inside that you can’t even see it?”

Facing forward, Wyn turned statue rigid, and his profile looked hewn out of granite.

Not this time
. Turning his head for him, Maddie forced Wyn to face her. The bleak, stark black in his eyes tore her up, but at the same time stiffened her resolve. “I think it has to do with your dad,” she said, nodding when he shook his head. “From what I know about you, which I think is more than maybe anyone but Ethan, you mostly shut down and become very stoic when having to talk about your father. To me that means in truth you have a tornado of emotions inside about him that are beating you up and leaving you badly bruised. That kind of pain has to bleed into other parts of your life, whether you mean for them to or not. It would be impossible to keep them separated all the time.”

Wyn’s face suddenly fell, and his voice broke as he whispered, “I’m just like him. I’m a failure, and I’m weak. As much as I’ve tried, I can’t get those characteristics of his out of my system. I want you,” he held onto her leg like a lifeline, “but I will fail you over and over again. I already have. More than once. I don’t deserve you.”

With every word Wyn spoke, Maddie shook her head. “Not even a little bit true.”

“When you got thrown from the snowmobile on that weekend we took together, I froze. I couldn’t think; I couldn’t function to help you. If those two women hadn’t found us, you would have died, and I would have sat there with your head in my lap, powerless to help you.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true!” Wyn’s raw shout ripped through the air, sending a cluster of birds up from the garden and across the sunny sky. Lowering his head and voice, he repeated, “It’s true.”

Maddie pulled his face right back out of hiding. “I believe that the women came; I already know they did. But you will never convince me that had they not, you would not have snapped out of your funk and saved my life. I know you would have. There’s no doubt in my mind about it.”

With a savage swipe, Wyn pushed wetness from his eyes. “I was useless with you, just like my dad was when my mom got sick. He’s always said he loved her too much and he couldn’t handle watching her die. Seeing you bleeding on the snow like that, I understood how he felt, and I even understood why he ran. I knew because I felt the same with you.”

Grabbing his face, Maddie reminded him, “But you didn’t run.” She locked her legs around his waist from the side and shook him. “Not with me, and not with your mom. It was just as hard for you and Ethan when Jayne got sick. Maybe even hardest for you the first time she fell ill, seeing how young you were. But you never shirked. Not once. That should prove to you how strong a person you are.”

A rough exhale escaped Wyn, and his hands still shook as he curled them around her leg. “I recently told you my father once came to Redemption, but not when.” Blinking hard, his mouth twisted down. “He came to town three days before your twenty-first birthday.”

Crap.
Maddie rubbed his back, across his wide shoulders, which sloped so much he looked to her like a scolded little boy. “I didn’t know.”

“I was already struggling with failing to keep you safe on the mountain, and it was like with each day that went by, the guilt ate at me more, not less.”

A light bulb went on in Maddie’s head, allowing so many answers to tumble into place. “You started getting busier at work, and picking up extra shifts. I never stopped to examine why. But it was because of this guilt you were dealing with, that you were keeping all to yourself, and you were avoiding me.”

“Why would you question anything?” Wyn’s voice rose, the hoarseness making it thick. “For all your salty language and sassiness, your innocence is off the charts. If you’re devoted to a person, you don’t question what they tell you. You accept that they’re always being truthful with you, as you know you are with them.”

Wyn fell silent then, but his Adam’s apple continued to bob erratically, and his focus dropped to his hands, where he picked at a strand of fabric on the left leg of her coveralls.

The silent internal struggle in Wyn actually screamed through every pore of his being. Whether he realized it or not, he needed to purge this from his soul. Forget that burying everything again would destroy them as a couple, it would slowly eat away at him until there was nothing left but an empty black hole.

Not on my watch
. Tempering her passion, Maddie gently reached between them and closed his hand in hers. “So while you were struggling,” she prompted, “your dad showed up.”

Wyn started and stopped a handful of times, before he finally got out, “I didn’t talk to him. I refused, just like any time he tried to get in touch with me on the phone in the past. But while he was here, I saw him on the street. He didn’t see me, but I saw him.” Visibly struggling, Wyn’s jaw ticked hard and fast, like it had its own heartbeat. “I watched him, and as I did, this wave of longing overtook me. I just wanted my dad so fucking bad. It took everything in me not to run over to him and hug him and never let him go and beg him never to leave again. This man who’d left my mom while she was in the middle of treatment and sick as a dog and unable to eat and losing her hair, this man who’d left his two children to help their mother deal with her illness, this man who for years and years never once got in touch with us to see if we needed his help or even if we were still alive and doing okay. This
man,
” Wyn uttered the word like a savage curse, “this man is the same man I wanted to wrap my arms around on that street corner and tell him I still loved him, and I wanted him to tell me the same.” His entire face a snarl, Wyn looked at Maddie, shoving the heels of his hands across his wet eyes. “What the hell kind of cowardly traitor does that make me? What the hell kind of man does that make me?”

Wiping streaks of tears from her cheeks too, Maddie promised him, “A human one.”

“Not one good enough for you,” he vowed, all the raw edges cutting up his voice. “I didn’t consciously cheat on you that night; I swear I didn’t. I didn’t think ‘I’m going to take this woman to my house and fuck her at precisely the time Maddie is coming over so that she’ll see us’. It wasn’t like that. I was just…It was just…I just felt like this enormous pile of shit, sitting in a corner so long flies are starting to buzz around me, and every day it went by where I couldn’t clean myself up, I began attracting other kinds of bugs and nastiness. I stunk to high heaven, and I felt dirty, so full of diseases, but I couldn’t clean myself up. I didn’t know how. But I knew if we were together you would still hug me and love me, and the stench and ugliness would end up all over you too.” His chest rising and falling fast, as if in the middle of a marathon, Wyn wiped snot from his nose. “I think subconsciously I didn’t want you anywhere near the pile of shit, so I made sure you would see it for what it was, see
me
, see the pile of shit, without rose-colored glasses on.”