And just like that, like she’s on a hair trigger that I just squeezed, she explodes. “Jesus fucking Christ, Fallon! Stop treating me like a child! I said I’m not hungry!”
I don’t care that she looks like she wants to punch the shit out of me. After days of tears, seeing her anger, seeing her feel something other than bleak sadness, spurs me to push.
“You’re going to eat something if I have to force-feed it to you.”
She sears me with a hot glare, and the beauty of that fire scorches me.
“Fuck you,” she spits and tries to bound out of the bed, but I pull her back and pin her underneath me, shackling her wrists when she tries to shove me off.
“You want to fight?”
She strains to break free, bucking her hips. “Get off me!”
“Bring it, Kitten. I can take it. Hit me, scream, make me bleed. I’ll give it all to you because I’d rather you hurt me than keep hurting yourself.”
“Let me go!”
I press her into the mattress and get in her face. “Never. Do you hear me? I’m yours. Forever.”
The light switch to her rage flicks off, and she crumbles. “But you’re not. You’ll be taken from me just like everyone else I love. I can’t…lose…you…too,” she struggles to get out. “I can’t…”
I kiss her.
Just like her anger exploded, her passion erupts just as quickly, and she kisses me back. Her tears are salty against her lips as our tongues touch and taste and take. Even in her grief, her love pours out in our kiss, and I give my love back to her a thousandfold.
You’re not alone. I’m here. I love you. I will help you survive this. You are my forever.
“What happened to Jay wasn’t your fault.” She needs to hear it. Believe it.
The emotional rollercoaster she’s been riding turns sharply, diverting her back onto the track of sorrow and self-hate.
“He said he had a headache. I should have seen it. I’m a doctor. I should have seen it.”
An aneurysm in his brain ruptured in his sleep. The medical examiner said he died almost instantly from the stroke that resulted. There was nothing she could have done to stop it.
I grab her face, force her to look at me. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Her beautiful face collapses as she cries. “Why didn’t he tell me?”
That was the catalyst for her fight with Julien. He knew. He said Jay had told him and made him promise not to say anything. Jay was scheduled for surgery—microvascular clipping—the day after he and Elizabeth were supposed to get back from Seattle.
“I don’t know, baby.” Maybe because he knew she’d come running to be there for him, and he wanted to make things right with her first, and not because she pitied him. “But it wasn’t your fault.”
“I…don’t know…what I…did…to deserve…so much pain,” she chokes out. “Why does…everyone I love…die? It hurts…too much. Love hurts…too much.”
I lift her and hold her in my lap and let her tears drench my neck. “Then I will love you enough for the both of us.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
FALLON
Her Light Is Not Gone
I lookup from my laptop screen when I sense someone watching. It takes a second for my eyes to adjust to the dark before I see Charlotte standing in the archway of the living room, wringing her hands and biting her lip, her expression one of apprehension.
Setting my work aside, I motion for her to join me on the sofa. She takes a hesitant step forward, then another before curling up next to me. I wrap my arm around her, and she rests her head on my shoulder.
“Is Mama still asleep?”
