I tried swallowing the lump in my throat.
“I’m scared to love you.”
“Why?”
“We’ve treated each other horribly. Your love is toxic, mine, barren; we’ve hurt each other too much to just move on like nothing happened.”
“We never gave up on each other,” he countered. “We never tapped out. That means something.”
“I’m too haunted by the past.”
“No, you’re finally facing it,” he said fiercely. “You’ve been ignoring who you were, your story, for most of your adult life. This is healing, Tierney. It’s messy as fuck, but anything worth doing is.”
I wanted to believe him. I did. Because the alternative was admitting to myself that I wasn’t healing. That I was juststuck in an inferno of never-ending agony and vomit-inducing flashbacks.
“You’re a controlling piece of shit.” I sighed in despair.
He opened his mouth, likely to bite my head off, realized he was about to validate my accusation, and closed it with a scowl. “I’ll do better.”
“I need to see you’ve changed before I tie my fate to yours,” I said.
“How can I do that?”
I licked my lips, meeting his gaze. “Show me you’ve changed your ways. No more stalking. No more overbearing rules. No more surveillance. None of that.Freedom. I want my freedom.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. He didn’t like it. But he didn’t have a choice, either.
“I can do that.”
“Can you?”
“Ye—no.” He scratched his jaw. Blew out a breath. “Fuck, yes.Yes. For you, I’ll do that.”
I wanted to throw up. Was I really giving him another chance?
Do you really have a choice?
He was a vital organ nestled inside me. With a pulse and a function—a living, breathing thing. If there were no him, there’d be no me.
He was the one person I knew would always be there, would always help, not because we shared a bloodline or trauma, like Tiernan, but because we shared asoul.
We stared at each other from across the table.
“I can’t give you heirs,” I reminded him. “So if this is something that’s important to you…”
“You’reimportant to me.”
“And issues,” I went on, ignoring his statement, eyes stuck on the table in front of me stubbornly. “I have a lot of them. I will put you through hell.”
“I would choose hell with you over heaven with anyone else, any day of the week.”
The panic inside me increased tenfold. We were doing this. Really. Weapons down. Just…letting ourselves succumb to our feelings. Over a decade after the fact, but better late than never, right?
“How did you lose it?” Achilles cleared his throat. “Your…”
“Uterus?” I swallowed, pasting on a nervous smile. He was so careful not prodding, not asking anything about my past, not when we were kids and not at the cabin. But he deserved to know.
“I was raped one too many times, by five too many men, at the work camp.” I recited it as though it didn’t happen to me but to someone else. Sticking to the facts. “I was twelve, and although being subjected to rape was a punishment Igor loved giving us, I did this one to myself.” A grim smile found my lips. “See, the work camp we lived at in Siberia had a terrible food shortage. I was hungry all the time. Sometimes that hunger drove me to do stupid things. Like offering my body for a bowl of oatmeal or dry crackers. We’d go to the woods, and I’d let the older soldiers…useme, in exchange for food. My logic was that I was already being raped on a weekly basis. What did it matter if it happened a few more times or a few less?” I let loose a self-deprecating laugh. “Still, I didn’t do it as often as I’d wanted to because Tiernan went ballistic whenever he found out, but it happened enough.”
