This was a bad idea—to voice this. But it was too late to go back, and all I could do was study the way Sully’s lips were parting like he didn’t know what to say.
“If you weren’t?”
“Here,” I clarified. “If I weren’t here.”
“I don’t—” He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“If I didn’t come back,” I explained as my heart pounded so loudly in my ears, I could barely hear myself speak. “If I’d stayed in California, I could have spared you from…this.”
His brows furrowed. “From what?”
I fought the urge to look away. He’d only catch me, pull me back again. “The pain, I suppose.”
“Do you mean…” He spoke carefully, like the concept was taking its time connecting in his brain. “Are you asking if it would have been better if I’d never known you were pregnant?”
I gave a slow nod.
Sully seemed speechless at first, and I worried that he might say I was right. That he might confirm my fears. Add to my guilt.
But then he groaned my name and dropped his forehead to mine. “Eleanor, no.”
“No?” I breathed.
“No, no, no, no,no,” he replied, shaking his head. And when he finally pulled back to look at me, there was a sheen to his gaze. “The thought of never knowing…no.” He gave his head one more resolute shake. “Absolutely not.”
My breath hitched, and it felt a little like my body was floating, coming up to the surface, finding the light, maybe some air.
Sully wasn’t done, though. His glassy gaze bored into mine. “To know that, even if it was just for a brief period of time, a blip of our lives, there was a part of you and a part of me that created something—someone—new together…Eleanor, I can’t tell you how much it would have killed me not to have known that they existed. Our child.”
And suddenly, I was crying.
Again.
And I knew it wasn’t pretty. I knew I was gasping for air. I knew my face was blotchy and my eyes red-rimmed. My brain was a mess these days, my nervous system shot as I bounced between highs and lows, as I switched from laughing to crying with the blink of an eye. But I couldn’t stop.
Because I’d neededsobadly to hear him say that.
“They did exist,” I gasped, “didn’t they?”
“They did.” He was cupping my face now, and I didn’t care that I’d be covered inButtermilk, didn’t care about anything but his response. “They existed, baby. They were ours. And they were real. And loved. And I am—” His voice caught, throat bobbing. “I amsoheartbroken that I will never meet them. But I wouldn’t trade the ache or the pain, not if it meant I’d never get to have you here, hear you tell me that you’re pregnant, hold you—them—for one night. Okay?”
I tried to get a handle on my tears, swallowing down the thickness in my throat as I nodded.
“I wouldn’t trade it for the world,” Sully continued, despite his own voice growing rough. “And I don’t want you anywhere but here. I don’t know what I’d do if you hadn’t come home and I’d somehow found out that you’d gone through this on the other side of the country, alone. Without me. The thought that?—”
He inhaled and then exhaled—shakily. His whole body was shaking, actually. Like he’d painted an image he couldn’t erase, and honestly, I was scared of that image, too. God, I couldn’t imagine doing this without him.
Sully closed his eyes for a second, and when he opened them again, they wandered over me, drinking me in. His body loosened, ever so slightly, like he’d remembered that I was here, and I wasn’t across the country, and everything was real.
And then, in a tender voice that renewed tears in my lash line, he repeated, “I am so very glad that you are home, Eleanor.”
I sniffled and wiped at my nose, even knowing that I was likely smearing paint everywhere. Sully gave me a tilted half-smile as he used his thumb to brush my tears away. And then his touch traveled lower again, like he planned to pick up where he had left off before. His finger curved over my jawline and along the slope of my neck, grazing my pulse point. He traced my collarbone and followed the shape of my shoulder. I could feel the wet trail he left in his wake as he switched directions and painted lightly over my chest, circling my left side.
“Me too,” I whispered, caught in a sort of trance from whatever he was doing to me.
Touching me. He was touching me. And even though he’d touched me a million times, this felt different.
“Good.”
