Clarity 3 (21 page)

“It hurts too much. Everything hurts.” I press my face against his neck, trying to get closer to his warmth. “I was so happy—then it all crashed and burned. I lost you.”

“
Winter, I’m right here,” he insists. He runs his fingers over my neck, examining my seatbelt-bruise. “You’re pretty banged up, but I know how tough you are. There is no reason you should die from these injuries unless you decide to lie out here in the cold and just surrender. Don’t you dare. Don’t even think about it. Just hang on. The body is tied to the mind, and if you give up, your body will give up, too. Let me be your strength. I can take care of you, if you just let me. I can help you fight.”

“Why should I let you?”
I ask him, sliding my hand across his stomach.

“Because I’m blackmail
ing you,” Liam tells me with a growl. “If you give up on me now, I’m going to take that gun out of your purse and pull a Grayson. I’m going to die here with you.”

I frown at this
, and my hand pauses just below his ribcage. “No way,” I whisper. My fingers inch upward to feel his heartbeat. “You wouldn’t.”

“Wanna bet?” he says angrily.
“How do you think I feel right now, Winter? I know I’m responsible for doing this to you. If you die, it will be entirely my fault. And I’ll be condemned to live in a world without you. I think I have a lot of motivation for joining you.”

“You have everything going for you,” I tell him. “You have a great job. You have great friends. You have a great apartment, and all the money I gave you. You have a bright future ahead of you.”

“Without you, I have nothing,” he says softly. He presses his lips against mine forcefully. “Please stay with me.” He kisses me again and again, growing more desperate. He holds me so tightly against him that it makes my injured bones ache. “I need you.” His hot tears spill over my eyes as he puts his forehead against mine and lets his breath drift over my lips. “God, Winter. I love you so much.”

“Liam,”
I murmur in astonishment. I have never seen him like this.

“
I would give anything for you,” he tells me. “I would burn everything I own for one more kiss.”

I gaze up at him
drowsily, wondering if this can be real. His hazel eyes are filled with sincerity and longing. I lift my fingers to trace the trail of tears on his chiseled cheek. It’s hard to think that anyone could really ever feel this way about me, but when he is holding me like this and looking at me in this way, it is hard not to believe him. His outrageous words are sinking into my skin and infecting me with faith. It feels like he is wholly here with me, tightly wound together in the insanity of love.

“Will you stay?”
he asks, tightening his grip on me. “I don’t know what kind of vast cosmic paradise lies on the other side; but will you choose me over infinity?”

I smile at this question. Now that we have come to this point, our problems don’t seem to mean
much anymore. Money really doesn’t matter when faced with questions of life or death. I can feel his love. I can see it etched in every line of his face, and staining the warm circles of his irises. I run my fingertips along his lower eyelashes, as though trying to read tiny sentences painted on each strand of hair.

“
Okay,” I whisper in agreement. “I’ll stay with you. Take me home.”

Liam
sighs in relief as his body moves into action. When he places the photo albums in my lap, my arms move to hug them weakly against me. He grabs my purse before gently lifting me off the ground, and begins carefully walking up the slippery hillside that my car went plummeting down. As he climbs the steep incline, the sashaying motion lulls me to sleep. The world begins to drift farther and farther away from me, until I can’t feel Liam’s arms around me anymore. I hear Snowball barking in concern, but she sounds like she is miles away.

“Winter,” Liam says in a demanding voice. “Winter. Come back. Stay awake.”

I try to follow his voice, but there is only pain. I can’t help trying to run away somewhere dark and quiet, where the pain can’t reach me. In all that darkness, I think I see my mother. She looks more beautiful than she did in the painting. She is wearing a radiant white dress that shines with some kind of ethereal light. She looks young, and strong. She looks happy. She holds her arms out to me, beckoning me forward into her embrace. I want to go to her. I miss her so much, and I just want to be with her again. But I feel like there is a rope around me that won’t let me go. A masculine voice tugs me back, over and over. I can’t fight against it; and even if I could, I don’t think I would want to.

“Look,”
Liam is saying as he kisses my eyelids gently. “The sunrise is breathtaking. Can you see it?”

Even the tiny motion of lifting my eyelids feels like a struggle. Now that it is getting brighter out,
it is a little easier to make out the landscape. I realize that we are standing at the side of the road, near to Liam’s car. He’s right. The sunrise is more beautiful than before. I wish that I could live to see a thousand more sunrises by his side, but the considerable pain makes me unsure.

“
I don’t think I’m going to make it,” I tell him in warning. I don’t want to disappoint him by dying after I’ve said that I would stay.

“You are,” he tells me. “
People live through worse every day. It may feel like the end of the world now, but you’ll come out of this stronger than ever. You’re a survivor, Winter. You’re going to survive so that you can marry me.”

My lips pull into a smile without my permission. “What makes you so sure?”

“I’m a betting man, and I’d bet everything on it,” he tells me with conviction as he looks out at the horizon. “I’ll spend every day trying to be a better man until I can win your trust back. And I’ll never lose it again. Every day is going to be better; starting with today. We can begin again.”

The sunbeams
are falling gently on his face, and he looks as though he is being enlightened by them in an impossibly profound way. Every spectacular color is reflected in his eyes, and the rosy shadows of dawn dance across his olive skin. I was wrong.  The sunrise wasn’t the best sight I could possibly behold before closing my eyes for the last time—he is. He is a far more wondrous creation of nature, and I could stare at him forever. His eyes are filled with a genuine awe that is almost childlike, but they also hold the true appreciation of a grown man in their amber depths.

“Life is filled with pain
,” he tells me softly, “but you have to hang on. You need to endure the pain to earn the pleasure. Someday, you will give birth to a baby, and it’s going to hurt even worse than this. But the pain doesn’t last forever, and once it’s over, you’ll know that it was worth all the misery and heartache. Pain is the price of life.”

He smiles down at me with such
hope in his face that it brings tears to my eyes. I don’t want to leave him now; I never wanted to leave him. Now that I know that he feels the same about me, I can’t bear the thought of not being able to stay. But the pain still floods my head, even though he has lifted the agony from my heart.

“Just in case,
” I whisper, “you had better kiss me goodbye.”

He
shakes his head in refusal, tightening his grip on my limp body. He carries me around his car, and struggles to opens the passenger door while holding me. Once he manages this, he carefully places me inside and stacks the photo albums on the ground near my feet. Snowball barks cheerfully and jumps into my lap, happy that we have a shiny, new, undestroyed car to ride in. Her weight causes pain in my legs, but I don’t care. I reach out to put my hand in her fur lovingly.

Liam pulls out the
passenger seatbelt and leans over to firmly strap me in. I wince as it digs into the lower part of my bruise from the earlier seatbelt that crossed in the other direction. He looks down at me, staring silently for a moment.

His eyes are
a delicious drizzle of honey within a warm glass of cognac. Finally, when he leans down to place his lips against mine, I discover that he tastes far sweeter than this. He kisses me in a manner that is both savage and sensitive. He kisses me with a thousand unspoken promises. The gentle pressure brings healing warmth to the cold and frazzled parts of my soul. He lets his lips linger there, as if we have all the time in the world. When he removes his mouth, he does so slowly, letting his warm breath drift over me.

“Just in case you couldn’t tell,” he says firmly
, “that wasn’t a goodbye kiss.”

He slams the car door and begins moving around the vehicle.

I sink back into the seat with a dazed sort of satisfaction. I feel peaceful again. Somehow, his lips managed to steal away all of my pain. All I can feel is the phantom tingle of his touch, still comforting me. It’s a little terrifying how much power he has over me. Did he somehow manage to give me the antidote for death? Or is this only a deceiving sort of numbness to make my last moments a bit more pleasant? Either way, it was excellent. Even if he didn’t intend for that to be a goodbye kiss, I am quite positive that it must have ranked within the top five best goodbye kisses in history.

I hear him climbing into the driver’s seat as I let my head fall to rest against the cool glass of the window.
“I’m sorry I never got to use the telescope with you,” I tell him softly.

“Silly girl,” he says in a
teasing voice as he turns his key in the ignition. “Once you get better, I’m going to be using my telescope with you all night.”

I remain still for a moment, but then the corner of my lips twitch slightly. This man
! It’s simply impossible to die around him when he’s giving me so many reasons to smile. He really is some kind of genius; not everyone understands that next to love, laughter is the best medicine.

“Liam,” I say in a tone of mock disapproval.

“I’ll give you all the telescoping you can handle,” he promises in a low voice. He reaches over to clasp my hand in his. “And I’ll make sure that you see stars.”

Thank you for reading
Clarity
! I really hope you enjoyed the story.

This was my first real attempt at writing contemporary romance, as I am used to writing fantasy/paranormal romance. More importantly, this was my first attempt at actually finishing a story. I have a lot of trouble letting go, and I usually write extremely long series that sweep through several generations. (If you would like to check out some of my other books, I also write as
Nadia Scrieva
.)  I have been a bit more private than usual lately; writing under a new pen name was sort of like a fresh start for me, much the same way that Helen needed to change her name. I always put a lot of myself and my life into my stories, and the writing process gets far too emotional sometimes.

The ending of this book actually came from a story I wrote when I was fourteen years old. It was not a car crash, but a shipwreck, a very long swim, and a battle with sharks that caused my main character to be injured. As she lay on the beach, all bruised and bloody, she looked out at the sunrise as she was dying. She had this overwhelmingly beautiful moment—not only due to the development and affirmation of her love with the hero, but due to the peace and strength she seemed to find in herself. It was a really poignant depiction of love conquering death, and it meant a lot to me.

I wrote that scene twelve years ago, and I still think it was one of the best things I have ever written. Halfway through writing Clarity, I realized that I could not think of a better ending, and I really wanted a chance to revisit that beautiful scene in the sunrise, and rewrite it as an adult—with these new characters I have grown to love so much. I hoped that if it had the power to stay with me for all these years, maybe it could stay with you as well.  Most of that old story is very juvenile and terribly written, but I put so much effort into writing that one chapter that it completely drained me. I actually didn’t touch that story again for five years after writing that scene in the sunrise, and I later told people that I needed to “grow up a little more” in order to finish writing the story. I felt like my character had been through this life-altering event, and I didn’t understand her anymore. 

My writing is the most important part of my life, and my strategy has always been to constantly put myself into dangerous new situations as research. When I was younger, I used to walk around without my glasses or contacts in bad neighborhoods at night, to experience the fear that comes with having a complete lack of vision. I did this because I used to be heavily into martial arts, and I wanted to become more confident in myself and my skill, and toughen myself up. Even though it was a long time ago, I think those experiences might have impacted a lot of the scenes in
Clarity.
Sometimes I seek out these situations intentionally, and sometimes they happen by accident and it only becomes clear later on how they are important and can be used. Either way, I very grateful for the memories, and I love the mysterious way that they weave together to make something new when I write.

Back when I first wrote the original shipwreck-sunrise scene, I actually swam across a wide river with a strong current so that I could better describe how tired my limbs were and how scary it was to be alone in the middle of a body of water. Similarly, this time, the scenes where Winter is crying and driving through the mountains of Pennsylvania were taken almost directly from some of my experiences last year. Even down to the lightning storm illuminating the mountains. After being deeply betrayed and disrespected by
two
of my closest guy friends, I was in a terrible condition as I tried to get home to Canada. I actually had to stop at a little motel in Pennsylvania because I couldn’t seem to stay on the road. When my friend followed me there to randomly
propose
to me, it only made things worse. Luckily, I escaped that whole situation with only a speeding ticket and some bad memories of beautiful landscapes experienced in a very emotional way.

I believe that imagination is the most important factor in writing, but I also think it’s important to seek out crazy experiences to cultivate and train the imagination. I try to follow the advice to “write what you know,” but I also write what I would like to know, and would like to become.

Again, thank you so much for reading my work!

I would love to hear your thoughts on the book, so please feel free to shoot me a message if there is absolutely anything you’d like to say. You can find all the methods of contacting me at the end of each book. Of course, reviews are also very welcome.
If you haven’t already joined my mailing list, please be sure to
sign up
so that you can hear about my next book. 

All the best,