Unhurt (21 page)

“Look, I know you want to run in there and tell her your side of the story, but she’s not ready. She’s fucking losing it right now.” A slight grin crept onto his face. “I’m telling you, man, I’m blocking your path for your own safety.”

“I don’t need you to do that. I
do
need you to let me go in so I can see her. I’d rather not have to move you out of the way myself.” I tried my damnedest to sound like I was at least halfway joking, but it hardly came across that way.

Bobby stepped aside at last. “By all means. Enter at your own risk.”

And I did.

I could hear Aunt Deb in the kitchen with Wyatt, but bypassed them both to go find Joss. She was in the bedroom, busily throwing all of my belongings into a pile on the floor while Hattie looked on in confusion.

“Oh good. You’re here,” she snapped when she saw me.

“We need to talk.”

“Yes we do. How fast do you think you can get all your shit out of here?” She tossed a handful of my shirts into the growing mound at her feet.

“I’m not leaving.”

“Fuck yeah, you are.” Her eyes – the ones that were usually smoldering with a heat that made me melt just being in their gaze – were now cold as stone. No feelings poured from them, not even hatred. They were just dead. “We don’t need you, Derek Tice. Sorry, but you’re going to have to find a new cause to help you ease your conscience. Wyatt and I can’t be your path to restitution anymore.”

I swallowed hard. She fucking knew exactly where to hit me. “You really think that’s the reason I’m here?”

She stopped what she was doing. “Can you honestly say it played no role in any of this? Come on, I know you. I may not know what happened over there, but I know you, and there’s no way you could live with hurting children. Even if it wasn’t your fault, even if it wasn’t you personally, you would take responsibility for it. And then you would move forward trying to save every child who crossed your path, because somehow, that would make you feel like you could make right what went wrong. Maybe you could never undo it, but you could find some small sense of peace in knowing you saved someone else’s son. Eased someone else’s mother’s heartache. It’s a nice sentiment. It really is. But I can’t be that mother anymore. And you’re done using my son.”

“How can you fucking say that to me? Fine, yes, what happened over there broke me. It fucking
broke
me. And maybe I walked away thinking I could pay forward what I could never pay back. And, fuck, but yeah, it played a part in my motivation for wanting to marry you. The moment Bobby told me about Travis and what he had done to you, all I wanted to do was keep you and Wyatt safe from him.” I took a step toward her. “But that wasn’t the only reason, Joss, and I know that you know that. You have owned me from the first time I saw you standing outside the Flying Monk. The first time you fucked with me and had a good laugh about it after. Joss, I’ve wanted you since long before I even knew Wyatt existed, let alone Travis.”

She was biting the inside of her lip. A good sign since it meant she was at least thinking about what I’d said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

My hands fell to my sides in surrender. “I was scared. You’re a mother. Your sun rises and falls with Wyatt. How could you ever look at me the way you have these last few weeks if you’d known the truth?”

“How am I supposed to look at you now?” she breathed. Tears were rolling down her soft cheeks and all I wanted was to kiss them away, but I couldn’t.

“What can I do, Joss? Tell me how to fix this?” Because I had to fucking fix this.

“Tell me the truth.”

I nodded. “Alright. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you all of it.” I closed my eyes as the images of that night flooded my mind as if on cue. Then I began. “There were eight of us. We were told to go in at night, find the target, take him out and then leave again like we’d never even been there. Only, the information we’d been given was wrong. When we entered the part of the compound he was supposed to be in, he wasn’t there. Just his wife and two kids. We retreated immediately, leaving all three unharmed, but her screams alerted the guards. Before we knew it, men with machine guns were swarming the area. It was pitch-black out and even with our night vision goggles on, we could only make out figures. Two of my men were hit. We had to get out, immediately. And we did that by any means necessary. It wasn’t until the next day that we learned the ‘men’ who had shot at us were only boys. Ages ranging from twelve to sixteen. That’s how young they are when they’re torn from their families and forced to pick up guns and start killing.” I couldn’t turn my head to face her. “I didn’t even use my weapon that night. I was busy carrying Darius. He’d been hit multiple times and was barely conscious by the time we got out of there. But it was my mission. My orders, my men, my responsibility.”

I heard the mattress squeak softly as Joss sank down into it. “You could have died,” she whispered. It was the last reaction I had expected.

“For a long time I fucking wished I had.” I stepped around the pile of clothes and went to kneel down before her. “Then I met you. You saved me, Joss. And not because I felt like I needed to save you, but because you could see past the broken pieces and still love what was left.”

Her eyes had turned from stone to bottomless pools a man like me could drown in. “I wish I could believe that.”

“Why can’t you?” I had both of her hands in mine, as if I could somehow maintain the connection between us that way. I knew I couldn’t. I could already feel her slipping away. Her fingers hadn’t locked into mine automatically like they always had. They were simply resting in my grasp, only there because I was still holding on. She had already let go.

“Because, Derek, I’ll always wonder now if you’re here because you want to be, or because you think you need to be. And that’s not the kind of love I can live with.”

“You can’t be serious. You can’t possibly believe that after everything that’s happened!” I jumped back to my feet, her hands freed from mine in an instant.

“Sorry. It’s how I feel.” Her voice was flat and completely devoid of feeling.

“Really? You’re going to fucking lie to my face? What is it really, Joss? What are you so fucking scared of now that you would rather chase me away than face it together?”

Her eyes shifted into narrow slants. “You.”

One single fucking word and I felt the air get pressed from my lungs. Me. She was scared of me. It was the most hurtful thing she could have possibly said to me and she knew it. And knowing that she’d done it anyway was enough to make me question why the fuck I was even still putting up a fight.

She stood from the bed. “I’m going to go and check on Wyatt. Today was really hard on him and things aren’t about to get any easier. Please be gone before I come back down this hall to get him ready for bath.”

That was it. She walked out. And all I could do was watch. I was too pissed and fucking heartbroken to do shit else.

E
ver since
Derek had been on the stand I felt like my day had passed in a dizzying blur. I felt nauseous and my head was fucking pounding to the point I wanted someone to drill a hole in my skull just to release the pressure. Or knock me the fuck out.

Bobby and Aunt Deb had both taken turns trying to talk me down from the ledge I was dancing on like a crazy person, but there was no coming back from where I was headed. Too many lives were at stake – along with my sanity – and I had to cut the dead weight to move on. My heart had to go. And Derek with it.

Even after he’d tracked me down and let his soul bleed freely at my feet, I’d turned him away. Forced him to go, because losing him now somehow seemed better than someday finding out I’d never really had him at all. I was torn on that, though. Logically, I could see it all clear as day. He’d felt responsible for those boys who died. He hadn’t been the one to kill them, or to put them in the middle of war to begin with, but he was Derek and so he’d made it his fault above all others. Because he held himself to those standards. Standards he’d never expect anyone else to reach, but ones he couldn’t bear to fall short of himself.

So, defeated and broken, he’d come home. Walked away from the only world he knew and tried to make right what had gone wrong. He’d adopted Hattie, probably because the silence that came with sleeping alone at night made his nightmares worse. Then, he’d somehow stumbled upon the idea of taking her in to visit children at the hospital. A noble, kind gesture, one he no doubt would have thought to do even under the best of circumstances. And that was the problem, really.

All along I’d known that Derek would do the right thing. Always. Without doubt or hesitation, I knew he would show up. He would protect. And he would be true to his word. All things in a man that women would bend over backwards in stiletto heels and Spanx for, and maybe I should have too. But I couldn’t. Not when I’d needed him to be all of those things. More importantly, my son had needed him to be them. My son. An innocent boy being threatened by a force too big for me to fight on my own. Precisely the sort of boy Derek was on a mission to save. I couldn’t be a mission to the man I loved. And I couldn’t live with the possibility that I was.

So, I took the part of my heart that belonged to him now and killed it. Drowned it in the anguish and fury I felt over the injustice of it all. The injustice of having been lost and then finally found and falling beautifully in love only to have it be tainted by a reality in which I’d never be able to tell the truth of my heart from the lies it told.

Logically, I knew all of this. Could see it clearly. Understood it perfectly. Emotionally was another story altogether. My soul felt sick at the thought of losing Derek. In the deepest darkest parts of myself, a small voice was screaming at me, furious that I could be so stupid as to buy into the spewing of my sensible mind, when here in the plainest way possible was such unmistakable evidence even the best arguments of my head would falter.

But that voice was easy to silence. I’d learned to shut her up a long time ago. And so, I did just that. Told her to crawl back into the dark canyons that riddled my heart and stay there. She’d clearly done enough damage over the years.

It wasn’t surprising that sleep had left me along with Derek, and by day three of trying to get a grip on my life while I was stuck in yet another state of limbo as the judge took time out to review everyone’s statements along with our previous case before he was prepared to make a decision, I was still puking my guts out every time Aunt Deb force fed me even the tiniest morsel of food. Between the exhaustion and the lack of nutrition, I was pretty sure I’d be comatose before long. Not a bad prospect, all things considered, provided some doctor would be able to snap me out of it come ruling day.

“I’m coming in,” Aunt Deb announced from the other side of my bathroom door. I was curled up around the base of my toilet for the third straight day in a row and lacked the energy to fight her even if I was in no state to be viewed by anyone.

“Sweet Jesus, Joss. How much longer are you going to do this?” She bent down and reached under my arms to pull me up. Leaning my head against her own chest, she sweetly rocked me back and forth in a way I’m sure she meant to be comforting, but actually just made me want to hurl again.

“Ugh. Stop. You’re giving me motion sickness,” I groaned into the side of her arm.

“Oh, sorry.” The rocking ceased instantly. “I’m serious, Joss, you’re scaring me. I’ve never seen you like this. Not even when Cara died.”

I sobbed. The heaving in my chest was dry and painful. “If I tell you something, you have to swear never to tell anyone ever.” It took every ounce of strength I had at that point to lift my head from her chest and look at her.

She nodded, then waited for me to make my confession.

“This hurts worse than losing Cara,” I whined shamefully.

I felt Aunt Deb’s hand reach up to collect the beehive of hair on my head, trying to smooth out the tangled mess it had become after missed showers and a lack of brushing. At this point I wondered if there would be any salvaging what was there. It was entirely possible I’d have to shave it all off and start from scratch by the time I was fit for civilization again.

With closed eyes, I tried to focus only on the repetitive soft motion of my aunt’s hand traveling across my scalp. It was hypnotic in a way and an unexpected source of comfort I was happy to indulge in. I was so entranced by what she was doing, it took me a second to register when she spoke again.

“You know, this is different than Cara. Not just because it hurts more, but because you can undo it. You can have him back in your life. All you have to do is ask him.”

Just like that she had ruined the dreamy state of numbness she’d previously teased me with.

“You know I can’t do that.”

Apparently Aunt Deb
didn’t
know that. “If you’re really in love with him. Why give up?”

I shrugged, frustrated to have to explain it to her when I’d already had the argument with myself a hundred times over and barely won each time. “Maybe I’m not really in love with him. I mean, I am the one who ended things. Don’t you think it says something that I was willing to make him walk away so easily?”

“Sure. It says lots of things. None of which amount to you not being in love with him.” She resumed stroking my hair, but it was too late. It no longer had the same mesmerizing effect on me it had had before.

“And what about him, huh? If I was mistaken, if he wasn’t here for the wrong reasons, why did he leave, hm?”

Aunt Deb leaned down and whispered, “Because you told him too.”  Even in her hushed tones, the words bore a harsh reminder of the part I’d played in my own misery and I could feel the tightness of tears even though I was too dehydrated to actually produce any.

“Besides,” my aunt continued,” he’s not really gone. I mean, I’m pretty sure Darius and Abe aren’t hanging out here simply for something to do.”

I jerked upright, slamming my hand on the cold hard tiles, the sting of needles spreading through my palm instantly. “See! He can’t stop himself! He just
has
to save us.”