I wanted her to let me in.
Bending, I scooped her up, bringing her with me onto the bed. I sat with her in my lap for a long time, as long as we needed to work this shit out.
She sobbed into my chest so long it felt like it’d been hours, hell days.
“There was an accident,” she whispered, face wet, cheeks red. “I told you my ex-husband was an athlete.”
I didn’t move, not a goddamn inch, and I wouldn’t. Couldn’t risk it.
Come on, Jersey girl.
I needed her to keep talking, didn’t want to move so I didn’t.
She winced. “He was pretty popular. Even being retired. Still had a following and fans. They even still followed him everywhere. Us everywhere.”
Fire shook my limbs, no world in which I wanted to envision her with someone else, period. Let alone the man who’d struck her. She hadn’t gone into details, but she had said he’d placed hands on her.
“There were always paparazzi,” she continued. “Always noise. Always chaos. That was that life.”
Haunted again, her voice completely hollow.
In her silence, I curled a hand over her shoulder. “What happened, Jersey girl?”
I felt the words before she said them, physically felt them in her quivering limbs. I drew her chin up, and she looked at me.
“It was an accident. I was driving, an accident.” Her swallow hit her throat. “I was three months pregnant. They just wanted a picture…”
What. The. Fuck.
I shifted her, framing her face, and she blinked down more tears. I forced my breaths even. “They hurt you.”
“Not on purpose.” Her head dropped. “I saw them following me, and I tried to get away. I was by myself, and they were aggressive. They always were. They just wanted a photo.”
Lungs in an ice bath, stomach in a vise.
Her shoulders quaked. “It was a head-on collision. I lost the baby.”
I closed my eyes, folding back her hair.
“And it changed things, Ramses,” she retched. “Changed my ex-husband. Changed me. He dealt in his own ways. Drinking. Gambling.”
“Hurting you.” I tipped her chin in my direction. “He hurt you. Hurt you because of this, didn’t he?”
In the silence she forced me to wait for the answer, I could have shot my fist through a wall. It actually had me to the point where I was physically shaking.
She nodded without words, acknowledging my fear. I’d thought this guy was a coward before, but that hadn’t been the word.
To physically put your hands on someone, a woman, after something so tragic had happened to her? There weren’t any fucking words for that. None in the goddamn dictionary. The man belonged in a cell right next to my father, two assholes with too much power.
This guy had a faux power. Because what did it take to hit a woman? Someone, no doubt, a fraction of his size.
A grieving woman.
I braced Bri, rocking instead of doing something else.
“It was only the one time,” she said, like that meant something. “He turned into someone completely different. His grief made him a monster, a shell of himself.”
I folded a hand on her cheek. “Don’t justify anything he did. He doesn’t deserve it.”
And she didn’t either. What about her own grief?
I saw it right here in my arms: someone so guarded, hurting all the time.
I mean, a wedding had made her sad.
Happiness had made her upset that night of December and Royal’s union, in misery, and that was when I’d found her.
We had found each other in misery. Different reasons backed it, but we’d been in a similar place. I held heartbreak and the piss-poor decisions that resulted. She had a failed marriage, but the results the same. Different experiences, different events had broken us, and I now knew why she’d been in group therapy.
I now knew why she’d found me too.
It was like the universe knew we’d needed to be together that night, our worlds of chaos united.
My attention shifted when Brielle sat up, easing off my lap. She took a seat beside me, and I hated the distance.
“I left him because of it.” She faced me then, frowning. “But you need to know what you’re dealing with. You need to know I have no desire to have children. Something like that, what happened changes people, and I’m not going through that again.”
I understood, nodding. “I get it.” I did, but she might not always feel that way. I shook my head. “But with time, you never know how you may feel in the future or even years down the line.”
Whatever she wanted to do, I’d wait. If that was where we were headed… of course, I would.
It blew my mind I was even having this conversation. Especially after the last year I’d had. Back at Brown, I’d unloaded a lot of crap into my life. Enough to make me leave. Enough to make me come here, but now, meeting her, it felt like a Godsend.
Like it’d all been worth it.
To go through that so I could come here, run into her and this thing we had. A relationship and one I could put my hands on and feel the realness of it.
And not the deceit beneath.
I hoped she felt that too, and I knew she did. I’d seen it in the shower. I’d seen it every day and every time we were together. She had feelings for me as real and tangible as I felt. She had love for me.
Like I had for her.
Her smile held no joy, no happiness. In fact, it shifted into nothing but sadness when she placed it in my direction.
“Because I have so long to try.” She laughed, but again, no humor. She faced me. “I’m thirty-five years old, Ramses, and even if I did change my mind—which I won’t—I don’t have the time. I don’t have those years.”
“There are other ways to have children, Brielle,” I said, this topic delicate, sensitive. I nodded. “Adoption. Surrogacy—”
“I said I won’t change my mind!”
My head lifted, my mouth closing. I saw what she was doing here completely.
And I think she saw it too.
She was running without actually running from me, but the difference was, I knew how she operated now.
I knew her.
She pushed, and I pushed back. I’d always push back.
Since this was delicate, I decided to choose my words carefully. There were a lot of emotions in this conversation, and only some of them had to do with us, me and our relationship. This woman had a history, traumas that had nothing to do with me. But still, there was one thing she needed to know about me.
I placed my hands together. “I’m never going to be the reason you walk away,” I said, surprising her. I shook my head. “I will never give you that, nor be your permission to step back. Make no mistake about that, Brielle.”
And I wouldn’t, I’d stand by her on this. The ball would always be in her court. At least, when it came to this.
She closed her eyes. “What if that’s not what I want?”
My throat tightened. “I’d say you need to tell me, but when it comes to this?” My shoulders lift. “You don’t get a choice. I’m here in this, and I won’t be your reason.”
I refused.
I wouldn’t give her the easy way out, and this wouldn’t be easy. It would be hard and something we’d both have to work at every day. She had her issues and I had mine, and we were in different places in our lives.