Walk Through Fire

  Oh no.

  Was I going to be shut in my house with Logan during a blizzard?

  That could not happen.

  I turned to him. “Then you need to eat and leave.”

  He took a bite of toast and looked to me, speaking and chewing. “Say it one more time, babe. Not leavin’.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why?” he asked back.

  “Yes, High. Why?”

  He tipped his head to the side, opened his mouth, and shut it.

  He studied me and he did this for some time.

  Then he looked back at the plate he was holding in front of him and said, “We’ll talk after we eat.”

  “If it’s snowing that bad, you need to get going,” I pointed out.

  He looked back to me and his voice was quiet when he replied, “Let that go. That fight you ain’t gonna win. We’ll talk after we eat but I’m not goin’ anywhere, Millie. And I mean that in a lotta ways, so you best start gettin’ used to it now.”

  Panic assailed me and I twisted farther his way. “High—”

  “Eat,” he ordered inflexibly. “Then we’ll talk.”

  I stared at him, fear beginning to infuse my bloodstream, then I turned back to my plate and ate.

  Fast.

  Forking it in, swallowing it down, cleaning my plate in no time.

  I then turned back.

  “Done,” I announced, mouth still holding half-chewed toast.

  His lips were curled up as he replied, “Christ.”

  I swallowed with difficulty and declared, “We’ll talk in the living room.”

  Before I could move, he dumped his plate on mine on the tray and took the tray off my lap. He then leaned so deep into me his stomach was pressed to my thighs and he did this so he could drop the tray to the floor with a clatter.

  Before I knew what he was about, he arched up, took hold of me, shifted, hitched, twisted, and hauled so he was under the covers with me. He’d pulled me over his body in a roll and pinned me to my back in the bed with him on me.

  Panic gripping me, I started panting.

  Then I caught the look on his face and started gasping for air.

  “I get it,” he whispered.

  “Y-yes,” I stammered. “You did. I gave it to you. And now it’s supposed to be over.”

  “I get it,” he strangely repeated.

  “Logan, I told you so this would be done.”

  “I get it and I’da done the same thing.”

  I stared up at him.

  He lifted his hand, the tips of his fingers tracing my hairline along the side of my face and he kept talking.

  “Found out it was me, found out I couldn’t give it all to you, I woulda done the same thing, Millie. I would have made it so you got it all and I would have done it ugly so you’d walk away from me and never look back so you could have it.” He dipped his face closer to mine. “So I get it. I get why you did what you did. I totally fuckin’ get it.”

  Okay.

  That felt good. Better than good. It loosened the grip that took hold of my heart the second he turned and walked away from me, letting it pump again, almost like normal.

  But no.

  It was good he knew. It was great he understood.

  But this was over.

  “I’m glad you understand,” I replied. “And thank you for sharing that with me,” I went on. “However, what I don’t understand is why you feel the need to do that lying on top of me in my bed.”

  His head jerked back a few inches.

  “Say what?” he asked.

  “It’s all out there, High, the game has been played. There are no more moves to make. So it’s over and it’s time we both put it behind us and move on.”

  “Put it behind us and move on,” he parroted incredulously.

  “Yes. What we have is damaging and unhealthy and we have to put a stop to it and get on with our lives.”

  He stared down at me and I tensed when his expression started to turn stormy.

  I tensed even further when his face suddenly cleared and he roared with laughter, his weight bearing into me, his head dropping so his forehead rested on my cheekbone, his hair tickling the skin of my face.

  “High.” I pushed at him.

  He kept laughing.

  “High!” I snapped, pushing harder at him.

  He lifted his head, eyes dancing, lines radiating out the sides creasing, body trembling with the chuckles that still had control over him and there it was again.

  Perfection.

  Enough!

  “Get off me,” I demanded.

  “Babe,” he replied.

  I listened.

  He said nothing else, just rode the wave of his amusement until it naturally died.

  Then it hit me. The memory. The memory that there were a variety of occasions where Logan spoke Badass.

  There were only a few words in the Vocabulary of Badass but each one had a number of meanings. They included beautiful, Christ, fuck, Jesus, and shit.

  But the one used most was babe.

  I was out of practice. I had no idea what that particular babe meant.

  And I wasn’t going to find out.

  “Nothing about this is funny,” I bit out. “Let us not forget, I came to you to tell you what I told you yesterday and in your fancy-ass RV, you humiliated me.”

  There was no amusement in his expression when I quit talking.

  No.

  Instead he shifted over me so he was fully covering me. I was taking a fair amount of his hefty weight, and he lifted his other hand so he could use both of them to hold either side of my head.

  In other words, there was no escape.

  “Yeah,” he growled. “I did. I did it with intent. I was a dick and I was a dick on purpose. Because what you did to us fuckin’ destroyed me and I never put the pieces back together. But, Millie, I did it for more reasons than that. I did it for self-preservation. I did it ’cause you were back in a way you were back, in my bed, ass in the air for me, takin’ my dick and I felt you, I smelled you, I heard you, and I saw the ink on your back permanently declarin’ you were mine when you made that a lie for reasons I did not get. And all I could think was that I wanted to keep fuckin’ you, listenin’ to how much you loved takin’ me, feelin’ my cock sink inside you, and I wanted that until I stopped breathing. If I had you on your back, woulda seen your face, which would have fucked with me more. I picked the lesser of two evils. So I had to cover that shit on your back so I didn’t let go and let you lead me to the brink again and convince me to jump.”

  Oh my God.

  “High,” I whispered, and he dragged his thumb along my cheek, pressing it into my bottom lip until it hooked on the edge of my teeth and he moved in so we were so close, I could see nothing but him.

  “I’m Logan to you.” His voice scratched out, chafing my skin.

  Against his hold on my mouth, I forced out, “I—”

  That was all I was able to do.

  “You feel sweet. You feel scared. You feel happy. You feel sad. You feel anything you use your name for me. You can call me High. But not times like now. Times like now, I’m Logan.”

  I wasn’t entirely certain I understood precisely the different occasions I could use his different names but I felt in his current mood I should agree.

  So I said, “Okay.”

  He swept his thumb from my mouth to the flesh under my cheek and pressed in lightly.

  Then he went on.

  “I held you down for that,” he continued to explain. “I held you down, coverin’ that ink. You were not faceless pussy, Millie. You could never be that and you fuckin’ know it. Even if you forgot, what came after woulda told you that shit couldn’t be true.”

  “What came after wasn’t much healthier,” I shared hesitantly.

  He moved back an inch and tilted his head slightly. “Yeah? You think?”

  What?

  He didn’t?

  “Of course,” I said quiet
ly. “You were there. You have to think the same thing too.”

  “Three weeks ago when I didn’t have it all, maybe. Now. Fuck no.”

  “It wasn’t healthy, Logan.”

  “I couldn’t get enough of you, Millie.”

  I drew in a sharp breath.

  “Couldn’t get you outta my head. Didn’t rest until I found a new reason to get in your space. Found those reasons, got in your space. If I didn’t give a fuck about you, I wouldn’t have followed you for forty-five fuckin’ minutes, from the second I laid eyes on you at Bill’s rally, and found my shot to get in your face. If you didn’t mean shit to me, I’da seen you and put you out of my head. I didn’t. I got in your face. You kissed me. I fucked you. And I kept comin’ back for more.”

  Okay.

  Damn.

  Okay.

  Shit.

  That made sense.

  “And you,” he continued. “If you didn’t give a shit about me, you moved on, you would not have seen me buyin’ a burrito and come lookin’ for me. You woulda heard what I said, felt what that meant, and went on with your life. You didn’t. You found me. You kissed me. You took my cock. And even with how I took that from you, when I kept comin’ back for more, you kept takin’ it. You didn’t want it, you know you made that clear, I woulda been gone. You did not make that clear. You entered that fucked-up game we were playin’ because you needed what you got, unhealthy or not. Just like me when it comes to you, you’d take what you could get.”

  You’d take what you could get.

  I would. With Logan, I would.

  Until the day I died.

  I tried to turn my face away, to get some sort of privacy to process his words, but he put pressure on to keep my focus on him.

  “I need you to get off me, Logan,” I whispered.

  “You did wrong,” he replied.

  I stared up at him.

  “You did wrong and only hindsight makes that clear. No way in fuck, baby, no way in fuck you shoulda made the decision you made to end us all on your own. You shoulda told me.”

  My heart started hammering with a different kind of panic and my words were still whispers when I said, “But you told me you got it.”

  “You were twenty-one, way too fuckin’ young to have what we had, feel what that meant, know we had a lot of life before us, and have enough of it under your belt to make the right choice. I remember bein’ twenty-four and feelin’ you put an end to us so I can go back there and know where you were at and why you did what you did. But it still was wrong.”

  “Please, Logan—”

  “You should have told me.”

  I shut my mouth and pressed my lips together so they wouldn’t quiver.

  He slid his thumb back to them, gentle this time, and rested the pad against my lips.

  “You should have told me,” he whispered. “’Cause now I can’t prove to you you were all I wanted. You were all I needed. You took that shot away from me and it was as important then as it is now that you know that to your bones, Millie. You gave me what you thought I had to have and I’m grateful, so fuckin’ grateful, baby. When you meet Cleo and Zadie, you’ll get just how grateful that is. I love my girls. Fuckin’ love ’em, the lights of my life. But it’s the goddamned, motherfuckin’ truth that I would have had all I needed. I would have had everything if all I had in life was you. And you took away my shot to show you that. You also took away any shot I had of helpin’ you through gettin’ the knowledge we couldn’t have a family and buildin’ a new dream together and that cuts just as deep. You made those decisions on your own without sharing with me. And that was wrong.”

  When you meet Cleo and Zadie.

  My voice was trembling when I demanded, “You have to get off me.”

  He put pressure on my head.

  “You are not gettin’ me,” he growled.

  I thought he had all my attention but the way he said that, I found myself giving him more.

  “This is not me layin’ the guilt on you,” he carried on. “This is not me plantin’ more shit in your head to fuck with it. I told you I got it, I get it. Back then, twenty-four, knowin’ how bad you wanted kids, knowin’ how bad we both wanted to build a family, findin’ out it was me who’d take that from you, I love you so goddamned much, I couldn’t bear it. I wouldn’t be able to live with that burden for a lifetime with you. And I woulda done everything I could to make myself a man unworthy of you, make sure you knew it. It’d kill me. But I’d live life dead inside knowin’ I gave that to you.”

  His face got close again and I held my breath.

  “So I get it. I get what you did for me ’cause back then I’d do the same. And you gave me what you thought I needed and I’m grateful, Millie. But outta that over the years we both got somethin’ else. We’re not young and stupid and so caught up in love we’re blind. We got life under our belts and we know better now. So, what I’m sayin’ is, in future, learn from what we lost and don’t ever do shit like that again.”

  In future.

  Was he saying…?

  “In future?” I choked.

  “In future,” he stated plainly.

  “I… you… we…” I shook my head in his hands. “Are you saying we should start up where we left off?”

  His comeback was instant.

  “Did it ever end for you?”

  My body jerked under him and my fingers formed fists on the bed at my sides.

  He might not have seen my hands but he felt my reaction and he read it.

  “No,” he stated. “You’re a ghost and I lived life haunted by your ghost so there’s no takin’ up where we left off because we never left off. We’re still back there. Now we just gotta find a way to put the shit in between behind us and keep on goin’.”

  I started to say something but he kept talking before I could get it out.

  “And the way we’re doin’ that, coasters do not factor.”

  My body jerked again in surprise at his bizarre declaration.

  And for a variety of reasons, all of them having to do with self-preservation, I focused only on that.

  “I have nice things, Logan,” I informed him of something he could absolutely see.

  “And you make a mint, got a mint invested, and I’m not hurtin’. You get bacon grease on your sheets, babe, we buy new and who gives a fuck?”

  “I do,” I snapped. “These sheets are perfection. It took me two years to find these sheets. I don’t need to spend two more years finding new sheets that are perfect.”

  “I’m in bed beside you, I’ll make it so you don’t think about sheets.”

  He was beside me, I’d sleep on a bed of broken glass and not give a damn.

  This was not something I intended to share at that juncture.

  So instead, I shared, “I have a lock on two Himalayan kitties from a local breeder and they match these bedclothes. I’ve put deposits down on them. Cats can live fifteen, twenty years. And honestly, the last time I went looking, it felt like it’d take twenty years to find the right sheets. Put cats in the mix, these sheets have to last a long time.”

  “You’re gettin’ cats to match your house?” he asked in open, badass, hot guy, biker astonishment.

  “Of course,” I answered, like that was a perfectly sane thing to do. “The house and the sheets. It’s all going with me to Arizona. Including the cats, which my mother is ecstatic about, she loves animals. And I’m good to pick them up any day now.”

  I’d clearly said the wrong thing because the storm that threatened his expression earlier in the conversation clouded his features and this time it did not clear.

  Again with his voice chafing, he declared, “You’re not goin’ to Arizona.”

  “It’s all sorted,” I returned.

  “Babe, have you been listening at all?”

  I shut up.

  He didn’t.

  “You’re leavin’ town to get away from me and shit has changed in a big fuckin’ way.”

  Oh God. r />
  It appeared that it had.

  “Oh, right,” I muttered.

  “Right,” he ground out.

  “I’m seriously jet-lagged,” I explained.

  “You’re lucky you got that excuse or about now you’d seriously be gettin’ a tanned ass.”

  I felt my eyes get big.

  “Are you joking?” I demanded to know.

  “Babe,” he clipped. “Twenty years apart, haunted by you, walkin’ around with a hole in my soul, we’re back and we’re talkin’ about cats and you goin’ to Arizona? No, I’m not fuckin’ jokin’.”

  Walkin’ around with a hole in my soul.

  I stared up at him.

  I stared up at Logan lying on top of me.

  He was back.

  Lying on me.

  He knew it all.

  He got it.

  He wasn’t angry with me.

  I’d laid it out and had a drama and woke up the next day to Logan making bacon and telling me we were back.

  We’re back.

  “I don’t know, but I think I’m either gonna be sick, start crying, or lapse into catatonia,” I whispered, way, way too out of it to be able to process all I was experiencing.

  I felt his body relax on mine.

  “It’s the first one, do me a favor and give me a heads-up so I can get you to the toilet. Bacon grease on sheets I can live with. Puke, not so much.”

  I felt the weird sensation of hysterical laughter fizzing inside me and it didn’t feel bad in the slightest.

  Tentatively, I put my hands to his sides, feeling his thermal, the heat and hardness of Logan under it.

  We’re back.

  “Millie.”

  I focused on him and not the irrefutable evidence of all Logan was saying weighing down on me, heating me through his thermal, and saw his eyes searching mine, like he looked standing outside the bathroom earlier.

  Warmth and concern.

  Logan.

  My Logan.

  He was back.

  My fingers fisted in his shirt.

  “I missed you.”

  It wasn’t a whisper.

  It was a breath.

  Barely audible, each word weighed down by heartache and history.

  But he heard it and then I heard his groan, felt it tearing through him, tearing through me.