“This what?”
“Whatever this is won’t fix what you’ve been running from.”
“Don’t you think I don’t know that? That’s why I’m here, Della. Aren’t you fucking listening? I’m in love with you, too. Goddammit, can’t you tell? Can’t you see how much I’m breaking?”
That dreaded stifling silence fell again, numbing everything as she gawked at me. My words didn’t seem to register, bouncing off a force field designed to protect her heart, but then they stabbed into awareness, and she crumpled in place, wincing and crying, shaking her head with panic. “What sort of cruel joke is this? You missed me in the forest so figured you’d get me back by telling me what you think I need to hear?”
There was no hope in her gaze, no joy like I hoped; only resignation and age-old grief. “I know you, Ren. I know you’d never let yourself think of me any differently than the way you always have. I’m your Little Ribbon. Untouchable. Protectable. Something to be adored but never touched. Oh no, never touched.”
I closed my eyes briefly, unprepared for the depth of pain her mistrust caused. “I don’t know how to make you believe me. I’m in love with you. I’m head over fucking heels for you. I have been for years. How can I make you see that?”
I spilled my darkest secret with my eyes still closed, and when I opened them again, she was closer to the door and farther from me, her gaze tormented with new thoughts. The same dangerous light she’d had when she cornered me with the idea of going to school the first time, of the suggestion we share a last name, of the fight when she didn’t want to go back to the city after months of bliss in the forest—glowed bright and savage, ready to destroy me.
I knew that look.
It was a look that petrified me because I never won against it.
My hand rose, imploring her not to run or do something we’d both regret. “Della…”
She shook her head again. “Don’t.”
“Whatever you’re thinking…stop it.”
She licked her lips, her forehead furrowing deep. “I just remembered what you said.”
“That I’m in love with you?”
“No. Before that. The truth.”
“That is the goddamn truth. I love—”
“Stop it, Ren! Okay, just stop it!” she shouted, her tone snippy and sharp. “I can’t deal with this. You’re spouting nonsense that makes me think you hit your head. And that’s after you admitted that you’ve been back for months. Months!” Her voice thinned until it was soundless. “You’ve been watching me, haven’t you? I wasn’t imagining it.”
I hung my head. “No, you weren’t.”
“Every day?”
“Yes.”
“How could you? How could you do that to me?”
I didn’t understand how I’d hurt her, but I put aside my questions and bowed to hers. “Because I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t stand to be away from you.”
“But you left!” Her voice rose with a breakable octave. “You left me. You walked out that door.”
“I know.”
“Ugh!” She blinked back tears, her body wobbling with sadness and rage. “Want to know why I don’t believe that you’re in love with me? Because if you were, there is no way you could wait so long. Months, you’ve been back. Months where you watched me and made me think I was going insane. Remember all those times growing up when I knew you stared at me and I stared at you? Remember how in-tune and aware we were of each other?
“I knew that day when you needed help counting and charging up those hay-buying customers. I felt you looking at me over acres of paddock. I’ve woken up at night to you watching me. Just like you did with me. I’ve spent a lifetime learning how my skin prickles when you think of me. Did you forget that, Ren? Did you forget that I might have been lying to you for years, but you’ve just tried to do the same with me in the worst possible way?”
I shook my head. “I-I don’t understand. I needed time to figure out how to tell you—”
“No, you needed time to do your best to convince yourself it wasn’t real.”
“If you know it’s real, why are you arguing?”
“Because you didn’t come to me the moment you returned. The difference of loving someone and being in love, Ren, is loving someone can be full of obligation and self-denial. But being in love makes you selfish and greedy and hungry. It turns you into a self-serving monster because you can’t breathe unless you have the one person you need.”
She laughed coldly. “I know because I’ve lived in that emotion for so damn long. I’ve hated myself for how much I wanted you. What I did to myself thinking about you. How I used other boys to scratch the itch that was you. But you? You watch me from afar. You selfishly know I’m safe, watching me, studying me, all while I’m left wondering if you’re even still alive! How could someone who says they’re in love with another do that, huh? How could you stay away when it’s taking all I have not to rip off my towel and pull you down onto my bed even while I hate you?”
I staggered under her condemnation and the mental image of her tumbling naked on her bed. “Fuck, Della.”
I didn’t know what I cursed at. The brutal honesty of her latest confession or the barbaric, almost primitive need to climb on top of her and force her to believe me. To crawl inside her body and soul and growl into her ear while I took her violently. ‘See? I am telling the truth. I do love you. I love you so much you make me goddamn insane.’
But I shook away the dark brutality, taking my turn to be the sinner with secrets. “Regardless of what you think, I am in love with you, Della. And I stayed away because I-I—”
“What? Tell me!” she screamed, her sudden outburst ratcheting up my temper to uncontrollable levels. She’d successfully threaded lust with rage, and it was a cocktail I no longer had any power over.
“I wasn’t ready, okay?! Fuck, I don’t think I’ll ever be ready to accept that I’ve fallen in love with the child I stole. That even now, I struggle seeing you as Della, grown-up and filled out, an adult in your own right, and not buckle beneath the image of you when you were five years old with your beautiful blonde hair and fascination with your ribbon.”
I dug my hands into my scalp. “It makes me sick, okay? It makes me want to burn out my eyes for ever seeing you naked as a kid or hugging you when you were a teen. It makes me want to cut off my own cock for ever getting hard around you, for all the inappropriate thoughts I had about you, for despising the boys you dated, for wanting to die knowing you let another fuck you when all I ever wanted was the freedom to love you in that way.”
My temper cindered into exhaustion, leaving me breathless. I shrugged brokenly with palms spread in surrender. “How can I admit such things to you, Ribbon? How can I stand here and confess that I’ve jerked off to images of you? That when you were still innocent, still untouched, still so fucking young, I was using other women to somehow find a way to remain honourable and not crawl into your bed? Do you know how many times my willpower almost failed? Do you know how many dreams I’ve had? How many times I’ve had you in my arms and on my lips, only to wake up and find it was all a fantasy?
“It was everything I could do to hide such things from myself, but you…I could never tell you because I couldn’t stand for you to think of me as a monster. For you to see me as others’ would. A paedophile. A beast. A twisted-up son of a bitch who would rather put himself first than the child he’d sworn his life to.”
My breathing came ragged as she took a hesitant step toward me.
However, this time, instead of disbelief, there was a sliver of something, a fledgling hint of hope, an aura of satisfaction of finally, finally hearing my truth. “How long?”
I shook my head. That was one secret I wanted to take to my grave.
But she came closer, her towel slipping farther, her eyes getting softer. “How long, Ren?”
“It seems like forever,” I moaned, shaking my head again, begging her to let it go.
Her fingers f
luttered on my overly hot forearm. Sweat covered me from fighting and declaring. My energy was gone. I was more exhausted than I’d ever been in my entire life, but still, she didn’t let it go.
“Please…I need to know.”
I looked up, flinching at just tasting the words. My tongue burned with wanting to lie, to add on a few years, to not make myself such a child-stealing savage. But she’d been honest with me, and now, it was my turn to be honest with her.
Hesitantly, I raised my hand, cupping her cheek for the second time, grazing my thumb once again over the delicate bones that swooped up toward stunning blue eyes. This time, she didn’t jerk away, and I stared so damn long into her that I became lightheaded and terrified.
My voice was barely a whisper as I admitted, “Since you kissed me.”
She tilted her head, biting her lip as if her emotions threatened to drag her under, but not before she got her final answer. “Which time? The kiss that drove you away or the kiss in the stable at Cherry River?”
I closed my eyes.
I’d been given an opportunity to hide the worst of my transgressions. I could say it was the kiss she’d given me when she was seventeen—so close to eighteen that it was no longer illegal to fall in love with a minor.
But…I couldn’t do it.
Tonight had been a truth-tearing hurricane, and I had no choice but to murmur, “When you were thirteen.” I sighed with every sickness and shame I’d carried for five interminably long years. “The night you woke me up kissing me.”
“Oh.”
One tiny sound as she jerked and fell.
I wasn’t prepared for the way she crumpled. The way her legs gave up supporting her. The way her body shoved aside her anger and tumbled pliant and welcoming into my arms. And I definitely wasn’t prepared for the way her eyes welled with a different kind of tear.
A tear full of heartache and years of hiding; a glistening, glittering joy that infected my heart until I felt forgiven. Understood. Redeemed.
Somehow, without saying a word, she gave me absolute absolution.
“I thought you hated me for that.”
“I did.” I pressed my forehead to hers, needing to be close, needing to sit down. “But not for reasons I made you think. Not for reasons I made myself believe.”
“You saw me that night? Truly saw me.”
“I saw that my feelings toward you were changing. That there was something unsaid between us. Something that wasn’t allowed. Something that only grew bigger and more incessant as we grew older.”
“Is this real?” she breathed. “Did you honestly just say you fell in love with me the night I fell in love with you?”
My knees quaked as I backed toward her bed, holding her tight and forcing her to trip with me. “I think I fell in love with you the day I returned for you in that house where I’d left you as a baby. The moment you saw me, you crawled so fast. You knew you were mine, and I was yours, even then. I’d never had anyone be so excited to see me. So innocent with their affection. So trusting that I’d keep her safe.”
I sat down heavily. The instant the mattress held my depleted weight, Della spread her legs and climbed onto my lap, her towel opening indecently, revealing naked heat-flushed skin that I desperately wanted to drink.
But I forced myself to keep my eyes on hers, adoring the way her legs wrapped around my back and her arms looped around my neck and our foreheads remained glued together, our eyes so close, our lips so near.
This was all so new, and yet, so heartbreakingly familiar.
This was Della.
She was my home.
“I’m not saying I fell in love with you in this kind of way,” I murmured as our lips inched closer. “I’m saying there are so many ways I fell in love with you. Most of them pure and utterly unconditional, but that night in the stable, the night you entered my dreams and made me plummet…that night was different.”
Her chest rose and fell, her nipples pink and tight in my peripheral vision as her towel fell away, draping damply over my arms where I hugged her.
She breathed quicker, harder, as our mouths crept ever closer, quietly, tentatively, afraid that any moment this perfection would shatter, and we’d wake from yet another life-tormenting dream.
“I’m sorry I made it impossible for you to stay,” she whispered, looking deep, deep into my eyes, all that trust and affection and connection back in place.
She was home, just like me.
She’d returned to being the girl I would kill for and the woman who had every power to kill me. Only this time, there were no shields. No blockage of honesty. No slurry of lies. The way she looked at me was unlike anything she’d done before.
I’d caught glimpses, sure. The nights in the forest after she’d run away. The moments before I’d head out for a shallow night of pleasure with unknown women. The seconds before I’d climb into bed and she’d stare at me from the corridor as I turned out the lights.
Glimpses and glances—windows into the world of just how desperately she loved me, the same world I’d been hiding from her.
“You didn’t make it impossible. You were trying to make things better by pushing me to admit what I was afraid of.” I brushed back her hair, my body hardening, heating. My mouth watering, tingling.
Our lips drew closer still, magnets intent on connecting.
A new kind of energy crackled around us—just as dangerous and potent, but this time, it was passion, not rage.
Passion I never believed I was permitted to feel around her.
Passion I never thought I could earn.
I basked in it, loving the spark and sizzle of her body pressed against mine. Of the wondrous anticipation of where this was going, the build-up of seventeen years of living in each other’s pockets, of being each other’s everything, of finally coming full circle from friends to possibly more.
More than I could ever deserve.
The first graze of mouths was barely there. A whisper of touch. A kick of taste. But my heart ran away, galloping and pounding as wild as our shared surname and just as feral.
Della jerked in my arms, sucking a shaky breath. Her legs squeezed around my waist, her arms twitching around my neck. “Ren?”
My eyes were too heavy to keep open. They went half-mast. My body aching. My mind messed and incoherent. “Yeah?”
“I want to kiss you.”
I licked my lips, groaning beneath my breath. “Yeah, me too.”
“But…you need to know something.”
The back of my neck strained with pressure, desperate to press my mouth to hers and devour any more words. I no longer wanted conversation. I wanted something so much less innocent that damn conversation. “What do I need to know, Della Ribbon?”
She shivered as I ran my fingers up her naked spine and ducked to press a kiss on the very same collarbone that had tormented me for most of my life.
Old memories crackled like ancient TV channels, overlapping the Della I had in my arms with the baby I’d carried in my backpack.
I jerked and shoved the disgusting comparison away, doing my best to silence the voice hissing that this was wrong. That I had no right. No permission.
“You kiss me,” she murmured, her back bowing, pressing more of her skin into my mouth. “And that’s it. There’s no going back. No way I can stop loving—”
I didn’t let her finish.
My arms banded tighter, and my chin arched up.
And I kissed her.
Hard.
Deep.
Wet.
Long.
I kissed her for all the nights I’d wanted to kiss her but couldn’t.
I kissed her for all the years I’d needed her but daren’t.
And she kissed me back.
Just as hard, deep, wet, long.
Her taste.
Her softness.
Jesus Christ.
She moaned into me, her tongue darting out and licking mine. Her body writhing on my lap, her weight and
movement rubbing against the rigid hardness in my jeans.
I wanted so fucking much to shove aside my clothing and consummate this newfound acceptance. I wanted to propose to her and marry her and never let her go again.
But as our kiss turned from exploration and newness to uncivilised grinding and gasping, the same crackling, snowy memories came back.
Of Della laughing as I cannonballed naked as a fifteen-year-old into the lake.
Of Della crying when she was stung by a bee and my seventeen-year-old self sucking out the stinger and kissing her wound all better.
Of Della reading aloud the sex education book when I was eighteen and just as lost as I’d ever been, finally realising that she was so far above me I could never get her back.
Boom, boom, boom.
Reminder, reminder, reminder.
I tore my lips from hers and shot up.
Twisting sharply, I placed her on the bed and yanked out of her embrace before her eyes had fully opened and her lips fully noticed they were no longer being kissed.
“What?” Her eyes instantly filled with blue terror. “Ren…no.” She scrambled to her knees. Naked as the day she’d torn off her dress and forced me to see that she was no longer a virgin. No longer untouched. “Don’t do this. You promised.”
I backed away, pinching the bridge of my nose, unable to stop the torrent of recollections.
Of Della riding Cassie’s horse for the first time and falling off.
Of Della giggling at something Patricia said only to stop laughing when I went in hearing distance.
Of Della watching me with a heart-stealing look as I chopped firewood shirtless.
Della.
Della.
Della.
Always there, always mine, and now, I didn’t know how to separate past from future.
“I-I—” I balled my hands, forcing myself to look her in the eye. “I want you, Della. You know that now, and I have no intention of lying to you. I’m in love with you. I want to be with you. But right now…right now, I need to work through this, okay? Can you give me time? Can you understand how hard this is for me?”