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 fluttered 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 im
possible. 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?”
She stood, fumbling for her towel and holding it as a barricade in front of her. “I understand because it’s hard for me, too. Don’t you think I have the same memories? Of you kissing Cassie? Of you younger and softer and nothing more than an uncomplicated farm boy who made me fall in love with a single smile?”
I held up my hand. “I know this is unfair, but our situations are nothing alike.”
“They’re everything alike.”
“No.” I shook my head firmly, scolding her like a child when, only seconds ago, I’d been kissing her like a man. What role did I play in her life anymore? Disciplinarian or partner? Father or husband? “They’re not alike. At all.”
Stalking to the door, I wrenched it open before saying softly, “I raised you, Little Ribbon. In my heart, I hold so many elements of love for you. I’ve fed you from my own fingers. I’ve washed your body. I’ve held you tight while you cried. I know we aren’t siblings, but somewhere along the way, I did love you as a brother. I need to untangle that love before I can move on as…as—”
“As my lover?”
I winced. “Yes.”
“Are you sure you want to be? This isn’t just you running away again?” Her eyes sparkled with another wave of unshed tears.
I hated that I’d let her down all over again, but I wouldn’t be honest with her if I didn’t tell her how hard this would be. How difficult I found it separating all the Della’s I knew, and somehow learn to allow myself to love all of them after she’d been off-limits for so long.
But I also knew if we were going to do this, we couldn’t do it here.
We couldn’t do this where people knew us as relatives.
We couldn’t do this where we might be caught.
“Do you still have the same phone number?” I asked, my fingers clutching the doorknob, holding myself in place, stopping me from running back to her and shoving her down on the bed.
From this distance, all I wanted was her, but I knew the moment I touched her my world would shatter, and I’d drown beneath memories determined to make me vomit for taking a sweet, innocent girl and turning her into something sick with want.
“Yes.” She hung her head. “But I won’t be here when you get back. I have to go back to David’s. I only came here to burn that.” She arched her chin at the scattered forgotten papers, trodden and crumpled on the floor.
My chest ached at the thought of her going back to him, but I had no choice. “Don’t burn it. And give me a few hours. I’ll text you, okay?”
She looked up, forlorn and afraid but resilient just like I knew her to be. “A few hours? I thought you were going to say a few days.”
I smiled sadly. “I’ve wasted more than enough days not having you. I have no intention of wasting anymore.”
She smiled, wider than before. “Okay, I can accept a few hours.”
“Thank you.” My eyes drank her in, imprinting this Della, the new Della into my mind first and foremost as I backed out the door, promi
sing, “I’ll be in touch. And when I do…we’re going to talk. You’re going to help me understand that there was no other path for us. That it was always going to be this way. That we were always meant to be. And then…we’re going to leave.”
I didn’t wait for her reply.
I had some soul searching to do.
I had some compartmentalizing to sort.
And I needed to do it now.
Because once I did.
I could have her.
And my complicated world would finally be complete.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
REN
* * * * * *
2018
DELLA: ARE YOU ready to talk about this?
The glow of my cell-phone screen lit up the night-shrouded park where I rested. The bench made my ass flat from hours of sitting, watching the sun go down. Pruned bushes and carefully controlled trees granted a sense of home, but nothing was wild about their regimented flowerbeds.
I’d meant to move. I’d meant to text Della hours ago, but once I’d opened the gates of so many stored memories, I couldn’t rush it.
It was a curse to have a good memory.
I didn’t have to strain to pull up image after image of Della as a two-year-old, five-year-old, ten, fourteen, sixteen. I knew her body and scars from falling off horses and clumsy incidents better than I knew my own. I knew more about her than any lover should. And I didn’t like how that made me feel.
Was it right for me to want her body that I’d seen grow from so small to so stunning? Was it disgusting to admit, even though I’d carried her as a child and cared for as a baby, I saw her as more than just my responsibility and legacy now? I saw her as my other half. My future. Everything I’d ever been searching for.
I guess I’d always seen her as my other half; I just didn’t have the lust component to go with it. It made sense now why I’d always felt lonely even when she was in my arms—because some part of me knew it wanted more but couldn’t have it.
Sighing heavily, I pressed reply. The alphabet spread out on an on-screen keyboard, waiting to transform thoughts into messages.
Thanks to Della, I could read, write, spell, and wrangle technology enough to be proficient. Even when we’d moved away from the Wilsons and our regular study sessions were replaced with long hours at the milking shed and Della traded me for other boys, I hadn’t stopped learning.