by Piper King
It was everything I’d feared. Everything I’d run away from. I could still see the blame swirling in his eyes. Everything that had happened to us five years ago had been all my fault, and we both knew it. He hadn’t been able to forgive me, and I certainly hadn’t been able to forgive myself. I hated seeing that in the person I loved more than any other.
So, I stood in the bedroom, wiping tears from my cheeks as I packed Whitney’s bags. All alone, the way I had been for years. The way I would be for the rest of my life.
By the time we pulled the truck into the driveway at home, rain slashed down from the sky. We hadn’t been able to beat the storm, no matter how quickly we had worked. The three of us sat quietly in the cabin of the truck, staring at the empty house in front of us. Now was certainly not the time to be carrying furniture inside.
But that meant Whitney and I would be spending the night in a very empty house. No bed, no couch, no chairs. Not even any food. We hadn’t had a chance to pick up any daily supplies yet, and I knew neither of us wanted to drive in this weather. Hail was starting to join the rain, and the wind whipped through the trees.
This was going to be one hell of a night.
13
“We’re going to have to move your things inside after the storm breaks,” I said slowly, leaning forward to look up at the dark sky. It was throwing a mixture of rain and hail onto the truck, dinging off the metal. Whitney shivered beside me, nervous. Annie, too. Neither of them said anything, but I knew they hated when it stormed like this. They had since we were kids, when tornadoes had swept through the town.
“Definitely.” Whitney nodded, her voice barely above a whisper. “Thanks for your help. We better get inside before it gets worse.”
A beat passed, but neither girl moved. “You’ll be alright, won’t you? You’ve got some blankets and cushions in there, at least? Some food?”
Annie and Whitney locked gazes, but neither of them answered. Fucking hell. Dread crept into my gut and clenched tight. They didn’t have a single damn thing in that house, but they didn’t want to tell me that. My anger at Annie was as still as strong as it ever was, but it didn’t stop my heart from softening at their plight.
I wouldn’t have let anyone go into something like that, but especially not Annie. I still felt a protectiveness toward her that I’d always felt. And probably always would. I might be mad, but when it came down to it, I’d do whatever it took to keep her safe and sound. And letting the two of them stay in a dark and empty house during a raging storm was far from safe. Fucking hell.
“Right,” I said slowly before taking a deep breath. “That’s settled then. You’ll come over to mine until the storm passes.”
“Are you sure?” Annie squeaked out, both relief and anxiety edging into her voice. “Storms like this usually last all night.”
“Well, then you’ll stay all night,” I said, gripping the steering wheel in my hands.
“Axel, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she began to say. It was the most she’d said to me since she got here. “I mean, it’s kind of you to offer, but—”
“Annie.” Whitney broke through her sister’s words. “Please.”
Annie sighed and nodded her head. Emotions warred inside me. Relief that she’d agreed to stay somewhere safe. Tension from the thought her staying the night in my house. How would we ever get through it without biting each other’s heads off? How would I ever get through it with the armor around my heart still in place? Just these few hours in her presence had already made chunks of it fall off.
I’d never survive this fucking night.
14
When we stepped into Axel’s house, I felt as if I were stepping back in time. I took in a deep breath through my nose, and the familiar scent engulfed me. Even after all these years, it was still the same. Laundry detergent, lemon, and something else that vaguely reminded me of freshly-baked cookies. He hadn’t changed a damn thing. All the furniture and all the decorations before me had been put there by his parents years and years ago. Axel may have kept the house when they’d died, but he’d done nothing to make it his own.
He must have really hated having me there, stepping foot in the place that had once belonged to his whole family.
Axel led us down the hallway to the kitchen. Steel pots hung over the marble-topped island, and flowery wallpaper lined the walls. It looked so feminine, so homey, so…unused. He probably never even cooked a meal. I certainly couldn’t imagine Axel standing over the oven flipping omelettes on a Sunday morning like his mom had.
“Make yourselves at home,” he said. “I’m sure you remember where everything is. If you need anything, I’ll be upstairs doing some work. I have a backlog of emails to take care of.”
Suddenly, the lights flickered. Once, twice, before shutting down completely. Pitch black loomed up around us. There went the electricity. A tree had probably fallen on a power line down the road, and it would be hours before it was set back straight.
Axel cursed under his breath. “Wait here. I’ll get some candles from the closet.”
“You have candles?” I couldn’t help but ask, if only to break the tension so thick in the room I could cut through it with a knife.
“My mom had candles.” His voice was gruff. “I never threw them out.”
Guilt and grief tore through me. I was starting to realize that Axel hadn’t moved on any more than I had. Maybe he’d moved on from me, but not from the past. It made my heart hurt just thinking of him living day after day in this place with constant reminders of his parents all around him. Why hadn’t he boxed all this up and tried to move past it? Being surrounded by all of this couldn’t be good for him. Everything inside me wanted to fix it for him. How, I didn’t know.
I didn’t think he would have let me even if I’d had a clue what to do.
And for the first time since I’d seen the girl coming out of his front door earlier that day, I hoped, a little bit in my heart, that he could find someone to help him finally move past his parents’ deaths. If Beth could do that for him, then well…I might not like it, but I couldn’t argue it would be for the best.
Axel returned a few moments later with a couple of flashlights and some candles. I grabbed the matchbox from one of the drawers, still in the same spot it always had been. Hell, it was probably the same damn matchbox if the rest of the house was any indication.
Once we got several candles going, I glanced at Whitney. She looked pale, uneasy. Totally the opposite of how she normally looked. “You okay?”
She shook her head and bit her bottom lip. “You know how I hate these storms.”
She did. When we’d been little, a couple of tornados had come through town, and Whitney had gotten stuck at school surrounded by brutal winds and hail the size of oranges. They’d crashed through the windows while the sirens blasted, while tree branches flailed around in a gust of insanity. The tornado had gone right by the school, and she and everyone else had been lucky to survive. A few more feet to the left, and they’d all have been killed.
Ever since then, Whitney had been terrified of storms.
“I have some Xanax in my toiletry bag,” she said as a tear slipped down her cheek. “But I think you put it in the back of Axel’s truck.”
“That’s fine,” I said with a nod to Axel. “I’ll go get it.”
“You don’t have to, Annie.” But I could tell by the look in her eye that she very much wanted me to do it. She’d just never ask me to go out in the storm like this.
I held her trembling hands between mine. “It’s okay. I’ll go and get it. I remember exactly where I put it in the truck.”
“Okay, but only if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.” Turning, I held out my palm toward Axel, the closest I’d been to him since I saw him that morning. It felt weird interacting as if we meant nothing to each other and never had, but I had my sister to worry about right now, and that was enough to force myself past it. “Can I have your keys?”
&n
bsp; “No,” he said, frowning down at me. In the darkly-lit room, it was hard to read his expression. Serious, still angry, but something more, something I couldn’t quite make out with the shadows dancing on his skin. “I’m coming with you.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but he held up a hand to stop me. He and I both knew I couldn’t get his truck doors open by myself, especially not in this weather. They were hard to unlock and far too heavy for my puny arms to manage. With a sigh, I gave him a nod and we headed outside.
As soon as we cracked open the door, I knew Whitney was going to need that Xanax far more than she thought. The wind had bent the trees in the yard so far that they were likely to break at any moment. The hail had grown twice as large, and they littered the ground like a storm-conquered battlefield. And the sound of the storm was so loud that I wanted to press my hands to my ears.
“Come on!” Axel held out a hand. For a moment, I just stared at it, feeling the spray of the rain on my face, the wind whipping through my hair. His hand looked as strong and as safe as it always had, but touching him scared the shit out of me. It made me shiver just thinking about it.
But slowly and carefully, my arm lifted from my side out of its own volition, and my hand slid into his. My breath caught in my lungs, and Axel’s eyes widened just enough to show that he’d felt the same jolt of something as I had. Electricity, satisfaction, rightness. Like our hands were meant to be this way.
And then the moment passed when Axel’s eyes clouded over with something else.
Anger.
He pulled on my hand, and we left the safety of the porch for the storm. Lightning cracked overhead, filling the sky with blinding bursts of light. The rain and hail beat down on our heads, soaking us through even in the short trek across the lawn to the truck.
As the roar of the wind surrounded us, Axel flung open the door of the trailer. He jumped inside, reached out a hand, and lifted me inside. Rubbing my arms, I looked up at Axel. Rivulets of water ran down his face, pooling on the edges of his strong and chiseled jaw. His dark hair was soaked through, curling wildly across his forehead. And in the darkness, I suddenly felt very exposed to him, like he could see through my defenses and into my heart. Like he could hear the way it battered against my ribcage, betraying every emotion I felt, showing that I still felt something for him so strong that I could barely stand to look at him without falling apart.
Even though the storm still raged around us, I suddenly felt very still and very calm.
“You should grab that bag,” he said in a low voice.
“Right,” I whispered. My words came out so soft I wasn’t sure he’d even be able to hear them. “Did you bring a flashlight?”
“Oh right.” He held up the steel and flicked on the beam. “Here it is.”
As we turned toward the depths of the truck to find Whitney’s bag, a gust of wind hurtled into the back of us. The doors slammed hard, crashing loudly and knocking me off my feet. I fell into a heap onto the hard and cold floor, my breath half-knocked out of me from the force of whatever had just happened.
“Are you okay?” Alarm tinged Axel’s voice as he knelt by my side, his warm and steady hand pressed comfortingly on my back. My whole body went tight at his touch, and I felt the wind knocked out of me once again.
“Fine,” I said. “What just happened?”
“The wind blew the doors shut.” Axel frowned and glanced behind me. “It shouldn’t be possible, but I didn’t secure them when we came inside.”
My heartbeat picked up speed. Truck doors were usually locked open by being attached to the side of the trailer. We’d been in such a hurry to get in from the storm and grab Whitney’s bag that neither of us had thought to do so. And the problem was…the trailers used in Axel’s fleet couldn’t be opened from the inside.
We were stuck.
15
“It’ll be okay,” I said, pressing up from the floor. Annie hadn’t hurt herself from the fall, and I felt the sudden need to put as much distance between us as possible. “I should be able to push the doors open just fine.”
“I thought you couldn’t open them from the inside.” Annie stood from the floor and brushed invisible specks off her jeans, like just being inside my truck made her dirty.
“You can’t open them when they’re locked, but it’s not like wind can lock doors now,” I snapped, moving away from her. Taking a deep breath, I tried to calm my fucking nerves. Being cooped up in here with my ex was making me feel seriously on edge. It reminded me far too much of that night when everything had gone to shit.
The night I’d wanted to propose.
I pushed on the doors, but nothing happened. Frowning, I rolled back my shoulders and tried again, straining all my weight against the steel. But they didn’t even budge an inch. They wouldn’t be locked, but somehow they’d gotten stuck, and no matter how hard I tried, they just wouldn’t yield.
“Are they stuck?” Annie asked, coming up from behind me. I could smell her skin, damp and cold from the rain. Her dark hair had already started to curl into waves, making her look even more gorgeous than she usually did.
Closing my eyes, I cursed underneath my breath. We needed to get the hell out of here.
“Let me try something else,” I said before taking a running leap at the doors. My body slammed into the steel, the impact reverberating through my bones. Pain flashed through me like lightning, and I fell to the floor. The fucking doors still didn’t move an inch.
“Axel!” Annie cried out and rushed to my side, dropping down onto the cold floor beside me. She reached over and took my arm into her hands, her eyes flicking across me to spot where I’d slammed into the doors.
But it was my heart that felt more gashed open than anything else.
“I’m fine.” I ripped my arm out of her grasp. “Maybe a few more shots at it will get the thing to budge.”
“I don’t think so.” She shook her head and pressed a palm against my chest when I tried to stand. “You’re just going to get yourself hurt.”
“What do you care?” I growled. “It’s not like it mattered to you when I was hurt before.”
Annie fell silent, her face dropping. Her eyes flicked away from mine to stare at some spot on the floor, just as she’d done earlier when she’d shown up at my house with her sister. Even now, she couldn’t look at me when confronted by what she’d done, by who she’d hurt and just how much damage she’d left behind.
“I care, Axel.” Her voice was so soft, so tender. “I’ve always cared.”
“Then why the fuck did you leave me?”
The question was finally out in the open after years and years of me asking it in my head. It had been gnawing at me all damn day, growing larger and larger in my head until I could no longer block it out. When she’d run off after the accident, she’d made noises about being sorry, about not wanting to burden me with her presence. But none of it had ever made a lick of sense.
I’d tried my hardest not to vomit out the words, but here they finally were, hanging between us in the same place where we’d once been blissfully happy together. We’d finally come full circle, and I was going to get an answer from her if it was the last thing I ever did.
16
Everything around me froze as Axel’s words sunk in. The question echoed in my brain. Why, why why? And there was nowhere for me to go now, no way I could run from the past any longer. I was trapped inside this truck with it, and there was no getting out.
I took a deep breath and stood, putting several feet between us. “What do you mean? You know why I left.”
“To follow your dreams,” Axel said with a wry smile. “Are you going to tell me that was it? Because everything seemed to change in a blink of an eye that night both my parents and your parents died.”
A tear leaked out of my eye as my vein throbbed in my neck. I whirled to face the back of the truck, escaping from the conversation the only way I knew how. “Of course that changed everything.”
“Why?�
�� Axel’s voice grew louder as he walked up behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders. “For fuck’s sake, Annie. Tell me why you left. I’ve never been able to understand it. Even though we were both so hurt by what had happened, that didn’t explain why you suddenly ran away from me. I needed you more than ever then, and you just…disappeared.”
My breath came out in short spurts. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I’d bottled all of this up for so long that it felt as if a tidal wave had suddenly engulfed me, dragging me down into its depths so that I would never feel air in my lungs again. I was going to drown in my own emotions if I didn’t get away from this fast.
“You know why,” I said again, shaking my head. Of course he knew why. He’d been there, hadn’t he? Why did he have to force me to relive the guilt all over again?
“No, I don’t. I’ve been wondering this for five fucking years. I haven’t been able to move on with my life because of it.” His grip tightened on my shoulders, and he whirled me around to face him. His face was alive, full of a fire so hot that I felt scorched underneath his gaze. “I haven’t gotten over you, Annie. Even after all this time, you’re the only woman I’ve ever been with because no one else could ever compare to you. I deserve some kind of explanation, and you’re going to give it to me right here and right now before you go disappearing a cloud of smoke all over again.”
My mouth dropped open, everything inside me shocked at what he’d said. My mind skipped on his words. Not over me. No one else. He truly didn’t know why I’d left. It boggled my mind. Had he really been left wondering all this time? And if so…did that mean I’d read him wrong after the accident? Had I…had I left for nothing?
