by Cindy Gerard
She shook her head, a sad smile tilting her lips. “Because you always understand. You would have said it’s okay. Somehow you would have made me believe it. And that’s as far as it would have gone. You would have shouldered the blame, shouldered the load, and made it go away for me. And that, Garrett, is a major part of our problem.
“For godsake, Em. How can there be a problem in understanding?”
“The problem is this way you have of being reasonable. Of being understanding to a fault. I never know what you’re really thinking. I never know what your true feelings are because you’re always so busy protecting me from them.”
“I thought that was part of loving you.”
She shook her head. “So is leveling with me. I need that from you.”
The breath he let out was weary, his patience clearly exhausted. “What is it that you want me to say?”
“What you feel,” she ground out, her own frustration making her forget her bid to cater to his pride. “I want you to tell me what you really feel about what’s happened between us. For starters you can tell me what you feel about what I did to you.”
He roamed back to the table, slumped down in a chair.
“Garrett?”
With stiff, controlled movements, he lowered his face to his hands. “Don’t push this, Em. I’ve taken all the hits I can for one night. Believe me, you don’t want to hear what I feel.”
“Why? Because it might hurt me? Because you might lose that precious control and say what you really want to say?”
He held his silence like a weapon.
“My God, Garrett—I drugged you. I shaved your head. I left you, accused you of adultery. You, a man who prides himself for his integrity, his sense of honor. You should hate me.”
“You think I didn’t want to?” For the first time his control cracked. He slammed his fist down on the table. His face was ravaged with rage and pain. “You think I haven’t wanted to hate you for what you did—not only to me but to us? I’ve damned you a thousand times for the hell you put me through.”
“But you fought it, didn’t you?”
“I tried to understand,” he said, each word measured in a bid to regain a handle on the patience he’d exhausted. “I tried to make some sense of it. And now you tell me that you don’t want my understanding. You don’t want me taking care—you don’t want me caring about you. Apparently you never did.”
He shoved up from the chair, radiating anger and fighting defeat. “I’ve loved you and only you since the first day I saw you, and I’ve never given you a reason to doubt that love. And yes, I wanted to hate you for what you did to me. But I kept loving you instead. And loving you means taking care of you. And yes, dammit, protecting you. Even if it’s protecting you from me.”
His eyes glittered in the shadowed room. His face was hard, yet achingly vulnerable.
“I give you everything I’ve got, Em. Everything I am. I don’t know how to do it any other way. And now you tell me it’s not enough.”
He closed his eyes, drew in a deep draught of air. When he met her eyes, his were brimming with pain and despair and a helplessness bred by both. “What is enough, Em? What’s it ever going to take to be enough for you?”
She didn’t try to follow him when he shoved the door open and stalked outside. She didn’t know what else to say. So she left him to the darkness and his anger and wearily climbed the stairs to the loft.
And then she prayed. She prayed for him. She prayed for herself. And she prayed that she hadn’t just destroyed whatever hope they’d had of holding their marriage together.
The light by the bed cast a soft glow over the room when she turned it on, then lay down fully clothed. Time crawled by in sluggish fragments that she marked by the slow slide of the moon across the sky.
By the time she heard the back door creak open and softly close, the first blush of dawn had stolen the edge from the night. Except for the violent pounding of her heart, silence settled again, until finally she heard the scuff of his boots cross the bare wood floor, the complaint of the loft stairs as they groaned beneath his ascending weight.
Curled on her side she watched him approach the bed. His face was haggard, his eyes weary as he crossed to the opposite side and sat, his back to her.
Shoulders hunched, he leaned forward, braced his forearms on his spread thighs. After a long moment, he glanced over his shoulder at her, then back to his loosely clasped hands.
“It’s so big,” he said finally, his words ragged, his admission complete. “This love I have for you. It’s so big, sometimes it scares me. I didn’t know, Em. I swear I didn’t know what my holding back was doing to you.”
He unclasped his hands, balled them into fists and braced stiff arms on the mattress on either side of his hips. “I’ve never known how to deal with it. I’ve never known how to let you in without making my hurt yours. Just like I’ve never known how to satisfy my needs without letting them take over.”
He stared toward the ceiling. “A long time ago I decided the answer was to never let myself get out of control—emotionally or physically. That way I wouldn’t take a chance on hurting you.”
Finally he turned to her. “Tonight you made me realize it shouldn’t have been up to me to make that choice. It should have been up to you.”
He understood. Relief poured over her like a sunburst. It warmed the chill in her heart and eased the riot of doubt that had clogged her throat and made it difficult to breathe. Biting her lower lip to stall the threat of tears, she rose to her knees behind him.
Wrapping her arms around him, she lowered her cheek to his broad back. “All I’ve ever wanted—all I’ve ever needed—was to know you need me as much as I’ve always needed you.”
He covered her hands with his, leaned back against her. “It never occurred to me that you didn’t know that. Or that holding back would diminish how you felt about yourself.”
“I just want to give back, Garrett. Please know... this is as much my fault as yours. I should have told you long ago. I didn’t know how. You wouldn’t let me in, you wouldn’t let me help, so I turned away from you.”
He twisted at the hip, lay back on the bed and took her down with him. “Turn to me now, Em,” he whispered, searching her eyes as if he’d find the answer to all his questions there. “I need you to turn to me now.”
More than love suffused his kiss, more than apologies softened his hold to a caress. He pressed her face to the hollow of his neck. “You’re going to have to give me a little time to work with this though, okay?”
“Just let it happen,” she murmured, and knew she was asking him to trust her to know not only what she needed from him but what he needed from her.
She pressed her lips to his throat where his pulse beat like thunder. And she waited.
Finally, after a long, decisive moment, he began to let it out. “It was my fault,” he said out of the blue with an anguish so raw and riddled with guilt her heart stopped.
“What’s your fault?” she whispered when she could form the words. She touched a hand to his chest, felt the relentless crash of his heart beating beneath her palm. “What’s your fault, Garrett?”
“It’s my fault he’s dead.” He closed his eyes, turned away from her. “It’s my fault my father is dead.”
In her heart she’d suspected. In all these years of loving him, she’d suspected he had somehow held himself to blame. And yet, this was the first time he’d said the words aloud. The first time he’d shared the pain.
With gentle hands she turned him in her arms and drew him to her breast.
His arms came around her without hesitation as he buried his face between her breasts and held her like she was the only thing in the world he trusted to be his anchor.
“Tell me.” She pressed her mouth to the top of his head. “Tell me.”
It was difficult. More difficult than anything Garrett had ever done. But once he began talking, he couldn’t seem to stop.
The words
came like a flood, the disclosures swelling to the surface, crowding the banks of his silence, then spilling out onto the open field of endless, welcome relief.
And all the while, she listened. His wife. His lover. This woman whom he had taken to his heart and promised to protect, held him in her arms and bore the weight of his burdens on her slim shoulders.
“It was a Saturday,” he said, letting out a breath that felt like it had been locked inside him for seventeen years. “I always helped him out on Saturdays. It was his way of letting me know he trusted me with some responsibility. His way of making some time for the two of us together. And it was my way of making some money. Something I never thought I had enough of back then.”
He nuzzled his face into her soft warmth, felt the strength and the steadiness of her heartbeat beneath his cheek. “I’d been begging him to let me run the trencher. That day was the perfect opportunity. He was running a little behind schedule on the mall project. Needed to get the footings for the foundation dug so they could get the cement work done. I badgered. I wheedled. He finally relented.
“I really thought I was something,” he continued and made himself go on. “Riding that big machine. All that horsepower beneath me. All that power at my fingertips. And I was doing fine. I’d dug about fifteen yards when I caught sight of him. He was running toward me, waving his hands, shouting. I couldn’t hear him above the roar of the machine. And it didn’t register—not at first, anyway—that he was waving me off. I didn’t realize it until later—after he’d jumped onto the trencher, shoved me off and onto the ground.”
A shudder rippled through him, unexpected, unstoppable. “I was still rolling, spitting dust and wondering if the old man had gone crazy when I heard the explosion.”
He’d heard that roar a thousand times in his sleep. Felt the blast as the earth rumbled beneath him, the heat from the fire that blinded him as he’d stared in stunned horror at the burning inferno that had once been the trencher, with his father onboard.
“The machine had hit a gas main,” he said, recounting the story he’d heard over and over again in the hours and days that followed. “No one could figure out how Jonathan James—a man known for being meticulous and cautious to a fault—had missed the locator mark that had warned of the presence of the main.”
He felt her arms tighten around him. Beneath his cheek, her heart beat fast and hard. “It wasn’t him. It was me who hadn’t recognized the significance of the orange arrow spray painted on the ground. It was me being macho and playing with power that cost him his life. And it’s still me, all these years later, who has never told another living soul that I was driving the trencher that day.”
He stared thoughtfully into the misty light of morning. “He gave his life for me. He shoved me off to save me and couldn’t get the machine stopped in time to save himself.”
She understood now. She understood why his sense of responsibility stretched to the extreme. Why it was Garrett who had taken on the burden of man of the family. Why he had been the one to look out for his mother, for the business, for his brothers and why that had carried over to their marriage.
“You were a boy,” she whispered against his hair. “You were his pride and his reason for living, and what happened that day was a tragic, horrible accident. I won’t, not even for a minute, try to deny you your sense of responsibility for it. I only ask that you accept that he never would have wanted you to blame yourself for his death.”
“I’ve tried,” he uttered, his words heavy with the weight of the burden he’d taken upon himself to bear, “every day of my life I’ve tried to make it up to him. I’ve tried to make it up to my mother and my brothers.”
“And you’re tired,” she said softly, soothingly. “And you don’t have to handle it all by yourself anymore.”
“I need you, Em. I need you so bad.”
“I’m here,” she whispered. “I’ve always been here.”
She rocked him like a child. Stroked her hand over his hair. Hugged him to her breast. And finally, after all those years of holding it in, she let her own tears fall as he cried for the boy who had lost his father, as he mourned for the man who was responsible for his death.
His silent tears fell warm on her breast long after sleep—numbing, healing, necessary—finally claimed him. With him still wrapped snugly in her arms, she let it take her, too.
Hours later she awoke alone. Sunlight slanted through the windows, glinted off the walls, telling her it was late morning, possibly close to noon. She rose, walked downstairs and found him outside, down by the river.
She went to him, snuggled close to his side when he raised his arm and made a place for her there.
For a long moment Garrett stared out over the river in a silence that was both peaceful and healing. The disclosures had been painful for him. The truths, revealing.
In the past few hours he’d come to grips with the fact that he had been pouring more of his energy into the construction business his father left in his keeping than he had into their marriage. His self-blame had driven him to make the business so successful that he had sacrificed time with Emma and Sara. His closing that part of himself off from her had contributed to her sense of distrust.
Thanks to her, he’d come to terms with the damage he’d done. By suppressing his emotions, he had unintentionally distanced himself from her, instilled her with her own feelings of loss and failure.
The truth had been hard for him to face. In fact, he still hurt from the telling and the conclusions. But a monumental weight had been lifted, and he recognized now that his silence and his reluctance to share had been the factor that had driven them apart. She’d known all along what had taken him this long to accept.
“How did I ever get so lucky to have you in my life? And why wasn’t I smart enough to realize how strong you really are?”
“I’m strong because of you. And together we have enough strength to move mountains.”
He turned her in his arms. “I didn’t think it was possible to love you more. But I do, Em. I’m falling in love with you all over again.”
“I’ve never stopped loving you. I’ll never stop loving you. And I never wanted to leave you. Never.”
They were words he longed to hear. They were words he’d missed for so long.
She pressed her cheek to his chest. “Let’s have another baby.”
He hadn’t been prepared for her request or the avalanche of feelings that followed. He tried not to, but he stiffened.
“Don’t,” she warned, reading his reaction for what it was. “Don’t close off from me now, not now that we’ve gotten this far. It’s been two years since the miscarriage. It’s time we think about it. It’s time we talk about it.”
He took a deep breath. Rolled his shoulders and made himself relax. The next words out of her mouth brought home how important this was to her—to both of them.
“This is one more discussion we’ve avoided for too long.”
With brutal honesty he realized that for the first time he completely understood what she’d been trying to tell him. She needed to know his thoughts. And he needed to share them. It was a new kind of honesty for him. One that was founded in trust. And it was crucial for a renewed beginning with the woman with whom he shared a daughter and a history too rich to discard for the sake of his pride.
For long moments they sifted through that horrible time in silence. She’d been so excited about the baby. A boy. They’d been trying for so long. The miscarriage had been devastating. The fact that he’d been out of town on a business trip and she’d had to handle it alone had been hard on both of them.
“You were so broken,” he said into the silence. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to help you.”
“I know. And you tried. You held me when I cried. And I was too weak, both physically and emotionally to tell you how much losing the baby hurt. Even though I knew we both needed to talk about it. Even though I knew you thought you were sparing me.”
“We can’t go on thinking for each other, Garrett. We have to ask. We have to agree to tell. We have to hash out the hurts and not think we’re protecting each other by keeping our feelings inside.”
He wrapped his arms around her. “I wanted the baby so badly. I hated myself for being gone and leaving you to deal with it alone.”
“And you blamed yourself.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I figured that somehow it had to be my fault.”
“Are we past that now? Can you promise me that you’ll stop punishing yourself by assuming the guilt for everything that goes wrong in our lives?”
He smiled grimly. “I can promise that I’ll try. And I’ll start with asking, how long have you been thinking about a baby?”
“Almost since we lost him.” And then she made an admission of her own. “But I thought you didn’t want to, because maybe you blamed me and didn’t trust me to carry another child.”
He groaned and swore under his breath.
“I know now that wasn’t true. But that’s what silence does. It creates distance. It lets in doubt and breeds assumptions—like the one I drew when I saw you with that woman. It had been two years and I was still feeling grief and inadequacy over losing the baby. I translated it into inadequacy as a wife.”
He crushed her in his arms. “All that’s over now. That, I promise with all my heart. You want a baby? I can’t think of anything that would make me happier than having another baby with you.
“I want you as my wife, Emma. I want you as my lover. As my confidante—and most important, as my partner. With everything I have, I promise I’ll trust you to be the keeper of my heart, my secrets and my soul. I’ll trust you to let me be weak and let me be strong.”
“I’ll let you be anything you want to be,” she whispered as a tear trailed down her cheek, “as long as you let me be there for you.”
