“Then what?” she prompts, her voice softer.
“On my back from Raiford I saw it and thought of you. I thought maybe when this was all over, I could take you to the dealership and if you liked it…”
“What? You’d buy it for me as a surprise gift?”
“Pretty much, yeah. You’ve been cooped inside houses and hotel rooms for weeks. Brandon told me you asked him to get you out of the room for a while. I know how you must feel.”
“Then take me in your car to get some coffee or just for a spin around the block.” Stunned, she gazes at the Ducati. “But this… A six-figuregift… It’s too much.”
Too much. As if I wouldn’t mortgage my soul to see that look of pure joy cross her face again. “Nothing is too much for you.”
“Tristan, it’s extravagant, insane.”
“There’s nothing too extravagant or insane when it comes to you.” The words come out more intense than I intended. I’m scaring her. I can see it. The tension in her arms. The parting of her lips. The way she takes an imperceptible step back. But it’s true. I’d give her anything, everything, if she’d let me.
“Stop. What are you doing? This is not how you make you love you.”
The accusation lands like a rusty bullet in the bone. As if I’m no different from every other man who’s tried to manipulate her. “You think I don’t know that? I’m not buying your love, Birdie. I just saw her, the colors, the design, and thought she was madefor you. I found something beautiful and wanted to give it to someone who deserves beauty in her life.Youdeserve to have someone give you something nice with no strings attached for once.”
“There’s no such thing, Tristan.”
My chest clenches at the resignation in her voice. She rejects the idea despite the evidence. This is what years of abuse and control do to you. You reject kindness. You suspect good. You only accept malice and evil because they’re the only things that make sense. “That’s what the likes of Abel and Shane made you believe, but that’s not true. Not with me. All I ask, all you gotta do, is let me be that someone.”
“Tristan,” she murmurs. Her chin wobbles, and her cheeks and nose redden. Is she crying? She looks away, before I can find the answer, and presses the back of her finger to the tip of her nose. “The idea of someone caring for me without an agenda is so foreign it scares her.”
“I know.” No one knows that better than me.
A nervous chuckle escapes her. “You said you were going to wait until this was over before taking me to buy it. Why didn’t you?”
The real reasons flash in my head, but the truth is more vulnerable than I want to admit. “Because…life is too short.”
“In other words, because you pulled me out of a tub half-dead.” Her voice is flat, matter-of-fact, with a touch of humor for fuck’s sake. “So this is what, acongratulations you survived a maybe suicide please don’t do it againgift?”
“Don’t do that. It’s not funny. It’ll never be funny.”
“I know. But you know me. I say weird, unfiltered shit when I…feel. I hadn’t been allowed to express emotions without heavy repercussions for a long time. It’s a defense mechanism.”
The raw explanation stabs deeper than the dark joke. She was robbed of her simplest of rights, the right to feel. Years of walking on eggshells, of having every emotion policed and punished, have taught her to hide behind sarcasm when things get too real. I wish I could tell her she never had to hide her feelings from me, that she was entitled to show every emotion without fear of consequences. I wish my words could be enough for her to believe it. But we both know words here mean nothing, only patience, actions of unconditional love and time would.
“If it’s anything, it’s anI’m sorrygift,” I mutter, my voice hushed and thick, “not that anything could make up for what you had to go through.”
“Sorry for what?”
“For wasting so much time.” It tears out of me. Every regret, every what-if, every night I’ve lain awake thinking about how different things might have been. “For not being strong enough or old enough back when I first met you. If I’d been, none of those terrible things would have happened to you.”
“Oh, Tristan.” She stares at me with tenderness I don’t deserve. “You were a nineteen-year-old student of mine living in a hell of your own. There’s nothing you could have done.”
“There’s plenty I could have done.” I could have been braver. I could have fought harder. I could have not ignored the signs or pretended everything was going to be okay. I could have…
“No. Do you not remember what you taught me on your first day as my bodyguard? You can’t possibly blame yourself forother people’s choices. I chose to marry Blake. Blake chose to treat his wife as a slave, cheat on her, beat her almost to death and blackmail her to spend her money on his drug addiction. But you,” she reaches out to touch my arm so carefully, so gently, and it steals my breath away, “you chose to come back for me. You chose to be here now, doing everything you could to protect and save me. That’s all that matters.”
The sincerity in her touch, the way she’s trying to offer me the same comfort I’ve been trying to give her, swirls inside me with an unexpected force. She sees my being here, after leaving her to rot for eight years, as enough.
But it doesn’t feel like enough. It will never feel like enough to make up for the years she spent suffering while I was working my way out of my father’s grip, building myself, telling myself I was getting strong enough to deserve her.
“Can we take this boss lady for a spin now?” She puts on the helmet, and it brings the first time she rode with me to memory, when I had to put it on her and buckle it myself. “Or will I have to wait for road security protocol measures first?”
“Now that you mention it, we need a vehicle tailing us with at least two details.”