Page 145 of Into These Eyes
“Do you trust me … with your heart?” I ask, my own accelerating wildly.
“Yeah, I do,” he answers, his voice rough and broken, reflecting the torment written all over his face.
“Why four?” I touch each quarter with my fingertip. “Why four broken pieces?”
He lets out a long breath and swallows. “Jamie … you don’t want to hear all that.”
I find his eyes again, the pain as clear as the blue staring back at me. “They’re the four things that hurt you most, aren’t they?”
He closes his eyes for a moment, then nods. “But it was a long time ago. Those wounds aren’t the same anymore.”
“I want to know. I want to knowyou. Even though I feel like I already do, I don’t know everything. And I really, really want to. This part of who you are is so important to you, you branded yourself so you’d always remember.”
He scoffs lightly. “Like I could ever forget.”
Touching my finger to the first piece of his torn heart, I trace my nail around its jagged edge. “What hurt you here?”
He swallows, flicking his gaze to my touch on his skin. “My father. When he turned his back on me. As if he hadn’t raised me for eighteen years, as if he had no idea who I was. How he could think I was capable of killing anyone, let alone a woman …”
“He never tried to reconnect?”
His expression tightens, and his fingers dig into my hips for a moment. “Once,” he forces out. “Took him five years to show upat the prison. I refused to see him. I just …” His throat bobs. “I couldn’t.”
A tear forms in the corner of my eye. I blink, but not soon enough, because all I manage to do is set it free. He follows its path down my face. When it settles in the crevice between my lips, I drop my gaze to his mouth and watch the tip of his tongue appear, as if he wants to taste that tear. And, oh God, do I want him to. But that would be a distraction. That would be easy. This is hard. And it’s the difficult things that have the deepest meaning.
I force my attention back to the tattoo and move my finger onto the next piece. “And this?”
“That was for all my dreams that would never come true. The realisation that my life would never be what I imagined or planned. It’s for what I once had, and what I lost forever.”
Jesus, this keeps getting worse.I intrinsically know the damage his incarceration has caused him, but actually hearing it in his own words, is heartbreaking. But I’m not stopping now. We’re halfway there.
My throat constricts as my finger trails down to the piece below. He says nothing, and from the tension coiling through his muscles, I know he’s trying to keep his emotions in check.
After a moment, I press, “This one?”
“Jamie …”
I meet his eyes.
“I don’t want you to feel bad about anything I felt … back then. Especially now, since that piece is redundant.”
“But it meant something once. Gavin, please tell me.”
Sensing his indecision, I wait.
“That one was for every time you looked at me in court. Your life was shattered, never to be the same again, just like mine. And you knew it. I saw it in your eyes every day of that trial. You believed I was the one who did that to you. And you hated me forit. And that hurt. Deeply. The weight of being blamed for ruining the lives of others is a backbreaking burden.”
I’m so stunned that I’d had such an effect on him way back then, I can barely breathe. Ashamed, I lower my eyes to his chest, causing more tears to spill over my cheeks.
Ever so gently, he wipes them away with his fingertips.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
He presses his lips to my forehead. “No. It was no more your fault than it was mine. We were both victims. You just had no way of knowing that. I wrote you so many letters explaining everything. But you never got them.” He touches the underside of my chin and tilts my head up until I meet his gaze. “Jamie, that piece … that piece of my heart is whole again. Completely healed.” He wipes away another stray tear with his thumb. “I promise you.”
I nod, my throat too closed off to form words. Instead, I wrap my arms around his shoulders, tuck my face into his neck and hold him tight. How is it that his heart’s been torn to shreds, yet it’s still the warmest, biggest heart I’ve ever encountered? How is that possible?
He slips a hand beneath my wet hair and absently begins circling his thumb on the back of my neck, as if he’s done it a thousand times before.
