Page 36 of Fire Island
“Eve?” he utters.
Hope flares, swelling with a flutter that makes my eyes raise to his.
“Yes?”
“So, you’re a writer, hey?” Small talk is painful for him, if the expression on his face is anything to go by.
My hope deflates, devastatingly so.
The awkwardness is palpable. This is him trying to be nice. Stuck in close proximity with a stranger his sister’s taken in. Not the boarder who took his home from him for months. That version of Callum was not as nice. I’m torn between laughing hysterically and sobbing where I stand.
“Something like that,” I manage.
I slip from the doorway and make a beeline for Iris’s room. The instant the door clicks at my back, it hits me like a ton of bricks. The fact that the man I love has no idea who I am...
We are strangers.
Strangers.
I collapse to the floor. The carpet burns my knees on impact. The clothes tumble to the floor, expelled from my hold as I sink my hands into my hair. I tug at the roots as a raw, wounded sound spills out.
The door opens, hitting my legs. I don’t bother moving. Someone drops to my side as it closes again.
Fine hands brush the hair from my face.
“Hush, sweetheart. Come now, tuck into bed.”
I don’t have the will to move.
My heart is bleeding through my skin, the remaining shards in my chest liquefied, soaking into the carpet. The inhuman groans leaving my body sound foreign. The agony of losing him, finding him alive and well, only to lose him all over again.
It’s too much.
Iris hauls me to my feet, and I stagger to the bed and fall into it.
I rock on my side, gripping at my arms, nails sinking into my skin. My old bedfellow grief slides in beside me.
Iris climbs in on the other side, tugging me into her embrace. She rubs a hand over my head. Her shushing noises tangle with my erratic wails. Her hands smooth my hair repeatedly, her holdon me firm. I let go in her arms. The pain of the past two weeks chokes its way out, burning me alive as it goes.
The days I truly thought Cal was dead.
The pain of thinking I would never see him again.
The air in my lungs evaporates on a cruel, searing blow.
The fear that had me terrified for days, with the threat of unthinkable things hanging between me and Timothy. The dread of realizing I was on the boat with two predators.
The fact that they both got away.
The moments I floated, suspended in time, it seemed, waiting for Emmett to find me. The millions of thoughts that he wouldn’t, and it would be too late. That I would sink to the dark depths of the ocean, another soul snuffed out and never found.
That I would never see Cal again . . .
Then him just now, leaning against the doorframe. Bare chest. Blue eyes curiously studying the woman in his sister’s bathroom.
The way simply seeing him leveled me. Like nothing else has before. Not even losing Joshua was as obliterating as loving and losing Callum McCreary.
Nothing compares.
