Come to Me Softly (Closer to You #2)(79)
Author: A.L. Jackson

My mother was never supposed to be here.

In this place that was ours.

It was supposed to be for her.

Aleena.

Aly gasped. Wounded cries broke free. “Jared . . . don’t.” Fear saturated her tone.

I dropped the wood to the ground. Panting, I watched horror take her over. The girl I loved stared back at me as if she didn’t recognize who I was at all.

But this was the darkness. The part of me she was always trying to coax out into the light.

The part of me I hated with everything. The part that I would never escape no matter how badly I wanted to.

Because there was no peace.

Aly backed away. Wetness soaked her face. Pain twisted her expression into heartbreak.

“Aly,” I whispered, wishing there was some way to take it back, to bury it all back inside where it belonged. Hidden from her.

She set her hand protectively across her belly. She choked over the words, all this hurt pouring from her. “Is this how you want to live our lives? You putting holes through walls when I say something you don’t want to hear?” She took another two steps back. The corner of her mouth trembled. “Tearing our house apart because it hurts?” Aly bit back a sob. “I refuse to live my life like this, Jared, refuse to raise our baby this way.”

Hurt lanced through my nerves, splaying me wide. That place I always kept hidden magnified, the void bloated with the truth of who I really was.

I wanted to be better.

“I will love you forever, Jared. Nothing could ever touch that . . . and no one could ever touch me the way you have.” Pain tripped her voice. “But this?”

Hopeless, she looked around the room that I had just ruined.

Sabotaged.

Because I didn’t know anything else.

I would always be the same.

The wicked tainting the pure.

“Look at this place. At what you built. At what you created. Look at how beautiful it is.” She stumbled over the emphasis. “And look how easily you destroyed it.”

I destroy everything I touch.

I stepped toward her, wishing I could go back to this afternoon when I was kissing her and she was kissing me, when we were free. “Aly—”

An injured cry erupted from her throat and she held her hand up to stop me.

It stopped me short, left me standing in the middle of the war zone I’d created in our home, in the middle of the chaos that was ripped from the walls and scattered across the floor.

The chaos that raged through my heart and mind.

Because I knew we hadn’t been free. We’d never been.

I’d felt it building for weeks . . . building since the moment I came back, really.

My mother’s face flashed.

It’ll be okay.

And I knew it’d never be.

Aly’s eyes slammed shut, as if she couldn’t look at me. Fucking broken. “Please, go. If this is the way you want to live, then I need you to go.”

Swallowing, I dropped my head. Crushing pain seared through me. Slowly I approached her and set my hand on her face. My thumb brushed away her hot tears, and I kissed her cheek, feeling something die inside of me.

Because I loved her. I once believed it impossible.

But there was no denying it was real.

Just like there was no denying I would never be good enough for her.

Turns out Dickhead was right.

“I love you, sweet girl,” I murmured at her ear. Pulling back, I looked on her with the saddest smile, crushed by the torment staring back at me, torment begging me to stay, to be different from the person I was always gonna be.

Then I turned and walked out into the night.

TWENTY-ONE

Aleena

Softly, the door clicked shut behind him, a complete contradiction to the violence that had claimed him minutes before.

Silence swallowed the room, a deafening stillness that screamed of all my fears.

Excruciating pain bore down on my chest. Squeezing. Suffocating. I couldn’t breathe.

I pressed my hand over my heart, as if it could somehow hold it together.

But my knees went weak and I buckled.

Body and soul.

I backed into the wall to catch myself from falling. Clutching my stomach with one hand, I pressed the other over my mouth and tried to hold myself up in this world that had finally beaten us down.

Jared.

Outside, his bike rumbled to life, roared to a thunder as he took it to the street.

Regret and anger and loss spiraled through me.

What did I do?

What did he do?

Oh my God.

It hurt. God, it hurt, and I wanted to take it back. I wanted to chase him and beg him not to leave even when I knew voicing it would be the biggest mistake I’d ever made.

Worse than the one I made when I cornered him, shoving the past he’d been running from in front his face without any warning.

Guilt throbbed deep, tangling with the overwhelming fear that I might truly lose this man.

I’d wanted him to know I searched for and found his father because I loved him, not because I wanted to hurt him. I wanted him to know I looked and pried because he deserved to get back that piece of his life that was stolen from him that fateful day.

But I should have done it all differently. Handled it with the care he deserved. Gave heed to this fragile situation that I knew could so easily crack and shatter into a million pieces.

Despair clogged my throat as I looked around the room.

Shattered.

All of it.

This gorgeous house that had been created by his hand brought down by the same.

This heart that loved him through every frantic beat.

The faith he’d had in me.

But what else could I do?

I’d been backed into my own corner.

Because it was true. I couldn’t live this way. Waiting for the next explosion to be set off.

After what happened tonight with Gabe, I’d sat alone in our room, fisting the scrap of paper in my hand, coming to terms with what I had to do.

I knew I had to give it to him.

It was time. I couldn’t keep ignoring the way he suffered. Night after night, I watched Jared splintering, frantic and lost when he’d wake me from sleep. Like he was begging me for help but didn’t know how to ask for it.

Finding his family was the only way I knew how to help him.

The address wasn’t given as a manipulation, not as a way to coerce this man who I knew loved me with all of his tortured life into doing what I wanted. All I’d ever wanted was for him to heal, for him to find a way to forgive himself for what he’d done, for him to finally come to terms with the mistake that had stolen so many years of his life.

The same mistake still robbing him of his freedom now.