He covered her hand with his and brought her palm to his lips. After pressing a kiss there, he laced their fingers together, but there was no stopping his confession.
“I swear, hearing Jackson’s tortured voice was all it took for me to snap, and some dark part of me that I had no idea was even there took over. Looking back, I know that was the moment the good in me ceased to exist. He told me my father was dead, and I remember falling to my knees, a torturous scream tearing from my lungs. I literally felt like my heart had been torn from my chest. Rage consumed me. I’m not an aggressive person, or at least I never had been, but I was literally blinded by anger. I don’t remember anything after that. Eventually Jackson and Heath were there with me. They dragged me into their arms, and we cried. We just fucking cried.”
He wrapped his arms around Cici, knowing he owed her more but unable to speak.
A few long minutes later she rose and kissed his lips. “I wish I could have been there to help you through it.”
Hearing the tenderness in her voice, feeling her loving touch, after the way he’d hurt her, made him feel angry and unworthy. That had been a constant battle, and he knew he had to get that out, too, before it bored a hole right through him.
“There’s a reason I didn’t come for you. You can handle anything, Ceese. But you didn’t need to handle a man who was such a mess.” He caressed her cheek. “I would have destroyed your spirit. Destroyed us.”
“You wouldn’t have,” she insisted.
“You have no idea. I was a mess. A fucking crazy mess, and I loved you too much to take you down with me. That drove me further into despair. I hated myself, Ceese. Hated myself for the anger that ate away at me, for being impotent when my parents needed me—”
“That wasn’t your fault!”
He sat up at the vehemence in her tone and the twisting in his gut. She sat up beside him, holding the sheet over her chest.
“Cooper, please tell me you know that what happened to your parents wasn’t your fault.” Her eyes were damp, her brows knitted tightly together, and her soul was right there with him, bared for him to see.
She’d always been that way. She saw the good in him, and damn it, he wanted to be that man one hundred and ten percent for her. But she needed to hear the painful truth—all of it.
He inhaled a ragged breath and blew it out slowly, nodding more to himself than to her, and finally, he took her hand in his.
“There’s this thing that happens when you lose someone to a violent death. At least for me, there was. I knew I couldn’t have been forewarned or known about the attack, but the guilt still clung to me. And the hatred. The hatred I felt toward the man who did it? That hatred was thick as tar and evil as sin. It consumed me. Even after Logan tracked down the guy who did it and killed him while the asshole was attacking another woman, I still carried the rage. Cici, the only way I got past that rage was to disassociate from it. From everything. This isn’t easy for me to admit, and now that I’m at this point in my confession, I’m thinking that maybe we should dress, because you might send me away for what else I have to say.”
She took his hand between hers and held on tight. “I don’t want to move until I’ve heard it all, but did you…?” Her eyes filled with sadness. “Did you hurt someone?”
He shook his head, and she breathed a sigh of relief.
“Only myself and the person who matters most.” His next words brought more tightening to his gut. “You.”
CICI FROZE AT his words. She hated knowing that, after all he’d gone through, their relationship had caused him any pain at all. At that time in her life she’d been standing on a razor’s edge. Losing Cooper might not have been the same as his losing his father, but the pain she’d experienced had cut just as deep. She knew she couldn’t minimize her pain just because his was deeper. She owed it to Melody—and herself—to be as honest as he was being with her. And, man, did she respect him, and love him, even more for his honesty.
“You did hurt me,” she admitted. “A lot. But I’m not going to send you away. Regardless of what you tell me, I do wish I had been there for you. We could have dealt with this together, found our way out of the darkness.”
He shook his head, and his stare turned dark and insistent. “No. I had nothing to give you. I would have driven you away. Hell, Ceese, I drove myself away. So fucking far away that it took me years to come back.”
She could barely breathe. She tried to imagine what it would be like if something happened to Melody, and just the thought of it made her tremble. She felt like she was right there with him, standing in a dark cave, angry and helpless. But she still needed to understand what had happened during those years, even if it tore apart their chance at a future. Their past was like an open wound, and she needed closure in order to fully heal. She had the sense that he did, too.