He cleared his throat and sat up, looking straight ahead at the person who’d interrupted his starlit silence. Several feet away, she leaned her elbows against the stainless steel railing that ran around the perimeter of the space, her knees pressed against the Plexiglas that separated the railing from the floor, her face, in profile, turned upward as she gazed up at the sky.
She was about five foot four inches tall and slim, dressed in jeans and a black jacket, with some sort of fur scarf around her neck.
As Erik stared at her wordlessly, his lips parted slowly, and his heart sped up, faster and faster, as it always did when he saw a woman with that hair color. It wasn’t quite blonde in the moonlight. From where he sat, whether it was a trick of the firelight or real, her hair appeared to be strawberry blonde. Held low against her neck with a simple band, it was straight and long, just like . . . just like . . .
Sitting up straight, Erik didn’t feel the blanket fall from his chest, pooling in his lap as he traced the lines of her face in profile, tiny puzzle pieces he’d fiercely longed for finally taking their place before him—the slope of her nose, the pursed bow of her lips, the swanlike grace of her long neck.
“Jesus. It can’t be . . .,” he murmured breathlessly, rubbing frantically at his eyes. It was only because he was here, where her ghost was everywhere, where he’d been so happy with her. It was a trick. It wasn’t real.
But his whispered words, only in competition with the light snap and crackle of the fire pit, had carried in the quiet darkness, and when he dropped his fingers to his lap and focused, he found she wasn’t a trick of light.
She was real.
Laire Cornish was facing him.
“Holy shit,” he murmured, his chest rising and falling so quickly, he was becoming light-headed. Was this a hallucination? A fucking joke? Without his permission, his feet had planted themselves firmly on the floor, and he was rising, standing, bound by a mutual searing, disbelieving gaze to the woman not ten feet away from him. “Laire?”
Under her puffy little ski jacket, her chest rose and fell as fast as his, and her eyes—her beautiful, beloved, sea-green eyes—stared back at him, wide and shocked, as she nodded her head.
“What the fu—what are . . ...?” he asked, his words barely audible in his ears over the fierce thumping of his heart. He forced his hands, which were sweating and shaking, to land and stay on his hips as he choked out, “Are you . . . are you, um, stayin’ here?”
“Y-yeah,” she whispered, wincing as she gasped, then sobbed, two mammoth tears slipping down her cheeks like jewels in the moonlight. “E-Erik?”
One gloved hand darted to the railing like she was having trouble standing up, and Erik lurched from the couch to her side, taking her free elbow with a firm hand.
“Breathe,” he commanded.
Looking up at him with green, glistening eyes, she sucked in a long, deep breath, filling her chest, which lifted her breasts again.
“Let it go,” he said, holding her eyes with his.
Her body relaxed in increments as she released the air, ignoring the stream of gray steam that disappeared over their heads.
“Do it again.”
She nodded and breathed deeply again, and he could feel her strength returning. As she filled her lungs, she pulled her elbow away from his grasp and took a step back. Despite the distance she imposed between them, she never looked away, her eyes incomprehensible, storming with too many emotions and not enough light for Erik to decipher their meaning.
“Do you want to sit down?” he asked.
“No,” she whispered, crossing her arms over her chest.
Wondering if his proximity was actually doing more harm than good, he backed away from her as he would a frightened animal. Once there was a good three feet of space between them, he dropped her eyes for a moment, running his hand through his hair as he tried to collect himself.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” he said softly. When he looked back up, his hand remained curled around the back of his neck. He needed to hold on to something.
“I know,” she said.
His eyes narrowed at her response. “You never wanted to see me again.”
Because her lips were still parted, he could see her clench her teeth, flexing her jaw and flinching at his words. Finally, she murmured. “No.”
His heart clutched with pain at the stark, simple word.
You never wanted to see me again.
It occurred to him that this was his long-awaited chance to ask her why. Why didn’t you ever want to see me again? But fuck if a lump the size of the ocean hadn’t risen there, making it impossible for him to speak. And his eyes, focused on hers, burned from the prick of tears, making him blink rapidly before looking away from her, out at the Pamlico Sound, which had conveyed them, time and again, to one another.
He cleared his throat, trading pain for anger. “Well, too bad for you, then, because here I am.”
A small sobbing noise made him whip his head back to face her, his eyes drawn inexorably to hers, where he found such fathoms of grief, it made the muscles of his face flinch as his heart skipped a beat. His anger took a hike. He knew that look. He’d felt it every day for the six long years he’d been apart from her.