“Em?”
She gave no indication she’d heard him, that she was aware of his presence at all, her gaze remaining locked on the debris strewn yard.
Jay didn’t know what was running through that busy head of hers, but he knew enough to proceed with caution. Leaving the option to talk up to her, he settled in silently beside her to wait.
An eternity passed before she uttered a word. “You found me.”
“I’ll always find you, Em.” He shifted to face her, but found her attention still riveted across the street. “But you can’t go disappearing like that.”
“I know.”
“You scared the crap out of me.”
“I’m sorry.”
Jay watched her profile as she took a breath and held it. The only part of her moving at all were her fingers, twisting together painfully tight between her thighs. He’d never wanted to touch her more than right then, but he restrained himself, not sure of how any touch would be received. Normally she was an open book to him, but Jay was having a difficult time getting a read on her. Whether it was his roiling emotions getting in the way, or hers, he had no idea. All he knew for sure was that words were safer than actions at the moment.
“What are you doing here?” He glanced back over the lot and could almost see the ghost of the dilapidated wreck they’d once called home. The city must have finally gotten around to tearing the old thing down. Or maybe one too many storms had come through and done the job for them.
“I wanted to remember.”
“How much worse it could be?”
“Worse . . . And better.”
“Better?”
Em shrugged. “Simpler.”
“Simpler? Were you living in the same reality as me?”
A small smile graced her lips and she huffed a tired laugh. Jay remembered when he would have considered that alone a major victory and suddenly her words made a sort of sense.
“Maybe simpler isn’t the right word, either. But things were . . . clearer. I knew exactly where we stood. It was you and me against the world, Jay. And despite those horribly bad odds, we kept coming out on top. Together. We accomplished so much together.”
He couldn’t have this conversation with her again. Not now. Not when he was so exhausted and raw. It would be all too easy for her to get him to give in. Get him to go crawling back to her, begging for forgiveness he didn’t deserve, but she would grant, regardless.
“I remember the first time I saw you.” Em glanced over at him, aware of the change of direction, but interested nonetheless. “At the train station.”
Another small smile. “You let that guy steal all of my stuff.”
“I saved your ass,” Jay corrected with a smile of his own.
“For the first time.”
They both remembered the second, and the third, and so on, but there was no need to go there.
“I knew you were special even then. Not just because you were beautiful, but you were . . . different.”
“Naïve?”
“No. Well, yeah, maybe a little, but that wasn’t it. I looked at you and I . . . I swear I saw a piece of myself. A piece I’d been missing. I can’t explain it any better than that. But you know when I knew for sure that I was a goner? That I’d never look at you the same?” Em quirked her head and he shifted his gaze back to the vacant lot. “It was the fourth or fifth day you were staying with me. I came back from doing who the hell knows what, and I looked up at the squat, and there you were, sitting in the window like you were just waiting for me to come home. I’d never had someone waiting for me to come home before. Not ever. That’s when I realized that is what you’d made this place. You’d taken this dank, dilapidated hole in the wall unfit for human occupancy and turned it into a home. My home. Simply because you were there.”
Em’s smile turned sad and she closed her eyes. “I was waiting for you. I was always waiting for you. The only time I ever felt safe was when you were near. That hasn’t changed. Any of it. I’ll always wait for you, Jay.”
Jay’s hand folded gently over hers and squeezed. “And I’ll always come home. When I know you’re safe.”
His attention was drawn to her lips as she nibbled on it nervously, but he decided to let whatever was going through that head of hers go . . . for now. They lapsed into silence as the sun kissed the horizon. A muted rainbow lit up the sky in pinks and oranges, in stark contrast to the muddy, slushy earth below. A strange combination of ugly and beautiful unfolding before them.
Em obviously wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up, but something had happened today—something that had brought her there—and she needed to get it off her chest. If he let her keep it bottled up inside it would only erupt with time. He had to get her to—