“I was wrong!” I scream. “I don’t want to hear about you with her. I don’t want to hear this! I don’t want to hear how you fell in love with someone else! I can’t hear that!”
“It’s been almost three years, Beth! Our daughter is two years old! What did you expect from me?”
“I don’t know!” I scream again, so loud that the frogs that had been croaking in the hot Kentucky air go silent. “I don’t know,” I cry out, quieter this time, but so much more broken. “Not once in that time did I ever look at another man. You were it for me. You were… it,” I cry at the unfairness of it all.
“I thought you were dead! You knew I was out there! You can’t be mad because you started this whole series of events! Christo! You think I don’t hate myself, Beth? You think that I don’t despise myself for ever touching Teena when you were out there somewhere? She isn’t a bad woman. She tried to bring me comfort even knowing I was in love with another woman. And yet after one phone call, I push her away and set about trying to find you… even while hating you, even while wishing you had fucking stayed dead!” he yells, and what was left of my heart breaks with those words.
There’s nothing left to say… That says it all.
The words leave before I can stop them. I see her visibly jerk with them. See the exact moment they cut her open, just like they were meant to. The monster is loose. He got to strike out, except it doesn’t bring satisfaction. Seeing her tears, feeling the pain between us, it doesn’t help the scars from the past; it’s just making new ones. What the fuck am I doing?
“You need to let me go, Skull. When we get back to the club, just let me go. Put me and Gabby in one of your safe houses until you find Colin. I don’t care, just please set me free.”
“I can’t. Don’t you even get it, Beth? I can’t release you even if I wanted to. You’re in my blood, buried in the fucking bones of me. Jesus, cutting out my heart would be easier than releasing you.”
“You have Teena…”
“I have no one! I don’t want anyone. Mierda!” I growl.
“Then what do you want, Skull?”
“To go back. Go back to the night we pledged our love to each other. The night I was sure I had slipped inside of you as deep as you are rooted in me. The night I thought I got through to you…”
She looks up at me, her tears still flowing down her cheeks unchecked.
“I lie in bed and think of that night. I want that too, Skull. I do. I want to go back and never have to make the decision I made. I tried every way I could not to. I didn’t have a choice, Skull. If I hadn’t gone with him, he would have killed Katie. He wouldn’t have stopped. I had already cost your club so much. Poor Beast… I couldn’t risk more happening. I couldn’t let my sister die. But, if it had just been me, Skull… If it had just been the two of us, I would have taken my last breath never leaving your side. Even if that breath was just a moment more, I would have chosen you. You have to know that,” she whispers sadly.
If it was just the two of us.
“It’s just us here, now.”
“But there’s more involved when we leave here.”
“Torch would die before he let anything happen to your sister, and Gabby can only be happier if the two of us are together.”
“There’s more involved now,” I repeated. “There’s your club. I have nightmares about what happened with Jan and that sweet baby… and Beast… That’s all my fault…”
I walk to her now and cup the side of her face. “Mi cielo, no one is responsible for that except the Donahues and Jan. You did not have any control with her stealing the keys from Bull. You could not control the actions of your father or any of the other culos in that family.”
Her hand trembles as it comes up and lies over mine. She squeezes gently as my thumb absently brushes the silent tears still falling from her face.
“Skull, it’s not that simple. There are other things… There’s…”
I instinctively know what she’s going to say, and I don’t want those words to pass her lips or even exist in her head.
“I didn’t love her, Beth. She knew that, and she knows it even more now. Since the moment I found out you were alive, I haven’t touched another woman.”
“You don’t have to tell me that, Skull, I don’t have a right to know who has been in your bed since I left. I knew that when I gave birth to Gabby, me staying away didn’t have to do with that.”
“Then why the fuck didn’t you come back to me, Beth?” I ask, forgetting to tread lightly.