I thought I deserved it. Sometimes I still do. I stayed in the cottage and treated myself like I was a prisoner of all the bad shit I did in my past, and told myself that one day I’d be able to move on and have a life again, but first I had to pay the price. I had to feel some of the pain I caused.
But my pain didn’t bring Cait back and it never seemed like enough. Not for Orin and not for me.
“I’m sorry,” he says, stroking my hair. “I’m sorry I put you in here. I’m sorry I got angry about you seeing my mother. Fuck, Tara, I’m sorry my father did that to you.”
“We can’t change any of it now.” I blink at him, vision blurry with tears.
He kisses me gently. “Nobody will ever hurt you again.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can and I do. I swear, Tara. Nobody will ever hurt you like that. No matter what.”
“Not even you?”
He grimaces as if struck, but instead of pulling away like I expected, he takes a fistful of my hair and tilts my chin up to stare into his eyes.
“Even me.”
He buries his lips against mine and I kiss him back with the full force of my want and need, and something breaks inside of me, some barrier that’d been erected over years and years of pain and sadness, some terrible wall I kept wrapped around my heart, and I melt against him.