I hated my life was a trap.
He shifted so he could press his mouth to the crown of my head.
“I missed you.” He issued the words for the first time.
They flooded through my bloodstream like liquid.
Molten warmth.
Profound and sad and the bitter, ugly truth.
I curled in closer, and I whispered my lips across his ribs. “I missed you, too. So much.”
And after this, I was only going to miss him more.
His arm tightened farther, and he pulled me so close I was almost draped across his chest. I could see the torment carved in the lines of his face when I peeked that direction.
“Tell me what it’s been like.” His brow twisted when he asked it.
I winced. “You don’t want to go there.”
“Maybe that is exactly where we should go, Aster. Maybe it’s time.”
“And what if it hurts too much?”
What if it destroyed us? What if it sent Logan to a place he could never come back from?
He pulled my leg over his waist. Every muscle in his body twitched. Bristling with strength. Flexing with greed.
He reached out and threaded his fingers through my hair, and he tipped my chin back with his thumb. “And what if we can’t move on until we do?”
I hesitated for a moment, looking at this man who watched me as if it didn’t matter what’d happened.
A promise that he’d hold it.
The grief and the pain.
I thought maybe he was wondering if it were possible I could hold his, too.
“Do you want to know what it was like, Logan?”
It was torment.
It was sickness.
It was chains.
It was floating through a vast nothingness that had no end.
But I could boil it down to one thing.
“It was lonely. It was living through an emptiness so deep and dark. A hollow vacancy that went on forever.”
A sound of commiseration puffed from his nose as he held the side of my face. “Meaningless.”
I dipped my head in a slight nod.
Malachite eyes roamed my face, though in the darkness, they’d come alive, the gold incandescent.