ALoveSoDeep (3 page)

I turn back to Gabe as Sherry pulls the van out of the driveway, staring up into his face, memorizing the slope of his cheekbones and the way his dark lashes flare around his eyes and his hair falls over his forehead. I don’t ever want to look away. I want to stand here staring until this feels real, until I know he isn’t going to disappear the moment I turn my back.

“I don’t know where to start,” I say, breath rushing out.

“It’s all right.” He brushes my tangled hair behind my ear, reminding me I must look a mess after the long flight and my nap in the van. But it doesn’t matter. The way Gabe’s looking at me leaves no doubt I’m the most beautiful thing he’s seen in ages.

“We’ll figure everything out,” he continues. “I’m just so glad you’re okay. I recovered a memory of you a couple of weeks ago that…scared me.”

My forehead wrinkles. “Recovered?”

“I had the surgery.” Gabe turns his head, lifting his thick, nearly black, hair with one hand, revealing a long, pink scar. “Since then my memories have been patchy.”

“Oh my God,” I say softly, letting my fingers brush across the puckered skin. “But you’re okay? You’re better?”

“I’m tumor free.” He drops his hand, letting his hair fall into place as he turns back to me. “But I lost most of last summer. The memories have been coming back, but it’s slow. I didn’t remember your name until January, and it’s only been in the past few months that I’ve remembered…other things.”

“Other things,” I repeat numbly, my pulse thudding unhealthily in my temple. Gabe lost most of last summer.

Lost.
That means he lost the months we fell in love, and all the memories of who we were together.

I’m already starting to panic even before Gabe says—

“I know we used to steal things, but I don’t remember why.” He glances over his shoulder toward the house before continuing in a softer voice. “And then, a few weeks ago, I had this memory of my hands at someone’s throat, and an image of you, your neck covered in bruises. After that, I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” The thud in my temples becomes a pain that digs into the back of my eyes. Surely he can’t mean…

“I was afraid I had…hurt you,” Gabe says, looking down at me with shame in his blue eyes.

Shame.

Gabe doesn’t do shame. He rarely does regret. I’ve heard Gabe say he was sorry a handful of times, but I’ve only seen him genuinely filled with regret once. It was the night we killed Pitt, but he didn’t regret the murder. He regretted the lies he’d told, and that he’d let us fall so deep in love when he knew he would be dead before the year was out.

And now he’s standing in front of me, alive, but missing pieces of what made him the man he was. The old Gabe would never have thought that he was capable of hurting me, not for a second. The old Gabe would have fought for me, killed for me, died for me. I knew it, and he knew it. It was the kind of thing that went unspoken between us, so obvious that there was no need to say the words.

Sure, the old Gabe wasn’t your conventional, upstanding citizen, but he was a man who knew himself, inside and out, and made choices based on his own marrow-deep beliefs in what was right and wrong. They weren’t the same things society calls right and wrong, but Gabe’s convictions were stronger because he had worked through the big questions and come up with his own, authentic answers. But now, he seems to have lost touch with those answers, and may have lost more than just his memories of last summer.

What if he’s lost the parts of him that made him unlike anyone I’ve ever met, the parts he was so afraid of losing, he chose to die rather than risk a surgery that might leave him profoundly changed?

The thought is so awful that, for a moment, it feels like Gabe has died all over again, only worse. Now, he is alive, but with a mind that believes he’s capable of hurting someone he loves, and a heart that could never love me the way I love him. Even if he recovers his memories, the man who made them might never return.

I take a step back, tears blurring my vision. I’m turning to run—somewhere, anywhere—when Gabe’s fingers wrap around my upper arms, holding me in place with that same tender strength I remember.

“Don’t go,” he says, voice hoarse and as pained as I feel. “I know this is hard, but you have to know how badly I want to remember. I want to remember everything about you, about
us
, but I don’t yet, no matter how hard I’ve tried.”

He pauses, tongue slipping out to dampen his lips, making me think of our kiss, and how it had felt like our old kisses. “But I remember that I loved you, and that you were the only person who ever made me feel worth a damn. And when I kissed you just now…I felt alive for the first time since I woke up with part of my brain gone and this feeling that something vital was missing.” He pins me with that look that always made me feel like he knew all my secrets. “That vital thing is
you
.”

“How can it be me?” I ask, tears filling my eyes. “You don’t even know me.”

“I know you,” he insists, with an intensity more consistent with the Gabe I knew at the end of last summer than the arrogant boy I first met. “If I were blind, I would know you. You’re the reason I’ve kept going, even when recovery threatened to kick my ass, and all I wanted to do was give up. I might have lost our past, Caitlin, but we don’t have to lose our future. We can get
us
back. I know we can.”

I stare deep into his eyes, seeing hope and that familiar Gabe passion, but something is missing, something I can’t ignore now that I’ve realized it’s not there.

“But you don’t love me,” I whisper, knowing I’ll start sobbing again if I say the words too loud.

“But I did,” he says, his grip loosening, becoming a caress as his fingers skim down my arms to capture my hands. “I remember I did.”

I pull my hands away. “Remembering you used to love someone, and loving them, isn’t the same thing.”

“Then I’ll just have to fall in love all over again,” he says, his words almost a perfect echo of what I said last summer.

As soon as I found out about the tumor, I’d begged Gabe to have the surgery, insisting that I would make him fall in love with me a second time if he came out on the other side not remembering who I was. But now I’m faced with the reality of a Gabe who doesn’t remember why we robbed people, or the rush we felt when we were dispensing our own brand of justice. This Gabe doesn’t remember the murder we committed, or the reasons he believed we had no choice but to kill the man who kidnapped me.

He doesn’t remember the way he made love to me that last night, fucking me until we were both bruised with pleasure, while promising to love me until men were fairy tales. He doesn’t remember the secrets we shared, or that he was my first, or that he saw the strength in me when no else did, or a hundred other things that are the reasons there will never be anyone in my heart but Gabe Alexander.

I don’t know how to start over with a new Gabe, when I’m still in love with the boy I knew before, but I have to try. This thing with him has never been easy, but it is the only thing worth having.

I knew that two days ago, when I broke up with Isaac before the kids and I got ready to fly to South Carolina. I told him we were going to the Big Island for a vacation with Sherry, and that he should take the ten days we were gone to move out. I knew if he learned that Chuck had died, he’d insist on coming to the funeral and I didn’t want Isaac stress on top of burying-my-father stress. And once I’d decided to break up, I couldn’t put it off. I’d finally admitted that friendship and sweet lovemaking were never going to be enough for me, and I didn’t want to settle for less for even a few more days.

I wanted passion and fire, I wanted to walk up to the edge of oblivion and stare into the chaos on the other side. I wanted Gabe, and now, miraculously, I have another shot with the man I thought I’d lost forever. I would be a weak, pathetic, coward to shy away from that, simply because our second chance is going to be difficult.

My entire life has been difficult. If I’m equipped for anything, it’s digging my heels in and getting through the hard shit.

“You’re going to say yes,” Gabe says, his lips twisting to one side the way they do when he’s getting what he wants. “I can tell. I remember this face.”

I take a breath, and a tiny flame of hope flickers back to life inside me. “What else do you remember? I want to know everything.”

“Me too,” he says. “You want to get out of here? Go someplace private where we can be alone to talk?”

I meet his eyes and I can tell he isn’t thinking about talking, but no matter how much I’d love to let Gabe whisk me away to his father’s abandoned office, or the barn in his parents’ back forty, or some lonely gravel road so far from civilization no one would hear me scream his name, I don’t want sex to come first. Our sexual connection was amazing, but I don’t want to make love to Gabe again until I know we’re both emotionally invested. Making love to him, while he simply fucked me, would break my heart.

“We can go into the backyard,” I say. “This is Veronica’s house now, so I wouldn’t feel right going inside without knocking, and I think it’s best to let her sleep as long as possible. She left a couple of messages on my phone last night while we were in the air. Sounded like she’d had a few.”

“Is she going to notice we’re walking around outside?”

“I doubt it,” I say, leading the way across the grass. “And even if she does, she’ll be cool. She’s actually a pretty decent person.”

“Better than Chuck deserved?” Gabe asks in a wry tone.

I swallow past the lump in my throat. “Maybe. I don’t know. My dad was better near the end. I sort of wish I’d made more of an effort with him.”

Gabe stops walking several feet from the picnic table under the shade tree. I turn, not liking the look on his face. “What?”

His brows draw together, reminding me that Gabe is beautiful, even when he’s frowning. “I don’t know if I should tell you on the day of your father’s wake.”

“Tell me,” I say. “If it’s about Chuck, not much could surprise me.”

Gabe studies me for a moment before he nods, evidently deciding to take me at my word. “I came here looking for you last January. Chuck answered the door.”

My features flinch, as if they can’t figure out what kind of face to make in response to the bomb Gabe’s just dropped. “Wh-what? Are you sure it was him?”

“I’m sure. I asked if he knew where you were, but he said you’d run off, and he hadn’t seen you since last summer. He said you’d left the kids alone, and he’d sent them to live with his sister in Florida not long after.”

Pain flashes through my chest as I struggle to wrap my head around this latest betrayal. How could Chuck do this? How could he keep something like
Gabe being alive
from me? How could even
he
be such a complete and utter bastard?

“I was wrong,” I say, fighting to breathe past the painful knot fisting in my chest. “I guess Chuck still has a few surprises left in him, after all.”

“Maybe he thought he was doing you a favor?” Gabe asks, pity in his eyes. “I remember he wasn’t a fan of you and me.”

I shake my head. “No, he knew how much I loved you, and how devastated I was when you died.” I shake my head again, a little harder. “When I
thought
you’d died.”

“I’m so sorry. No one should have to go through what you’ve been through.” Gabe steps closer, pulling me against him. I go willingly, wrapping my arms around his waist and pressing my face to his white polo shirt, inhaling the miraculous scent of him.

“Even thinking I might have lost you…” He takes in a breath and lets it out long and slow. “It was unthinkable. Especially knowing I might have been the one responsible.”

I lift my head, tilting my chin up until I can see his face. “But you had to know you would never hurt me.
Never
. I can’t even imagine it.”

He meets my gaze and the relief in his eyes is palpable. “I didn’t want to believe I would, but my parents said the tumor changed me. And I don’t remember why we did the things we did, the robberies and…all the rest of it. Especially the rest of it.”

I can tell by his tone he means the murder. “A man named Ned Pitt kidnapped me,” I begin softly, filling Gabe in on the events of the night Pitt lost his life and we burned his house to the ground. By the time I’m finished, Gabe doesn’t look relieved. He looks furious, merciless, the way he did when he was standing next to the mattress where we’d dumped Pitt’s body, preparing to set it on fire.

“That explains how angry I am in those memories,” Gabe says. “All I can think about is how much I want to kill whoever I’ve got my hands on. I swear I can taste blood in my mouth, but I can’t get a clear picture of the person’s face.”

“You were in a lot of pain,” I say. “You were blacking out. That’s how I found out about the tumor.”

Gabe’s eyes open wider and his lips tighten. He doesn’t say a word, but I can still read him as well as I could before.

“You didn’t remember that you didn’t tell me.” I don’t wait for Gabe to confirm my suspicion. “It’s okay. I wasn’t angry. I understood.”

He’s quiet for a moment before he says, “How could you?”

“Neither of us planned on falling in love,” I say with a shrug. “We made a promise to each other that we wouldn’t. We were only supposed to be together for the summer. Just one wild summer.”