Summer's Desire (21 page)

In his embrace, my body has turned rigid
with dismay. For there are two things in this world in which I ever believed:
my parents' love for me and, once upon a time,
Seth's
love. Coming to
doubt Seth's love, after our separation—it made me doubt everything I knew
about my world.

And now I understand that he, too, experienced
something awfully similar because of me.

He gruffly continues, "That you
could dismiss our past together so easily when we met again—it crushed me twice-over.
I was furious and disappointed, and that's why I acted like I did." Then,
with a wry grimace: "Not that I ever stood a chance of being able to keep
my distance from you."

"Truly?" I'm lapping his words
up, allowing them to dissolve the last little knots of misery inside me.

"Sunny, from the first moment I saw
you again, I've been fighting against myself, trying to stay away from you. But
it was a losing battle from the start—because I didn't really want to stay away
from you."

"You wanted me back?"

"Of course. But because I thought
I
was the one wronged by you, I tried to hold on to my anger long enough for
you
to come to me." He smiles self-deprecatingly. "I'm an arrogant ass, I
know."

I grin at him and tease, "So you
were waiting for me to come to you and what—beg for your forgiveness with
abject remorse? At which point honor would have been satisfied and you would have
given me absolution?"

His mouth twists into an apologetic, but
oh-so-delicious grin. "Something like that." He shakes his head and
adds, "I don't know, Sunny. A plain 'I'm sorry, Seth' from you would've
probably done the job too. But I was getting damn close to just saying, 'To
hell with who's to blame', and coming after you myself." Then some dark
thought crosses his mind, for his face turns somber again. "Forgive me for
the hurt I caused you five years ago. And also these last few days. I didn't know,
Sunny."

My heart throbs with sympathy and
tenderness. "There's nothing to forgive, Seth. What happened in the past
wasn't your fault, and in the last two weeks you were just acting in self-preservation,
I think.
That
, unfortunately, is something I know all about. But you
were still there for me when I needed you most." My skin crawls at the
memory of Josh's attack.

"I should've never trusted Jessica that
she'd give me your letters. That fucking bitch!"

I shake my head. "You had no reason
to suspect how utterly rotten that girl is. I doubt that she's ever been
anything other than sweetness and light around you. But good heavens, Seth,
it's because of her that we've been apart all these years!" My eyes are stinging
with the effort of holding back renewed tears. "If I hadn't come back to
Rockford, we would've never learned the truth about the past. We would have
been lost to each other forever!" The idea is much too horrific to even
contemplate.

His expression, too, darkens
forbiddingly at the thought, and his jaw is clenched so hard it seems carved
out of granite. I start to move my hand in a soothing motion on his chest, and
his body seems to relax slightly.

Therefore his next words, spoken with calm
solemnity, take me aback: "For what Jessica Anderson did to us but most of
all for the hurt she made
you
suffer, thinking I'd abandoned you... I
could tear that soulless bitch limb from limb, then see her burn in hell while
she's still begging for breath."

I shudder at the gruesome image he's
painted. But I don't pause in gently stroking his chest.

He cocks his head slightly to the side,
regarding me. "Sunny, how did you even find out that she had our letters?"

"Oh, well, Jessica's made it her
favorite pastime to abuse me verbally." My voice is matter-of-fact, but his
muscles tense again, his gaze turns a deeper blue with rage. I hesitate before
continuing. "Tonight she came into my room before leaving for the party,
to brag about her plans for you. She-had-a-drug-she-planned-to-slip-you-to-get-you-to-have-sex-with-her."
My words come out all garbled, but by the incredulous look entering his eyes, I
see he's understood me.

"So that's why she was after me all
night, trying to force booze on me? I thought she just wanted to get me drunk
enough to—" He breaks off with a wary glance at me.

"So you didn't take anything from
her?"

Seth shakes his head. "No, I don't
take drinks from other people. Besides, I was driving tonight, and even if I
hadn't been, I rarely drink anything stronger than beer these days. I had a rough
time when I was fourt— a few years ago, swilling way too much. But I didn't
like the loss of control. Then I also had football to consider, so eventually I
stopped drinking." His gaze sharpens on me again. "But you were
telling me about the letters."

I recount how Jessica called me
Sunny
even though there was no way that she should've known that name. How I kept
obsessing about my having written that name in my letters to him and how I started
to ponder some things that he had told me which didn't seem to fit. "In
the end, I decided to just go and search among her things. Yet still I could
barely believe my eyes when I found
my
letters hidden at the back of her
closet."

He furrows his brow. "It's weird,
actually, that she didn't destroy the evidence of what she'd done."

"I also wondered about that, but maybe
she kept the letters as a trophy of sorts? Maybe took them out occasionally to
gloat? Because she totally seems the kind who would do that." I grin
ironically. "To have Jessica's own callous arrogance come back to bite her
in the butt seems like poetic justice, doesn't it?"

Seth's frown hasn't lessened. "I hate
the idea that our finding out the truth about the past depended on something fickle
like
luck or coincidence."

But was it really coincidence? My
arrival in Rockford, at least. Thinking back to my last conversation with Ms.
Walker, I have serious doubts.

Besides—"Look, Seth, I agree that
everything that happened to bring us back together seems unlikely. But I've
decided that it wasn't, in fact, coincidence, but providence instead." I
smile at him playfully. "We were fated to meet again."

But he's in no mood to play because—"We
still damn well almost wasted the opportunity!" he bursts out. "What
fools we've been, spending two whole weeks skipping around our issues instead
of just talking openly to each other!"

He's right; we should have been honest
with each other from the start.

But then again, how do you find the
strength to be honest, to completely open up your heart to someone who's hurt
you before, when you know that they hold the power to hurt you more still? Maybe
this time even, to break you beyond redemption?

And there was also a much easier way how
we could have spared ourselves these two weeks of being at cross-purposes with
each other. I tell Seth about Greg, how he made me believe that Grandma's house
had been sold only four years ago. "—which meant that you would have still
been there when all my letters were delivered."

Seth looks incredulous. "Greg
Anderson told you that?"

"I don't think he mislead me
intentionally; in fact, he warned me that he was bad at remembering dates."
I sigh. "Either way, I'll gladly forgive him this one mistake in thanks for
the good turn he did me by bringing me back to Rockford." Now I can finally
understand Jessica's horrified reaction when Greg introduced me as their
family's new foster kid; truly, one could almost be tempted to believe that there
was such a thing as divine justice.
You reap what you soweth
, and all
that.

"Anyway," I tell Seth, "once
I learned the truth about the letters, I had to come see you immediately."

He starts to scowl at me. "You
shouldn't have put yourself at risk the way you did, coming here at
night." Then, in a really intimidating tone: "Don't ever do anything
so dangerous again!"

"Okay, captain!" I salute with
a grin. Clearly, I don't feel intimidated at all. In fact, I feel very warm at
the thought that he's angry because I put myself in danger. He wouldn't react
this way if he didn't care about me.

Still smiling, I move my head forward, burying
my face in his chest, and inhale again his clean fragrance that I've missed so
much. I feel so loose and relaxed leaning against Seth, his steely thighs
beneath me, his powerful arms around me. My eyes are heavy with tiredness. It's
been such a long day, and one that's put me through the emotional wringer over
and over again.

"Sunny?" He sounds hesitant.

"Hmm?"

"Your letters... I noticed the
envelopes were marked with different sending addresses."

A soul-deep sigh escapes me. "Five.
Five different addresses that first year."

"How many in all five years?" His
voice pulses with dark ripples of feeling.

"Besides the Andersons'?" I hesitate.
Then: "Seventeen. Plus a few group homes in between."

He gently raises my head from his chest,
and I open my eyes to him.

"Why so many?" he asks hoarsely.

I glance away, biting my lip. "Because
of my nightmares. They..." My voice falters to a halt; it's so difficult
for me to admit this. It only shows how thin the fabric of my sanity really is.

But he deserves nothing less than
complete honesty from me.

Gathering the cowering threads of my
courage, I meet his turbulent eyes again. "The old nightmares... they've
never gone away. In truth, they've been getting worse over—" His body convulses
around me on a powerful shudder. His eyelids squeeze shut and his face, empty
of color, is frozen in an expression of horror. And guilt?

"Seth...? What's wrong?" I
haven't even started telling him the worst. Was I too blunt, though? "I'm
sorry I—"

"Don't say you're sorry!" he
interrupts harshly, and his eyelids lift to reveal an awful kind of bleakness
in his eyes. "Only I should tell you that. You sent me those letters,
Sunny! You kept your part of the deal. I didn't!"

"Seth, you can't blame yourself for
Je—"

"Damn well I can blame myself—because
I failed you
, Sunny! I failed you, but you were the one made to pay the
price!"

"I think we both paid the price,"
I contradict gently.

"But you were the one left to deal
with your night terrors! Alone, all these years!"

"And I dealt with them. I
survived." Maybe not with all of my sanity intact, but I survived.

"You shouldn't have to face those
nightmares alone. I should've been there for you," he grits out in stark
self-reproach. "And you shouldn't have to just
survive
, Sunny! You
deserve so much more out of life." Then, very grimly: "Five years
ago, I convinced myself that you gave me up because you'd probably found a
better life away from me. A life where there was no room left for me—no room
for any nightmares."

Oh. Dear. God! A better life
without
him?
How
could he believe that? How much did he hurt himself, believing it? And such a
foolish thought too; there can never exist a "better" life for me if
it's a life from which
he
is missing.

But did he also say...
No room for
any nightmares?
I have a flash-back to a weird comment he made yesterday,
and I understand at last. "Then yesterday..." I lick my suddenly dry
lips. "That's what you meant, yesterday, when you seemed so certain that I'd
stopped having nightmares. You thought..."

His mouth is bracketed with white lines
of tension. "I thought after you left Rockford you discovered the
nightmares were gone for good. After all, the last time you'd had one, you were
only seven."

"When you were living with your
Mom," I remind him. "The nightmares returned that time because you
weren't sleeping by my side anymore. You know that!"

The two of us learned very early on that
I never got the night terrors when I slept with Seth, but that I always,
without exception, had them when I wasn't with him. We never talked about this,
just accepted the situation for what it was and worked around it.

After the summer camp episode—except for
that time when Seth's Mom took him away—he and I made sure, by mutual tacit
agreement, to never spend another night apart. This was truly no hardship, for
the place where each of us desired most to rest was in each other's arms. We had
become so intertwined, so much a part of each other, that we
both
needed
that closeness in order to feel at peace. He once confessed that, without me by
his side, his sleep had been restless and erratic as well.

But we never once discussed my
nightmares openly.

Still, he knew that it was only him that
could help me keep my night terrors at bay. Not distance from the place where
it all started, not the passage of time, not the psychologists who tried to fix
me—not anything or anyone else. Only him.

And if he believed that
before
our separation, then—"Seth, why did you really think that I was cured of
my nightmares after I felt Rockford?"