Part 32 (2/2)
He didn't hear her. All of this, like a volcano, had clearly lain dormant for years.
”I would have given you the moon. And I could have, too, Olivia. I asked for your faith that night. And you returned it with scorn. Because. You were. Afraid.”
It was unbearable.
”Lyon . . . Please . . . you must understand . . .”
”I believed you saw something fatal and irredeemable in me, and I quite simply couldn't bear it, Olivia. Now I know that you were just a coward. It really wasn't more complicated than that.”
The silence was ghastly. It was filled with the roar of their breathing. As if they were grappling gladiators who had finally sprung apart.
Her hands went up to her face and her lungs felt like a furnace as she drew in a ragged hot breath.
The fact was that he was right. Everyone was right about her.
All the rumors and legends were right.
She had broken his heart.
And in so doing, she had willfully, perhaps permanently, broken her own.
And everyone else's who loved him.
All because she'd been too afraid to fight for him.
Chapter 18.
”LYON . . . YOU HAVE TO understand . . . I never dreamed you would leave,” she said brokenly. ”I didn't mean for you to leave. You shouldn't have gone. You shouldn't have gone. You shouldn't have actually gone.”
Her voice spiraled in anguish, the anguish she'd never shown anyone, let alone herself, lest it rip her to shreds.
She dropped to her knees and covered her face with her hands.
She drew in a hot, ragged breath. And then another.
And the sob that clawed its way out might as well have been a shard of her own heart.
One ugly, wracking sob followed another.
Old tears. Too long held back.
She had never, never wept for him since he left.
After a moment she could feel him drop to his knees next to her.
”Oh, for heaven's sake. My girl. My sweet girl. For heaven's sake. Don't cry. Please don't cry. I didn't mean to make you cry.”
He said it so softly, almost panicky. He was flailing.
It was almost funny.
No one else called her that. No else had ever thought she was sweet.
No one knew how tender she really was.
No one else had ever been able to really hurt her.
No one else could save her from herself.
And all of this made her throw herself backward on the sand, fling one arm across her eyes, and weep with abandon.
He said nothing.
Perhaps she'd appalled him speechless.
She lay there on the sand, and she didn't care that her hair would be full of it, or the back of her dress would likely be ruined, or that her dignity was in shreds, and she wept as though it were the end of the world. As though she'd just lost him all over again.
At some point gentle hands tenderly scooped up her head.
She submitted as he thrust a folded coat beneath her as a pillow.
The coat smelled just like him. And just like everything about him, it comforted and stirred.
She heaved a great ragged sigh and sank back into it.
The sobs seemed to be done with her.
She finally peeled her arm away from her eyes.
And blinked, surprised.
It was full dark. Somehow the entire night seemed cleansed. The stars had an almost stinging brilliance.
She felt peaceful and empty and borderless. She might as well have been sand or sky.
Which was how she knew heartbreak had comprised nearly the whole of her for so long.
Now that she'd released it, she didn't know who she might be.
She lay still in the emptiness.
She let her head loll to the side. There Lyon was, mostly in shadow now, his arms wrapped loosely around his knees, staring out at the water, his profile etched in shadow.
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