Page 37 of When Sky Breaks
“Trying to make amends.” However, it’s not just Chase’s grave I’m visiting, but that’s a conversation for another day.
“You visit Chase?” Her question is strangled, much like my emotions as I roam over her face.
I glance away before I crumble at her feet. “Whenever I can, yes.”
Her body language shifts, and blistering tension flows from her to me. The air hums with an awareness as if the dead are watching and waiting at the veil. I ache to hold her, to comfort her, to tell her I’m sorry. Time hasn’t dulled my feelings. Not at all.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she mumbles and breaks our stare, heading for the cemetery gate.
My heart lurches. I can’t let her go.
“Wait!”
She stops, facing away, her head down. I hate that I did this to her, made her go back into her shell.
“Let’s go somewhere and talk. Please.” The plea isn’t pretty—it’s desperate. But I can’t let her go. Not yet.
She turns and lowers her lashes at the neatly trimmed grass at our feet. I don’t know if she’ll run, but now that we’re both in the same place, we can’t go on existing like this. Like we weren’t two people who loved each other down to the marrow of our bones.
“I have a house. I mean, I built a house. We can talk there. Dinner, I can make you dinner. Tomorrow night,” I stutter out.
Another minute passes, and the deafening silence nudges into me like the sharp end of a hook. I won’t force her to talk to me. After all, this is my doing. She doesn’t owe me a damn thing.
Sky lifts her head and surprises me with a stiff nod. “Okay. But no dinner. Coffee only. At the new place that just opened up.”
Relief, however brief, flutters through my chest as she stares for a second more before spinning and leaving me stunned in the isolated cemetery.
* * *
“Ben, I don’t know what the fuck to do.” I pace the wooden floors of my house, clutching the phone tightly.
“Uh, about what?”
“Sky. She’s, she’s back.”
“Hmmm. Yeah?” He sounds weird.
“She’s here for Foster. Everyone knows he’s sick.” I pause my pacing and look out the window into the backyard before resuming my neurotic steps around the square footage of my small ranch.
“Okay. And…” Benny says, irked.
“I was leaving flowers at Chase’s grave and she just shows up! I don’t know how long she plans on staying or how much time I have. Ugh, what the fuck do I do?” Panic laces my rising voice. My scalp aches as I slice my fingers through my hair.
“Okay, for one, chill out before you have a heart attack. Two, what the hell do you mean, what do you do? Talk to her.” Says the man who settled down a year after high school and hasn’t had to deal with this twitchy feeling in his chest over a woman.
“We’re meeting at the Coffee Haven tomorrow.”
“So, she found you?” He sounds amused.
“Yeah, why?”
“Oh, no reason.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
He sighs and my senses go on high alert. “Spit it out, Ben.”
“I may have run into her at the hardware store.”