Sugar trotted over to us, staring for a minute before climbing up Bowen’s body like a billy goat. He circled three times, looking for the most comfortable place on his human, then flopped down into the curve where my stomach met his dad’s side, half on, half off both of us. I gently stroked his back while listening to the slow and steady rhythm of Bowen’s heart.
“You can ask, ya know?” he finally said.
I tipped my head back to look at him. “I don’t want to ask. I want it to be something you share. Something you trust me with. A relationship is give and take, Bowen. This isn’t something I get to take from you with questions.”
“Jesus,” he breathed, threading his fingers through the top of my hair.
“You don’t have to tell me at all. But I can’t read minds, and I can’t stop things from hurting you if I don’t know what they are. I messed up tonight. I’m more than willing to admit it. But you scared me too. Something awful happened inside you, and it’s killing me to think I could unknowingly cause that again.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said adamantly. “Please, God, never say that any of this shit is your fault. It’s just…” His Adam’s apple bobbed, and he shook his head. “When I met Sally, it was a whirlwind. Time wasn’t a factor. In the span of three weeks, I’d fallen in love and planned a future.” His gaze collided with mine. “When I know, I know, Remi. It’s how I feel when I’m with you.”
I melted into his side. Funny enough, I understood completely. From the moment I’d laid eyes on him at the courthouse, I’d had no doubt he was someone special. I didn’t know how or why or when. But I always felt the unexplainable connection when we were together.
“I feel it with you too.”
“Good.” He kissed my forehead before continuing. “A week shy of our one-month anniversary, I got drunk and ballsy and asked her to move in with me. She’d thought of every reason in the book why it was too fast, but she never said no. The next morning, she disappeared.”
My body jerked as puzzle pieces from that afternoon started snapping into place. Shit. It hadn’t been about the plane crash at all.
He paused only long enough to draw me tighter against his side. I got the feeling it was an attempt to ground us both, and dread pooled in my stomach.
“I called the few friends of hers I knew at that point. They hadn’t seen her, so they turned around and called her family. No one knew where she’d gone though. Her car, her purse, her cell phone, and several suitcases of clothing were missing. The cops were notified but told us there was nothing they could do about a woman going on vacation. And by all accounts, that was honestly how it looked. But my instincts wouldn’t shake the feeling that something had happened to her. I felt it in my bones. The worst part was, once I explained that I’d asked her to move in with me, everyone, even her family, started to believe the cops too. They thought I’d spooked her. Too much. Too soon.” He let out a low growl. “Not my Sally though.”
I’d said I wouldn’t ask questions. I’d sworn to myself I was just going to let his thoughts flow and accept whatever parts of himself he wanted to reveal. But my heart was in my throat, suddenly frozen in fear of where the story was headed. “Wh-what happened to her?”
“That’s the one question that ruined us all. Five days later, they found her in her car at the park where she’d said she was going for a run. I’d searched every inch of that trail at least a dozen times before that and there was no sign of her or her car, but somehow, she miraculously just showed up one day, drugged out of her mind.”
A chill pebbled my skin. “What?”
“She wasn’t into drugs. Her friends said they’d dabbled with stuff in college, but when they found her unconscious, there were needles and heroin beside her, track marks on her arms. Everyone was so quick to assume she’d gone off on some kind of bender. The police, the doctors… Hell, even her best friend bought into it for a while. Everything was a haze for her, but she was adamant that a man had kidnapped her and given her the drugs against her will.”
“Holy shit,” I breathed. It wasn’t the most eloquent or supportive response, but what the hell else was there to say?
“Yeah,” he muttered. “It was awful. She was hysterical, but she had so few memories of what had happened to her over those five days that we couldn’t make the cops do anything. They dusted her car for prints, but that was about it. They told us just to be happy they didn’t arrest her,” he scoffed, but even that sounded pained. “I was so fucking relieved when they found her. She was alive, and that was all I needed. But little did I know it was only the start of the hardest chapter of my entire life.”
