The Time in Between by Kristen Ashley

And he couldn’t handle it.

  “Coert—” she said urgently.

  “I fucked us up. I fucked you up. From the beginning. Used you. Knew it was wrong. Knew it would break us. Knew it. Did it anyway.”

  “Coert, honey, look at me—”

  He was looking at her but she wasn’t there.

  She was in his lap, as close as she could be, but he was in hell.

  “After, after you knew, after you knew every time you said the name Tony it was a lie, I was a lie, we were a lie, I was a piece of shit, I wanted to go to you. I knew you. I knew what you’d do. Malc and Tom, they said dig right back in. Don’t give you time. Get right back in there. But Cap, my captain, said to give you time. He said if I gave you time, you’d see it was my job. You’d understand. It’d be all right. You’d be open to me fixing us, starting again. If I went too early, I’d go in when you were pissed and hurt and fuck shit up even more. Malc and Tom were right. I should have listened to them. Cap was wrong. You needed me and I knew it, and I listened to him and it was fuckin’ stupid.”

  She adjusted in his lap, straddling him. His hands still on the sides of her head, she reciprocated that and put her face right in his.

  “Coert, honey, see me,” she begged.

  He didn’t see her.

  “Christ, every time, every time I moved inside you and you called me Tony, I died a little.”

  “God, Coert,” her voice broke, her thumbs moved over the wet on his cheeks, “please, look at me.”

  He was looking right at her but he wasn’t seeing anything but a black pall of blame and shame.

  “I blamed you because I couldn’t take it. I laid that shit on you because I couldn’t live with the fact I’d done that to you. She fuckin’ murdered her boyfriend. You wanted out, I made you stay in. I made you a part of that. I made you live that right there. In it. Covering you in filth. In shit.”

  “Stop it, please stop it,” she pleaded, her fingers frantic on his face, her body burrowing close to his.

  “I’d come home and you’d smile at me and throw yourself in my arms and call me Tony. You’d look at me with Lars, and when I caught you, you’d look away. God, so fuckin’ sad. Every day hoping that I’d give you reason to believe and every day I gave you reason to walk away, and you stuck by me and I was using you.”

  She shook his head. “Stop it!”

  He finally looked into her eyes. “I loved you and I made you live a hell.”

  “I loved you and I was happy to be in that hell if you were there with me.”

  Coert shut up.

  “I shouldn’t have married Patrick,” she declared.

  He slid his hands to her jaw and shared, “Your brother explained it to me.”

  Her head jerked in his hands when he said the word “brother” but he kept talking.

  “And back then, I didn’t let you explain because I wanted an excuse to let you go, let you live your life, not have the shit I did to you that infested every second we’d had together go on to infest every second we would have. I wanted to set you free.”

  “I didn’t want to be free,” she whispered.

  “I thought you’d be better off without me.”

  “And I thought the same, so after I hurt you with Patrick I didn’t go back to you and make you listen to me because I was young and stupid. We were both young and stupid and scared and that was insanely crazy and messed up, and we fucked up and now we’re here.”

  He stared in her eyes.

  “We’re here, Coert. So what are we going to do about it?”

  It wasn’t that easy.

  With them it had never been easy.

  “I hurt you again just days ago, Cady. It wasn’t about talking to you. It was about facing you after what I’d done to you. After what I’d put you through. Facing myself and admitting I’d acted like a piece of shit. Seeing Lars, having it all brought back, he said it straight to me. He gave it to me straight. I did what I did to him and that didn’t matter. He’s trash. He did what he did and deserved what he got. But not you. And I had to face that again. And face what I thought I drove you to with Moreland.”

  “He wasn’t my husband, Coert, not really.”

  “His son shared that but you didn’t because I didn’t let you, and you tried back then and when you came back to me, and I didn’t let you give it to me then either.”

  “Can you see how all this is intense?” she demanded. “It isn’t like we were too young and hadn’t learned how to communicate yet, how to compromise, how to be in a relationship. There was murder and felonies and my family didn’t help, and Patrick was suddenly there and dealing with his own grief so he was being overprotective, and all this was just crazy insane. So maybe we need to both understand that and realize it happened. It went wrong. Okay so it went horribly wrong, devastatingly wrong. But now we have a choice. Keep letting it go wrong or make it right.”

  “What’s right, Cady?”

  “I think what’s right happened on my couch.”

  Coert went still.

  “And Lars can go fuck himself,” she carried on. “I don’t know what he said to you but I mean, God. He was firing a swath of vengeance across the country because he was a nimrod. I mean, really?” She settled back on her ass on his thighs and slid her hands down to either side of his neck. “Don’t think another second about whatever Lars said. He’s always been a jerk.”

  Firing a swath of vengeance.

  Nimrod.

  She was being funny and sweet.

  But Coert was not near to a place he could laugh.

  “Cady, honey, can you honestly say you can move on from here and every time you look at me not see how I threw your life right in the garbage and did it willfully?”

  “Coert, can you honest to God move forward from here and every time you look at me not see I didn’t believe in you when I knew. I knew. You were right. I knew who you were.”

  She moved in, burrowing closer, and kept talking.

  “You knew me too, and I did the exact thing I always did. Rash. Reckless. Whatever I could do to make the hurt go away. Better yet, find someone else to make the hurt go away and I did that the very day it all went down. That morning you left, Maria called me, screaming at me, ‘What did you do! What did you and that pig do?’ I had no idea what she was talking about and I was so freaked I went to her before I went to work, and I saw you there with your badge on your jeans, talking to cops, Lars and Maria and Sharon on their knees with their arms cuffed behind their backs in that dirty yard and I got more freaked. Then I barely got through the doors, trembling, not even knowing why I went in to work, and Jaime came into the Sip and Save right behind me, getting in my face, saying he’d cut me. I’d go down. My cop boyfriend would go down. And he took off and I lost it and went out to the side of the shop. I couldn’t even stand. I was sitting on the cement sobbing so hard and Patrick found me there. And what did I do?”

  “Cady,” he whispered.

  “I betrayed you. Right then and there. I didn’t go home to Casey’s that night and wait for you. Patrick took me to my parents’ and they kicked me out, ‘For good this time, Cady, and never come back,’” she mimicked her mother and kept doing it. “‘Not ever. If you love us at all, don’t bring this kind of thing in our lives. Not ever.’ So I went home with Patrick and that was it. I didn’t even go back to the Sip and Save. He took care of everything. He was there when I finally went back to Casey’s to get my stuff and you showed, and you saw him and the ring and rightfully lost it on me and that was it.” She shook her head. “That was it.”

  “Honey,” Coert murmured, gathering her closer.

  But she wasn’t done.

  “So you know, it’s a lot easier for me to see you were doing your job, as filled with landmines as that was to negotiate, I understood. It took some time but I completely understood. It was your job and it wasn’t an easy job and you told me as best as you could tell me I needed not to let go, not to give up on us, to stick by you, and I didn??
?t. You were doing your job. I was just being . . .” she huffed out a breath and finished, “me. So where does that leave us when you look at me?”

  “Do you wanna find out?”

  “With everything I have even though it’s completely terrifying.”

  Coert relaxed but did it still holding her close.

  “Then let’s find out.”

  She shook her head. “I say that but I can’t . . . I can’t . . . if it doesn’t . . .”

  “Cady, I love you. I never stopped loving you. You said you read the reports now read between the lines. I was never able to commit to another woman because I was still in love with you.”

  She jerked then went solid in his arms.

  “And that happened even when I convinced myself you married a man three times your age for his money,” he told her.

  She stared in his eyes.

  And Coert looked into them and made a decision.

  “Now, this is what’s going to happen,” he declared. “I’m gonna go down and get my wallet because I have one condom left and this time when I make love to you, it’s not gonna go that fast. That was fuckin’ fantastic, but it went way too fast.”

  She stayed solid in his arms but her hands at his neck convulsed.

  He kept going.

  “Then you’re gonna text your family to tell them to come back and I’m gonna go home and leave you with them. You’re also gonna tell them that even though they’re here for a visit, you’re gonna have dinner with them tomorrow but then you’re gonna come to my place and spend the night with me. And we’re gonna spend Christmas Eve together until I gotta go to Kim’s to be with my kid in the evening. When I go to Janie, you can come home and be with your family. And I want time with you on Christmas so you need to figure that out, because I’m doing presents with Janie at Kim’s and then I got a couple of hours where she has her before she brings her to me in the afternoon. And those hours I’m gonna spend with you. And I want you to meet my daughter and do that soon. But we’ll plan that after Christmas. So your family can have you and Janie needs me but any time we have in between, it’s ours, and when they’re gone, it’s you and me and when I have her, we’ll have Janie.”

  He stopped talking, and when she said nothing, just stared at him, her pretty face stunned, he felt his own face get soft.

  “And soon as I can,” he said quietly, “I want you to make me spaghetti pie, whatever that is.”

  He barely got the word “pie” out before he was on his back in her bed because she’d attacked him straight from his lap and she was kissing him.

  She was all over him.

  And Coert might have wanted to slow it down that time but he didn’t get that chance (and again had to sprint on her stairs, taking them two at a time, this time to grab his wallet) because it had been a long time, too long, way too long and they might have had a taste, but Cady was still very hungry.

  And Coert . . .

  Coert was still starving.

  Again only in his jeans, done up this time, Coert moved up the stairs to Cady’s bedroom and this time found her where he left her in bed.

  He got in it with her, stretching out beside her, but she was under the covers he’d pulled over her.

  He laid on top, handing her phone to her.

  “Thanks, Coert,” she said.

  It came out shy, she didn’t meet his eyes and he sighed.

  They’d had fantastic sex twice and they’d have more fantastic sex, a lot of it, but that didn’t erase the fact that they’d both jumped from their opposite sides of the shore into the raging waters of everything that came in between and neither of them had life vests.

  They just had to have the determination, since they’d made it through the rapids to each other, to hold the fuck on.

  “Kath,” she said softly, and Coert focused on her. She moved her eyes from her phone that had been beeping, he’d heard it go when he’d run to get his wallet, to him. “I think considering she’s sent eleven texts, she’s worried.”

  “I bet,” he muttered, pulling her and the covers over her closer to his body.

  “And I think Pat’s in some big trouble with Mike and Daly, and maybe Pam.”

  “You need to text her.”

  She nodded.

  Turning her attention back to her phone, he watched her text with her thumbs.

  “You can text with your thumbs?” he asked, and her eyes tilted back to his.

  “I have seven nieces and nephews. They all have phones, except Melanie and Ellie, but they’re getting one when they turn ten, like their brother Riley did. And I’m cool Auntie Cady. I spoil them, to their parents’ chagrin. Thus they text me a lot. And even Melanie and Ellie do it, when they steal Riley’s, Pam’s or Mike’s phone to do it.”

  “So you have lots of practice.”

  She nodded, went back to her phone. He heard the whoosh, and then without her phone to take her attention, she looked like she didn’t know where to put her gaze.

  “Cady,” he whispered.

  It slid to his.

  “If we do this, we have to learn something from what came before.”

  “What’s that?” she asked quietly.

  “We have to learn, even when it gets hard, we can’t give up and we can’t let go.”

  She got it and he knew it when her eyes widened and her body relaxed against his.

  “I spent so long not even thinking that this was a possibility, it’s hard to wrap my head around it being a reality,” she admitted.

  He touched his mouth to hers before he said, “I understand that feeling.”

  He watched her swallow and it looked painful.

  “You get freaked, worried, anything starts twisting the wrong way in your head, use your thumbs and text me,” he urged.

  “I think that might mean you’ll get a text every ten minutes.”

  “After not having you for eighteen years, do you honestly think I’ll mind hearing from you every ten minutes? Christ, Cady, you lived in the lighthouse in my town, and I’d convinced myself I was pissed at you and I made every excuse I could find to come here just to see you.”

  He didn’t mean to do it, but he got it when his words made her eyes fill with tears. It looked like she’d try to beat them back but she gave in and shoved her face in his throat, her body wracking in his arms.

  He rolled to his back, pulled her over him and held her.

  After he gave her some time to get it out, he pushed up so his shoulders were to her headboard and he took her with him, pulling her even deeper into him, holding tight.

  “I never once considered the thought you’d forgive me,” he told her.

  She pulled her head back and looked at him through watery, brilliant green eyes. “I thought the same. I thought you hated me.”

  “Two sides of the same coin, they say, love and hate. Let’s move to the other side, yeah?”

  She nodded.

  He needed to get her where she felt safe and solid enough for him to leave her to her family but also so she could look past the part that was scary as shit and precarious as hell and keep on going.

  “I’m committed to this, Cady,” he said gentle but firm. “I’m committed to working on this. Getting us through the whitewater and finding us somewhere safe. I would not have come here with your brother if I wasn’t all in. I’m looking you right in the eye and I’m saying that to you. It’s been a long time but I know what I feel. How I’ve felt since you came back. How I couldn’t get you out of my head, stop thinking about you. I know where I’m at even if I understand we have to get to know each other again, we have history to share and some of it might not be easy. Though,” he grinned at her and teased, “since you had an investigator, that might not be as tough on you.”

  She ducked her head and tucked her face in the side of his neck.

  “Teasing,” he whispered, lifting a hand to stroke the side of her neck.

  “I know,” she whispered back.

  “Too soon?” he asked.<
br />
  “No, just that I missed you teasing me.”

  He stopped stroking and wrapped his arm around her.

  That was something he’d missed too.

  He cleared his throat.

  “To finish what I was saying, I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t have put you through all this, if I wasn’t all in, if I didn’t still love you. You said you still loved me too. So we have that. We hold on to it. And we ride these rapids until I can get us to safety. You with me?”

  “I’m with you.”

  “Good,” he muttered.

  “I’m with you,” she repeated.

  “Heard you, Cady.”

  She lifted up and looked him in the eye, raising a hand to catch him hard on the head behind his ear.

  And he thought he was alert.

  But at her hold he became more alert.

  “I mean that,” she said again.

  Shit.

  She was back there. Back where she’d promised she’d stick with him.

  And then didn’t.

  “I know,” he said gently.

  “Seriously.”

  “Stop it,” he urged softly. “You hear me? That’s twisting shit. That’s staying where we were. Apart. Separate. With too much in between. We’re coming together. We’re moving on. You with me?”

  It took a second but she nodded.

  “Did you tell Kath that they could come back?”

  “I said I was good, they shouldn’t worry and I’d text soon when they could come back.”

  “Text them,” he ordered. “They wanna see you’re okay. You text. Get dressed. Walk me to my truck. And I’ll get outta here so they can have you to themselves to see you’re okay.”

  She nodded again.

  He gave her a squeeze.

  Then he gave her a kiss.

  That kiss led to another one and a few more, all soft, quick, sweet.

  But it eventually led to them making out before he unfortunately needed to pull away and say, “Your family needs to see you’re good, Cady.”

  She thought it was unfortunate too, gave him that, it made him smile so he touched his mouth to hers one more time before he found her phone she’d dropped in the bed and gave it to her.

  He got out of bed, put on his sweater, socks, boots and gave her privacy after she texted, doing this stroking Midnight while she dressed.