My body is healing far faster than my head or my heart.
The smaller cuts have scabbed over and the larger ones mostly healed with a few stitches that finally came out today—save for the deep stab in my side that will need far more time to truly heal.
The bruises have shifted from the dark purples and blacks into the yellow and greenish hues that make it impossible for me to even look in the mirror these days.
The aches and pains that were so prevalent during those first few days have eased, and I can finally move around almost normally again without wincing and cursing out the dead man who did this to me.
I’m feeling better…
Yet somehow a thousand times worse than I did before that fucker ever laid a hand on me.
Mostly because of the man up here right now, pretending that nothing ever happened between us who is ready to pack up and flee to that remote space we shared without looking back or even really discussing anything.
Lucky releases a little sigh. “You should go talk to him.”
I glance at her. “Why? He’s made it very clear he doesn’t want to. That he just wants to go back to how things were between us before all this went down.”
Avoiding each other. Arguing when we have to see each other. Animosity and big feelings we don’t talk about standing in the way of either of us moving forward with our lives.
Willow chews on her lip. “You think that’s possible?”
“Do I think what’s possible?”
“Going back. Pretending none of it happened.” She sighs, shifting her sleeping son slightly in her hold. “Killian and I tried that, remember? Even though I had no memories of that year, I told him that I just wanted to go back and pretend none of it happened, but it wasn’t possible. You can’t just forget about big chunks of your life and move on as if they never occurred. You can’t pretend.”
“It’ll be a lot easier once he moves up onto the mountain…”
At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.
That’s what I’ve been saying in my head every minute of every day he didn’t come to the hospital to talk to me. And every moment of every night I spent sleeping alone in that horrible bed that made the one in the old cabin feel like a luxury one at The Four Seasons. Definitely every second since I was released and have been trying to get back to some semblance of my normal life when absolutely nothing is the same.
“That’s what you want?” Lucky twirls her blue hair around her finger. “You really want him to go back up there?”
I chew on the inside of my lip, thankful that it finally healed as I’m not cursing myself like I did the first few times I inadvertently did it after we came back down the mountain.
It certainly might make my life easier to not have to see him, to not have to wonder what he’s doing or what he’s thinking, to not have to agonize over why he can’t just open up the way he did when we were alone and talk to me about how he’s feeling.
And maybe it would be better for him, mentally, to just go.
Maybe the mountain is truly what he needs.
Not what we had.
Just that place and his solitude.
But deep down, if my heart really believed that, it wouldn’t hurt so much.
“I don’t know…”
I barely whisper the words, but I know they hear me even over the sounds of the fire.
A few tense seconds pass before either of them dares say anything, though.
Lucky finally throws up her hands, motioning toward the direction of the hill that leads up to Connor’s place. “Then go talk to him before he leaves.”
My stomach tenses. “I don’t know what I would say.”
Willow barks out a laugh, then quickly remembers the baby is in her arms and glances down at him, but he sleeps right through it. “You have never lacked words, Raven. Words are what have always gotten you in trouble.”
