Page 66 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

They left the room and went through the motions of a normal evening. She got Toby fed and washed and into the bedroom that was rapidly becoming his during the nights they stayed. He went down fast, one arm flung over the bear. She stood over him for a minute the way she always did, cataloguing the miracle of him.

When she came back, Garrick was standing at the study window with a glass of something amber he wasn’t drinking. She knew before she reached him that the level voice from the west corridor had been a dam, and that the dam was breaking.

She didn’t say anything. She just crossed the room and stood next to him, close enough that her shoulder touched his arm, and she waited.

“He didn’t die,” he said, to the dark glass. “My father. Not the way people mean.”

She remained silent.

“When my mother died, he stopped.” His throat moved, once. “Not all at once. It was slow. He stopped eating right. Stopped keeping the house. Stopped keeping himself. The grounds went. The roses went. He’d go to stone for a day, then two, then a week, and every time it got harder to bring him back. He didn’t want to come back, that was the thing I couldn’t—” He stopped talking, and when he started again, his voice was even flatter. “There’s a choice, in the end. When you go down deep enough, long enough, you can choose to stay. To let the male go and just be the stone. It doesn’t hurt. That’s what he wanted, I think. Somewhere it stopped hurting.”

“Garrick.”

“A gargoyle can always tell,” he went on, the dam washed away completely, “when the stone holds a person. There’s a… resonance. You feel it. Even though my father was going under more often, the stone still held him. I could feel him in it. Sleeping, but there.” He turned the glass in his hand, catching the firelight in the crystal. “I was away. Building the company. I’d call and he wouldn’t answer and I told myself he was resting again. Then I came home one weekend and I walked into that room and I put my hand on him and⁠—”

He didn’t finish it. He didn’t have to. She saw all of it, the hand on his father’s cold chest, waiting for the resonance, and finding only rock. Only a statue where a person used to be.

“He was gone,” he said. “He’d chosen it. He’d been gone maybe months. And I’d been on the phone telling myself he was resting.” The gold in his eyes was very bright now, and very wet, and his voice was still flat. “He chose it. He looked at what was left—the house, the company, me—and it wasn’t enough. She was gone and I wasn’t enough to stay for.”

Underneath the flat voice was a son who had put his hand on his father and found him gone by choice.

She took the glass out of his hand and set it on the sill. Then she took his face in both her dirt-roughened palms and made him look down at her rather than the dark glass.

“You listen to me.” Her thumbs moved along the hard edge of his jaw. “That wasn’t about you. Grief did that. Grief that swallowed him whole. It wasn’t a verdict on whether you were enough. The fact that he couldn’t stay doesn’t mean you weren’t worth staying for. Do you hear me? Those are two different things, and you’ve spent all this time letting them be the same one.”

His breath went ragged. His hands came up and closed over her wrists, not to pull her away but to hold on.

“I haven’t been in there since,” he said hoarsely. “I can’t even put my hand on the door. I don’t know why. There’s nothing there. There’s been nothing there for fifteen years.”

“You loved him,” she said, “and loving somebody doesn’t have an off switch just because they made a terrible choice. I know that.” She thought, unwillingly, of a hospital hallway and a friend she’d married who’d never gotten to be more than that, but she pushed it back. This was his sorrow, not hers. “You didn’t fail him. He failed you, and it still hurts, and that’s allowed. That’s allowed, Garrick. You don’t have to be made of stone about the stone.”

Something broke in him then. Not loudly, not with any of the drama a smaller male might have brought to it. His head simply bowed the way his father’s stone head bowed, and he pressed his forehead to hers and just breathed. His great body shook under her hands, and she held his face and let him.

When he kissed her it wasn’t like the other times. The other times had been heat and hunger and the desire that had run between them since the first morning. This was a male reaching for the one thing that had given him comfort.

She kissed him back with everything she had, and wound her arms up around his neck as he bent to her. When his hands found her waist and lifted her clean off the floor she went, wrapping her legs around him, letting him take her weight.

“Toby’s asleep,” she breathed against his mouth.

“You’re sure.” It wasn’t a question. He was giving her the choice anyway.

“Garrick.” She put her mouth against his ear. “Take me upstairs.”

He carried her. Of course he carried her. The male could have carried a Bobcat if a Bobcat had needed carrying. Up the stairs with her fingers curled at the back of his neck and his mouth at her throat, and into the big quiet room where she’d woken three days and a lifetime ago.

He set her down like she was breakable.

“I’m not going to break.”

“I know what you are.” His voice had dropped into the register that did things to the backs of her knees. “Let me be slow.”

So she let him be slow, and slow turned out to be worse. Or better. She lost track of which. He took the buttons of her shirt one at a time, and every time his knuckles brushed her skin he paused as though he’d found something he hadn’t expected.

She got his shirt open and put both hands on his chest, on the warm grey skin that ran hot when he wanted her, and felt it under her palms. The resonance. The low deep hum of him that meant he was there, he was alive, he was staying.

“Feel that?” she said. “That’s you.”

The gold came up in his eyes like a furnace door opening.