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33
Don’t Make Promises You Can’t Keep
PARKER
Hudson is asleep with his back facing me. I trace the endless, cool curves of muscle and dips and in certain places, I can feel long scars.
Sitting up, I bring my head closer and use the spill of the moon’s light from the glass window to see if there are any marks, but there’s nothing really visible.
I touch his back again, trying to find more and I do find more scars along the side of his ribcage, another on his shoulder, and my fingers graze the nape of his neck, where there is another scar hidden by his inky black hair.
He suddenly shifts and I quickly drop my hand. His light breathing stops and I know he’s awake.
“Are you okay?” I ask softly.
Silence.
“Hudson?”
He’s silent for a beat of a moment. “You know something weird? No one’s ever asked me that before.”
I kiss his shoulder and move up closer to him. “Well, I’m asking now and I’ll always ask you.”
Hudson is silent again and my heart starts to beat faster. “Hudson, are you okay?”
He exhales. “I don’t know. Sometimes, it feels like it’s empty inside and I always wonder what it would feel like to feel more than that.”
“Empty?” I ask and at the back of my mind, thoughts of his psychological evaluation play.
Dr. Vera Callahan noted a conspicuous lack of empathy. I still don’t understand any of it and I’m afraid of what it means.
“Empty,” he murmurs.
“I love you, okay?” I tell him as I lift my head and kiss the nape of his neck.
“Why?” Hudson suddenly asks. “Why do you love me? What is there to love?”
“I love you because you’re a good person, you’re a smart, gorgeous man,” I whisper. “I also think you deserve to be loved.”
“I do?” His voice sounds lost in the darkness of the room and my heart aches with even more love for him.
I slip my arm around him and press my fingertips against his chest where his heart is beating fast.
“You do.”
“But cruel people like me don’t deserve it,” he says.
“You’re not cruel.”
He chuckles, turning around so that he’s on his back now and my hand is still on his firm chest. His heart is thrumming steadily.Thud-thud-thud.
“That has to be the worst lie ever.”
“Everyone has a bad side,” I tell him. “But just because you sometimes lose your patience and get angry, that doesn’t give me an excuse to hate you or call you cruel.”
“You’re really something else then,” he says, looking down at me. “Because I’ve been told otherwise in past.”
Even in the darkness, I can see his beautiful, green cat-like eyes staring right at me.
