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I wrap my arms around his waist, and rest my head against the hard planes of his back. “I’ll help. My life is pretty much screwed now too. Maybe you’re right about us meeting at the right time back in the summer. We can help each other.”
Dylan loosens my arms and turns back to me. “Can we? I pushed you away, and you push me away.”
“If I can sit and listen to you tell me everything you did to that girl three years ago, and still want to give us a chance, doesn’t that say something about how I feel?” I ask.
The silence in the apartment hovers in the charged space between us; a gap that needs closing after the months apart. Dylan wipes away an escaped tear with his thumb. “You’re crying for me?”
“No, for us. For the last few months. If I’d known what was happening, if you’d spoken to me before and not gone away…”
“I had to.”
“Don’t say that! You don’thaveto do anything!”
He seizes my cheeks with both hands. “Every single day of the last four months I’ve thought about you. I held onto the memories of us to get me through until the memories weren’t enough and I went back to the pills.” He drops his hands and walks over to the bed, sitting on the edge. “At the end of another soul-stealing day, I’d sit in the room with one thought: I would give everything to feel nothing.”
“Did it work?” I ask harshly, “Do you feel nothing?”
“Until I saw you again, then everything flooded in. I ache to have you back, Sky.”
I can’t hold this back. I’m unable to cope with this much emotion in just a few days. The stupid sobbing starts again as I’m hit by the depth of feeling I have for Dylan, the man I hardly know who I can’t imagine being without and who’s falling apart. I cover my face with my hands, not wanting Dylan to look at my ugly crying.
Then Dylan’s there, arms around me, hugging me close. He presses my head against the taut muscles of his chest and winds his hand into my hair.
“Don’t cry, please. I don’t want to make you unhappy too.” Dylan’s voice is hoarse, heart beating rapidly against my cheek.
I lift my head from the T-shirt I’ve dampened and look into the eyes of the man from the sea. I see the worry and love in the face I remember from before. Standing on tiptoes, I press my mouth against his, knowing we need to reconnect and fight this together.
Dylan responds with a hesitancy common in his kisses since we reunited, and I'm shaking, the tears dampening his cheeks. Gripping his hair, I push my lips harder against his until he yields and our tongues caress. My breath is snatched away by the intensity of the moment, the understanding behind our unity and the aching need to reconnect as easily as our mouths meld.
I close my eyes, savouring the taste and scent of Dylan, a memory I tried to hold onto and lost over the months apart. I want to fall back into us, desperate to be skin on skin with this man. As I move a hand beneath his T-shirt, desperate to touch his warmth, he catches hold and laces his fingers through mine. I pull away and look in alarm at him. Doesn’t he want this? Dylan rests his forehead against mine, breath heavy to match.
“I love you. I don’t ever want to live a life without you in it.”
I sniffle. “I thought you didn’t want to make me cry.”
“I have to tell you how I feel, Sky.”
I stroke his smooth cheek with the back of my hand, wishing I could say the words but frightened to tell him I love him too. The heavy tension in the room could be solved with losing ourselves in each other, but that gives Dylan another opportunity to deflect things.
“I want you to do something.” I tell him.
Dylan tenses, where his hands are on my hips they grip. "What?"
"I want you to go to St Davids and see your gran."
Dropping his hands, Dylan steps back. "What makes you say that? Why would I go there?"
I take his hand. “Dylan, to start moving on I think you need to reconnect with the old you. Not the one from three years ago, but the one who needs to remember where he once belonged. Go back and find him.”
When he sits on the bed and stares at his feet, I’m not sure I’ve said the right thing. “But it’s Christmas,” he says quietly.
“And if your Christmas holds demons, let’s go and put them to rest?”
He glances back at me with a glint in his eye. “With the help of an angel?”
I roll my eyes at him. “If you can’t find one, I’ll help instead.” Tipping his head, Dylan watches me quietly. “What?”
“You’re amazing,” he says softly. “I don’t deserve you.”
I cross to him, and he winds his arms around me, burying his face into my side. We stay together, in a silence that cocoons us.
