AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Almost.
Sterling didn’t reply or comment or even turn around.
Calling wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t speak.
Winter [HAMID]
I’m ready to go back to Virginia.
Ready? Quite possibly the biggest lie I’d ever told.
“I’ll take you to the airport,” Sterling said quietly. “I’ll return to Virginia after you.”
The sadness rolling off his shoulders made my eyes sting, but I nodded and went to go put on the blue gingham dress with the saucy ribbons.
“Winter,”Sterling said as we stood on the tarmac. He held me close.
It hurt. It was like some trapped piece of skin between us twisting into agonizing pain.
He didn’t need to tell me this was goodbye.
But he did anyway. “Don’t risk anything for me. You have your life. Go back to it. We won’t see each other again before the Meeting.”
That twisting, writhing connection between us that howled with tearing pain gave me his real meaning. “You don’t want me to even text.”
His grip tightened, then he pulled his hands away. “I didn’t say that.”
The breeze tore at my skirt. Despite the humid beach air, my blood went freezing cold. He was closing himself off. Locking himself into his mental office, where nobody could disturb him. Not even me. “You didn’t need to.”
“Winter.”
“I understand.” My silver wound sent my fingers dancing and my side pounded, and my stupid eyes shed stupid tears. I understood perfectly. This had been a lovely little interlude. A final, nice dream. Now we had to wake up, andstayawake until the very end. “This is goodbye. You want to get it over with. You don’t want to draw it out.”
Why let Alan end it, when he could end it right here, himself?
“I need to focus.” The words were the words, but they had multi-faceted meanings.
And that meant he wanted to end it right here, on this tarmac, after lying to me for days, andthiswould be the last memory I had of him.
This was goodbye.Thiswas, because it was the time and place of his choosing.
“You could have told me before now,” I said. “Just drop it on me like this? Here?”
He didn’t reply.
Sterling had always been practical and pragmatic to the point of merciless cruelty.
He was the wolf-of-silver, and not even I was invulnerable to what that meant.
We’d found a way to stay connected, and I’d thought, for some reason, that would last until the bitter, final end.
“It’s necessary.” He released me and stepped back. “For both of us.”
I stood with hands at my sides, hair whipping in the air, and my entire body shocked and numb at the same time it was full of pain, and it tried to rally anger to offset the pain.
But the embers of anger flickered, died, faded, drowned in the deluge of loss.
I’d been angry so long. There wasn’t enough of me left to sustain any sort of blaze.
