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Someone grabs my elbow and pulls me back.
And it's both jarring and relieving. Because while I'm no longer falling, the warmth of the hand on my skin is familiar. Painfully so.
“Who the fuck doesn't wear a coat in this weather?”
That voice…rich and smoky. It's gotten deeper while I've been gone. I recognize it, though. Know it as well as the three hundred and fifty-eight freckles on my face.
“It wasn't this cold in LA,” I whisper softly.
Cole snaps his hand back at the sound of my voice and the loss I feel at its absence is wretched and immediate.
Closing my eyes, I suck in a deep breath and release it back into the air in a bid to ready myself for coming face to face with the man I've seen only in dreams since I was eighteen years old.
But nothing could prepare me for seeing him again. For the coldness of his aura and the bitter hatred scarring his beautifully rugged face.
“Cole—“
“Don't.”
One word, but it says everything.
I hang my head and nod, sucking my bottom lip into my mouth and chewing it aggressively to give me something else to do other than watch him walk away.
I don't try to stop the tears that fall. There's no point. So, I just let them come, one after another in a rainstorm of heartache over my frost-kissed cheeks and I walk down the street to the house where I grew up. And when my mom answers the door, I collapse into her arms like a child and weep for my dad and for Cole and for the life I sometimes wish I'd lived instead.
All the while, the same thought spirals round and round in my head.
Why must it hurt so much to come home?
Ice in my veins.That's what it feels like to see Thea again. But not the type of ice that blisters. It's the type that burns with a violent rage I've never experienced before.
I've imagined what it would be like to see her again thousands of times, but not once did I anticipate the sheer anger that would fill me at the sight of her. I never imagined that one look into her viridescent eyes would cause vibrating fury to simmer through me until I had the inescapable impulse to throw my fist into a wall or find some drunk asshole at a bar to start a fight with.
Until now, I've never known it possible to both love and hate someone at the very same time.
But seeing Thea again, breathing her air, touching her—as soul-stirring as it all was—it gave way to bitter resentment.
She. Left. Me.
Six years of silence. Of heartbreak. Of cruel nostalgia. Of doubt. Of missed calls that went unreturned. Of wondering what I had done to deserve being exiled from her life with no warning or goodbye.
To this day, despite all the time that's passed, I'm still trying to get over what she did to my heart.
Perhaps I never will.
But that's a possibility I refuse to accept right now. Time heals everything, supposedly. Maybe I just need more of it. Or maybe I'll be totally fine as soon as the shock of seeing her wears off.
Though, that thought does little to subdue the storm still raging inside of me. So, when I make it to my parents’ house for our weekly family dinner, I hang back on the porch and smoke a cigarette as I look out over the sprawling fields of the Christmas tree ranch where I was raised until I’m ready to go inside.
Pine Ridge Farm.
There isn’t another place quite like it in the whole world.
“Whoa, what the fuck is wrong with you?” My brother, Conan, swings open the front door and gapes as he catches sight of the thunderous expression on my face.
At twenty-seven, he is the oldest of the five of us.
“Thea's back.”
