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He lets out a long, pained breath and lets his head fall back against the couch.
Closing his eyes, his grip on my ankle tightens, but his lips never move.
I start to think he isn’t going to talk, and I’m about to ask another, less painful question when he suddenly speaks quietly.
“I woke up, and you’d gone, Dove. I thought you’d slipped out of my bed in the middle of the night to be with Mav. But when I went searching, it was obvious that you hadn’t been there either.
“The house was deserted. I had no one to turn to or any idea what was going on.”
He falls silent, and I want more than anything to comfort him, but I don’t want to disrupt his thoughts or wake Mav. Something tells me that he wouldn’t be so forthcoming with this if Mav was listening too.
“I was already struggling a little. You knew that. You saw that.”
I have to bite down on the inside of my lip not to respond. I had seen that, and I just wish he would have talked that day on the swing. Maybe it would have helped.
Maybe…
My heart sinks. What’s the point in maybes?
I need to think about now, about the future, not concern myself with things we could have all done differently in the past.
“All day I waited to find out what was going on, but no one came back. Reid’s cell wouldn’t take a call, and I found both of yours in his safe.
“Fuck,” he hisses. “Do you have any idea how many photos of you Mav has in his camera roll, Dove?”
My lips part to say no, but the word never breaks free.
“He loves you something fierce.” JD’s voice cracks with emotion. “I already knew it. I saw it in the way he looked at you, the way he touched you. But fuck. Knowing he had you. That I had no idea where you were and had been left behind. It killed me, Dove. Fucking killed me.”
Pain cuts through my chest. Deep down, I know that I didn’t do this. I would never intentionally hurt him. But just knowing that I had a hand in it, cuts me so fucking deep.
My eyes burn with tears, as I think about him home alone without any answers.
I keep my eyes on him, grateful that he’s got his closed and can’t see how much this is hurting me just to hear.
I want to be this for him, I want to be his sounding board when he needs to get things off his chest, I want to be his voice of reason when things are chaotic in his head.
I want to be everything for him. What I don’t want to be is the reason he’s hurting or second-guessing himself.
“I took your advice,” he says suddenly. “I found an old notebook and pen and along with my bottle of vodka, I started writing shit down. Shit that I’ve never laid out on paper before.”
I’m pretty sure I stop breathing as I wait for what comes next.
“I started writing about you,” he confesses. “Writing about how I knew right from day one that having you in our basement was going to end in disaster.”
I suck in a breath, willing my body not to react to his words, no matter how much they affect me.
“I’m pretty sure I started falling for you the first time I came down and found you strapped to Reid’s chair.”
“Fuck. You were so fucking beautiful, Dove. I’d been watching you, telling myself that I was going to keep my distance, but I couldn’t.”
“And then that first time I touched you, felt the softness of your skin under my fingers, saw your reaction to me. Fuck. I was gone.”
“But for me… falling comes with consequences. Consequences I’d only experienced once, but ones I knew were going to come back to haunt me at some point in the near future.”
I want to assure him that I never wanted to hurt him. But honestly, in those first days, hell, even in the ones that came after, I probably would have willingly hurt him if it meant breaking free and getting back to Mav.
“Maya,” he says simply.
