Closer to the Edge Read online

  “You came back,” he whispers as I crouch down by his side.

  Wordlessly, I grab onto his arm, throwing it over my shoulder and wrapping my own arm around his waist as I attempt to ignore the heat of his skin through his shirt.

  After a brief struggle, I manage to help him stand. As I step away from him and move towards his crutches, both of his arms wrap around my waist and he pulls me against him.

  For just a moment, I’m thrown back in time and I can almost pretend like he was never gone. I can almost imagine that he was here this entire time and the past year never happened. The strong arms that always made me feel safe band around me and the solid wall of his chest is close enough for me to rest my cheek against like I used to do. It would be so easy to lean into him and let him hold me, let him take away the pain.

  “Jesus Christ. I forgot how beautiful you are.”

  His softly muttered words bring me right back to the present. He’s not the man I used to know. He’s not the man who will take away all of my fears and love me unconditionally. He forgot about me, but I never forgot about him.

  I have got to get the fuck out of here.

  Clenching my teeth, I angrily yank my body out of his hold and take a few steps back. My sudden movement causes him to lose his balance and he teeters for a second on his good leg before quickly wrapping a hand around one of his bedposts.

  “Liv—”

  “Don’t,” I cut him off with a growl.

  It’s hard enough being in the same room with him. I can’t handle hearing him use my nickname, the one he used to whisper in my ear so reverently when he pushed inside of me; the one he would chuckle when I said something funny.

  “I know you’re angry,” he starts.

  I laugh in his face. I know I sound like a crazy lunatic and I don’t care. I feel like a damn crazy lunatic. My emotions are all over the place and I don’t know what to do with them.

  “You don’t know a damn thing about me,” I tell him with a shake of my head as I turn away from him and grab his crutches.

  I thrust them into his hands and ignore the way he’s staring at me, like he’s trying to see right through me, like my face will give him all of the answers he seeks.

  “I didn’t want you to see me like this,” he tells me, pushing the crutches under his arms and moving closer to me.

  “Well, I didn’t want to see you at all. I guess we don’t always get what we want,” I remind him.

  He curses when I move out of his reach again and begin picking up the mess by the door, shoving my supplies haphazardly into my bag and the donuts back into the box.

  I hear the thump of the crutches on the floor as he moves behind me. “Please, just let me explain.”

  Cleaning up the last of the mess, I stand and whirl around to face him. “You don’t need to explain anything. Your actions a year ago spoke volumes. I didn’t come back in this room because I need anything from you; I came back in here because it’s my job. Now that you’re back on your feet, I’m leaving. I’ll have the agency send someone new.”

  I can’t be in this room with him any longer. Just being this close to him, I can already feel my anger slipping away. He was always such a strong, proud man. Seeing him injured and needing help tugs at heartstrings I didn’t think existed inside of me anymore.

  “Please, love. I just got you back, don’t go.”

  The anger bubbles right back up to the surface. “Don’t you dare call me love. I am not your love. I stopped being that to you the day you walked away. You don’t get to stand there and pretend like everything can be erased with a few endearments and shitty excuses.”

  He curses again, throws his head back and roars towards the ceiling. “Goddammit! I’m trying here, Liv. There’s so much I want to say and I’m not doing a good job of it. I’m fucking everything up.”

  I laugh cynically and shake my head at him. “You fucked everything up a long time ago. I don’t want anything from you. I came back in here because you needed help and I felt sorry for you.”

  My words have the desired effect and I watch the pleading look on his face quickly disappear. There’s nothing worse than telling a Navy SEAL that you think he’s weak and pathetic. Gone is the man who, moments ago, would have done anything to get me to listen to his explanations. Gone is the softness and vulnerability that clouded his features. In its place is a stony mask of coldness and indifference.

  It’s exactly what I wanted. I didn’t want to see the look of love shining in his eyes or his defenses crumbling at his feet. I’m the weak one when it comes to that side of Cole. It’s a side I’ve rarely seen and never been able to ignore. It’s much easier to deal with the Cole who has shut down than the one who wears his heart on his sleeve.

  “I’ll make sure the agency sends a new nurse as soon as possible. Good-bye, Cole.”

  He doesn’t say a word as I turn and make my way out of the house. He doesn’t call out to me and he doesn’t try to plead his case. The pain seeing him again called forth disappears and I feel good about the fact that I finally turned the tables on him. This time, I’m the one saying good-bye and walking away without a backwards glance.

  “WILL YOU GET your ass back in bed? You do realize that your inability to follow the doctor’s instructions is what landed you back in the hospital, right?”

  I poke my head out of the bathroom door in my tiny hospital room and scowl at Caroline. My nurse, who I told to leave me the fuck alone when she tried to help me into the bathroom, quickly rushes over to my side at Caroline’s orders. She wraps her arm around my waist and walks me back to the bed. If I close my eyes, I can almost imagine it’s Olivia’s arms around me. The nurse, whose name I didn’t bother to remember, has the same long black hair as Olivia, but that’s where the similarities end. Where Olivia is tall and slender with just the right amount of curves, this woman is short and plump. She’s also got a nasally, whiny voice, where Olivia’s is soft and sweet.

  Except her voice isn’t sweet and soft anymore; it’s cold and hard. Even when we fought, which wasn’t often, she never looked at me the way she did before she turned her back and walked away from me the other day, like she couldn’t stand being in my presence.

  Caroline stares down at me with an irritated scowl once I’m situated back in bed, but I ignore her, folding my arms angrily across my chest and giving the nurse a curt nod when she tells me she’ll be back in to check on me. I don’t need Caroline to remind me that this particular hospital stay is my own damn fault. While Olivia stormed out of the house a few days ago, the words she threw at me began playing on a loop in my head.

  I felt sorry for you.

  I felt sorry for you.

  I felt sorry for you.

  As soon as I heard her car pull away, I staggered over to the main house on my crutches, went right to the workout room and pushed myself far beyond my current abilities. Four months ago, I could run fifteen miles on the treadmill, bench press my body weight and spend an hour on the rowing machine, barely winded.

  I made it through twenty reps on the bench with eighty-pound weights, a few meager leg-lifts and attempted to walk-slash-hobble for a mile on the treadmill before I fell off the fucking thing and had to crawl over to the phone in the corner of the room to call for help. In my haste to prove that I wasn’t weak and pathetic, I reopened my surgical incision, exposing myself to whatever nasty shit that caused the infection they’re pumping me full of antibiotics to fight.

  “Where the fuck is the doctor? I need to get out of this hospital. I’m going crazy.”

  Caroline shakes her head at me before grabbing a chair by the window, pulling it closer to the bed and plopping down on it. “If you weren’t such a stubborn ass, you wouldn’t be here in the first place.”

  I know she’s right, but I don’t need to hear it. I want to go home, pull my head out of my ass and find some way to convince Olivia to talk to me long enough to give her the explanation she deserves. Jesus, I wasn’t lying when I told her I’d al
most forgotten how beautiful she is. Seeing her in pale blue scrubs reminded me of all the mornings I laid in bed, watching her get dressed for work. I’ve been tormented by images of her sitting on the bench at the foot of our bed wrapped in a towel, rubbing lotion to her skin, and the way she’d brush out her long, black hair before pulling it up onto the top of her head in a ponytail. I interrupted her morning routine often, pulling her on top of me as I released her hair from its tight confines and stripped her out her scrubs in between her laughing protests that I was going to make her late for work.

  Where did that woman go? The one who smiled easily and looked at me like I was her whole world. Did my leaving a year ago really do this to her? Turn her into someone cold and distant? Someone who couldn’t even stand to look at me? I hated myself every single day for walking away from her, but that’s nothing compared to the disappointment in myself knowing that I’m the reason she doesn’t smile. It was a given that she’d be pissed the first time she saw me again, but I thought she loved me enough to give me a chance to explain. There wasn’t a single trace of love shining in her crystal blue eyes and it fucking killed me.

  “So, do you want to tell me what threw you into a tizzy this time? I’m going to assume by the squealing of tires I heard the other day that you forced another nurse into early retirement,” Caroline laughs, bringing her feet up to the edge of my bed and crossing her legs at the ankles.

  I honestly can’t explain why I hadn’t told Caroline that Olivia was the nurse the agency sent, or that I royally fucked up my first meeting with her. Seeing Olivia again, having her in my arms, if only for a few seconds, completely rocked my world. I guess I didn’t want my memories of the smell of her skin, the softness of her hair brushing against my cheek and the way her body fit against mine like it was made for me tainted with “I told you so’s.” I love my sister, but she wouldn’t waste any time telling me how I fucked up. Aside from my old SEAL brother Garrett, Caroline was the only other person in my life who understood the extent of my feelings for Olivia. She knew how much I loved her and how leaving her almost ripped me in two. I’m sure she’d be on my side and help me in any way possible to get Olivia back, but this is something I need to do on my own. I need help with practically everything else in my life right now because of this fucking knee, so I have to do this myself. I need to feel like I have full control over something in my life, even if it’s just this one thing.

  “So, I have bad news and I have really bad news. Which do you want first?” Caroline asks, bringing me out of my pity party.

  She continues without waiting for my answer. “I called the agency and you, my friend, are all out of nurses. They refuse to send you someone new.”

  “I don’t want someone new,” I tell her firmly.

  Caroline narrows her eyes at me for a second and I backpedal just a little bit so she won’t get suspicious.

  “I mean, this one wasn’t fresh out of nursing school and knew what she was doing. It was my fault. I was just in a bad mood.”

  She accepts my answer easily and shrugs.

  “Yeah, and that would be the really bad news. She doesn’t want you. I told the guy we would pay triple her normal salary and she still turned the job down. So, unless you want me to be your nurse, you better figure something out. Might I suggest groveling? Maybe a few tears? If you want, I can call them back and sweet talk the guy into giving me the nurse’s name and home address so you—”

  “No!” I shout, interrupting her. Putting a smile on my face, I lower my voice. “I mean, I don’t want to bother this woman anymore than I already have. It’s okay, I’ll figure something out.”

  All I want is a chance to explain everything to Olivia, just one chance. I never told her about Dragon and King. I didn’t share with her the guilt that ate me alive every single day after I left them in the Dominican. I should have told her, but I thought I was protecting her by keeping my nightmares to myself. Olivia was my heart, my soul and my future. She gave me everything of herself, but I didn’t do the same. I never wanted her to see me as anything other than the strong, confident man she fell in love with. I’m not used to exposing my weaknesses. Letting someone see that there is a chink in your armor just gives them the power to crash through it and bring you to your knees. In my foolish attempts to guard my heart and protect my ego, I’d forgotten how little I actually minded being on my knees. Olivia brought me to them the day I met her and it was the best fucking place to be.

  Caroline drops her feet from the edge of my bed and stands. “Well, if you really want the same nurse, you better come up with a good plan. You obviously suck at apologies and sweet talk, so that’s out. This chick doesn’t want money, so that’s a no-go, as well. You could always take a page out of Mother’s book and blackmail her.”

  Caroline laughs and I smile right along with her, thinking about how our mother would absolutely stoop to something like that to get her way. The smile dies on my face, though, the longer I think about it.

  “Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” I mutter to myself, the plan already taking root in my brain.

  “I really don’t like that look on your face.” She crosses her arms in front of her and stares down at me suspiciously.

  Playing it off with a laugh, I shoo her out of the room, telling her I need to get some rest. As soon as I’m alone, I start going over the idea in my head again. Blackmail isn’t really a word I want to associate with Olivia in any way. Emotional persuasion sounds so much better. Olivia could never turn down a challenge, especially when it came to her work. The harder the patient, the more determined she was to help them. Some guy wakes up from a coma and refuses to eat? She made it her life’s mission to get a few scrambled eggs down his throat. A woman gets into a car accident and won’t do physical therapy? She wouldn’t sleep until she got that woman out of bed and had her doing laps around the hospital floor.

  My idea is probably a little shitty. Okay, it’s A LOT shitty, but right now I don’t give a fuck. All I need is the opportunity to be in the same room with her again, some time to let her see that the man she fell in love with is still here and willing to fight for her.

  When the doctor comes through the door a few minutes later to scold me once again for pushing myself too far, I don’t curse at him or bitch about going home. I have a smile on my face and, if I could walk without crutches, I’d have a spring in my fucking step.

  “I DON’T THINK I have enough wine stocked in the house for this.”

  I laugh at the shocked look on Parker’s face, the two of us facing each other on her couch with our legs tucked under us.

  After I left Cole, I couldn’t face going home. I was pissed and sad and so full of contradictory emotions I felt like I would explode. Parker and Garrett are my family and I didn’t give it a second thought when I turned my car around and headed in the direction of their home.

  I’d spent the last fifteen minutes rehashing the morning’s events with Parker and I could finally feel a little bit of weight lifting off my shoulders.

  “I mean, seriously? Of all the people in this fucking city who need home nurses, you get assigned to Cole? This isn’t a coincidence, Olivia. You know that, right?”

  Shaking my head, I set my glass of wine down on the coffee table next to us. “Stop thinking like a CIA agent. Not everything is a conspiracy.”

  “It’s impossible for her to stop thinking like an agent. If Annie loses one of her toys, Parker sits her in a kitchen chair and shines a light in her eyes until she breaks down and gives her intel on Barbie and Ken and where they might be hiding.”

  Parker reaches between us and grabs a pillow, chucking it straight at Garrett’s head as he walks into the living room. Garrett smacks the pillow away with a laugh before flopping down in a chair across from us.

  “You didn’t have anything to do with this, right?” Parker questions Garrett.

  It didn’t even occur to me that Garrett might have been behind this. He was the one who got me the job with t
he agency, making it possible for me to be a nurse again. Even though Garrett was supportive of me and stood by me alongside Parker through the events of the last year, Cole was still his friend first. He wasn’t happy with the way Cole left and hated what happened to me in the months after, but he made it a point to shut Parker down when she called Cole’s character into question. In his own strong, calm way, Garrett stood up for Cole and the decision he made to leave, saying that there were reasons behind his actions and leaving it at that. I refused to question Garrett further about it at the time because knowing Cole had any reason to abandon the life we’d built hurt too much.

  “Fuck no,” Garrett replies. “I didn’t even know he was back stateside.”

  The irritation in his voice is evident. Cole was like a brother to him and he didn’t take it well when Cole shut him out and left without a single word. I knew enough about war in general and SEAL missions in particular to comprehend that the things they’d seen and experienced brought them together in a way I would never fully understand. Having spent many nights lying beside Cole as he thrashed and screamed, I knew that he was haunted by nightmares only Garrett could relate to. I tried, I really tried to get Cole to open up to me. I let him know that he could tell me anything and I would help him any way I could, but he would always brush it off like it was no big deal. He was stubborn and strong, things I’d always loved about him. Looking back on it now, though, I realize his failure to share his nightmares with me made it easier for him to walk away.

  “I never thought he would come back,” I say, absently picking a piece of nonexistent lint off of my scrubs. “When he said good-bye, it was like even he knew he wouldn’t survive whatever he was going to do. It was so final, so cold and detached.”

  “It’s just something I have to do, you wouldn’t understand. You deserve better than this, Olivia. Better than me. You have a whole life ahead of you to live. I don’t have that luxury and, honestly, I wouldn’t deserve it even if I did.”