Solace by S.L. Scott

Author:S.L. Scott [Scott, S.L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781940071565
Publisher: S.L. Scott
Published: 2017-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

17

Jason

“Why do you sleep in your old room?”

Floating on her back with her eyes closed and her body still, Delilah replies, “I feel safe in that corner of the house.”

I wade through the water, mentally running through the floor plan of the farmhouse. Her room is the farthest from the front door, the back door, and the common areas. “You never wanted to take over the master bedroom downstairs?”

As if an unforeseen force pushes her down into the water, she loses her balance when she loses her concentration. She pops up.

Glorious in the mid-morning sun shining on her wet lashes and water droplets covering her skin, she swims away from me. After being here practically every day and night for over a week, I’ve discovered when she turns away from me she’s either avoiding a question or hiding her eyes from me. She can’t lie when looking into my eyes. Either way it’s avoidance. Simple as that.

Swimming after her, I catch her twenty yards from the dock, but keep swimming to give her the space I know she needs. “I can dog-paddle all day long.”

“Why do you want to know all the stuff that doesn’t matter now?”

“Because it matters to me.”

“Fine.” She splashes me. “If you get to ask questions and I have to answer, same goes for you. I’ll make you a deal. We take turns and when one doesn’t answer, the game is over. How’s that?”

She may be good at avoiding those grenades of questions I drop around her sometimes, but I’m the king of keeping secrets. So this proposition gives me pause.

For us to be together, she needs to know about the life I’ve been leading. As much as I hate admitting the bad stuff, there were good things to come out of it. What if this is my chance to redeem myself? What if she thinks I’m a monster? What if she loves me more because I survived when I didn’t know if I would at times? What if she can’t forgive my past? What if she hates me? What if . . . letting her in will free my soul from these sins I’ve carried with me?

I swallow my pride. “Okay,” I whisper. “Deal.”

She swims closer but stops ten or so feet away. “When my dad died, Cole moved us straight into my parents’ bedroom. I didn’t want to sleep in there. I was still grieving, and it felt disrespectful. It hurt to be in that room at all, much less take over it.”

“Why he’d do that?”

Smiling gently, she reminds me, “My turn, remember?” I swim a foot or two closer to her. “Where have you been the last three years?”

Easy. “Alaska for a brief stint on a fishing boat. The money was great, but the work was hard.”

“You never minded hard work from what I remember.”

She’s tricky. It’s not a question, but a statement I feel the need to answer. “It wasn’t the work I wanted to do. Also, it sucked being on that boat for weeks at a time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.