Surface Currents by Rachelle Paige

Author:Rachelle Paige
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
Publisher: Rachelle Paige
Published: 2018-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Clutching her arms tight against her chest, Shannon’s entire torso seized. She didn’t breathe. She didn’t take her eyes off his. She pressed her fingers into her forearms until her nails began to dig into the soft flesh. She’d be bruised, but she barely felt the pain. Only her emotions were registering with her brain.

“I don’t…” Her words came out in a whisper. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I don’t ever do this. I never get to close to people. I have trouble with that.”

His eyes darkened. She was screwing this up. She could read disdain in his narrowing stare and flaring nostrils.

“I walk away.” She shook her head, trying to make her disjointed thoughts coherent before he turned his back and left. Without giving her a chance to explain. “I don’t want to just walk away from you.”

“Look, Shannon.” He shut his eyes and rubbed his temples with one hand.

She’d seen the gesture enough. The body language that read you’re too stupid to get this, go away little girl. She probably should turn back now. She couldn’t.

“My life was destroyed when some drunk college kid thought it’d be a good idea to get behind the wheel of a car at nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve. One minute, I’m holding my wife’s hand in my lap, stopped at an intersection, as our baby slept in his car seat behind us. Next thing I remember, I’m alone in a quiet car, my wife slumped next to me and my baby silent. They were both gone. The drunk college kid? Pushed us into the middle of an intersection when we were stopped. Our car was t-boned. And that stupid kid? Guess what?” He let out a bitter laugh, the sheer calamity of that accident never ceasing to astound. “He ruined his parents’ lives too. He was their only child and he died instantaneously.”

She reached out to comfort him, but her hand stopped inches from his face. He winced at her approaching contact. She drew her hand back and resumed keeping herself still and small. Making herself small had been the tactic she’d developed when her life had fallen apart.

“So don’t tell me you understand what it’s like, okay? I have to go.”

“No, stop. Please let me ex—“

He held up a hand and she fell silent. The anger in his eyes at reliving the painful memories she knew wasn’t directed at her. Still, she acquiesced. Diffusing anger and rage had been another one of those lessons she’d wished she’d never learned. Or at least not so little.

“When I was six, my father didn’t wake up one morning. He was healthy, worked out, ate well, had no family history of anything, and never smoked. One day an aneurysm killed him before we even knew there might be a problem.” She dropped her hands to her side, forcing herself to stand straight and tall and let her voice be heard. She’d never told anyone anything. Trish had known from her mother, and Shannon had never felt the need to share her history with anyone else.

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