Chapter Twenty-Two
Julian woke up in stages, which was unusual for him.
Normally, his alarm sounded and he went from a dead sleep to fully awake, already on the clock, mentally prepared to dig into his schedule. For the last couple of weeks, he’d woken up praying he could adhere to some semblance of structure, though he’d started to find it hopeless these past few days. Now, in Hallie’s bed, he regained consciousness totally devoid of any motivation to do anything but lie there in her warmth, in this room that smelled like flowers and detergent and dogs and sex. Because, yes, he’d gotten painfully hard watching her go through her nighttime routine of putting on lotions and short, silky pajamas and blowing kisses to the dogs. The mattress had creaked for another half hour before they fell into an exhausted spooning position, her amazing butt tucked into his lap like it was made for him.
Thank Christ he’d pulled his head out of his ass before doing something stupid, like going back to Stanford and leaving Hallie behind in St. Helena.
He loved teaching. A lot. He would look into sporadic guest speaking engagements, and, truth be told, he was even more eager to lecture about the meaning of time now that he had a new perspective. Before, he’d been concerned with passing on information. Facts. Now he wondered if he might make a difference in the lives of the students who came to listen to him. Maybe he could prevent them from making the same mistakes as him, taking for granted that the important things in his life would still be there when he was ready. More time would never yield itself unless he made it.
It didn’t even require as much effort as he thought to picture himself here, in St. Helena, using his time to make his mother’s days easier. His father might not be happy about it, but Dalton wasn’t here. Julian was prepared to embrace the sense of ownership of the land that bore his name.
His sister’s future remained to be seen, but he could help there, too, when she was ready to ask for it.
Then there was Hallie.
His heart woke up in his chest, firing so suddenly, he sucked in a breath.
Automatically, his hand smoothed across to her side of the bed, hoping for curls. Or skin. That smooth skin of hers that made him feel like sandpaper, roughing up and reddening her, leaving imprints of fingertips and teeth behind. He’d catalogue the damage right now. Kiss every mark he’d left behind . . .
His eyes opened, head turning.
No Hallie at all. No blond curls on her big, fluffy yellow pillow.
Where was she?
He sat up and listened, heard nothing except the dogs snoring in various places around the bedroom. Todd had taken edge-of-the-bed honors while the other two were sprawled on the dog beds in the corner. Other than that, there was no audible movement in the cottage. No lights on, either. Though maybe she’d gone into the en suite bathroom and left the light off so she wouldn’t wake him up?
“Hallie,” Julian called, annoyed by the finger of cold that traced up the back of his neck. There was no reason to be worried or alarmed. It’s not like she’d disappeared into thin air.
Still, when there was no response from the other side of the bathroom door, he threw off the covers, his feet already carrying him across the angled area rug. He checked in the bathroom just to be sure, then left the bedroom with added purpose in his step. Kitchen or backyard. She’d be in one of those two places. They didn’t discuss her sleeping habits, but didn’t it stand to reason that Hallie’s should be irregular?
A fond smile curved his mouth.
Had her off-the-wall, unscheduled lifestyle really annoyed him before? Because now the challenge of pinning her down excited the shit out of him. Like he’d said yesterday afternoon, she could show up late as long as she kept showing up. Period. Right about now, he liked the idea of carrying Hallie to bed and showing her there was no set schedule in terms of when he needed her. It was all the time. Every minute of every day . . .
Where the hell was she, though?
The living room sat eerily silent, the other, smaller bathroom empty. No one in the kitchen. No sign of anyone having passed through to get a drink of water or fix a snack. And the lights were off in the backyard. He went to check, anyway, opening the glass double doors and doing a turn around the unoccupied garden.
“Hallie.”
She’d gone out. At . . .
He turned on a light to check his watch, before remembering it was on the nightstand. Glancing back over his shoulder toward the kitchen, he spied the time on the microwave.
2:40 a.m.
She’d left the house at 2:40 a.m. There was no reasonable explanation for that. Not even for Hallie. People didn’t go for walks in the middle of the night, and if she did, she would have taken the dogs, right? Nothing in town was open. Not even the bars. She had a friend . . . Lavinia? But he had no phone number for her, and anyway, regardless of where she’d gone or with whom, why wouldn’t she wake him up? What the fuck was going on?
She couldn’t have been . . . taken against her will somewhere, right?
The idea of that was ludicrous.
Was she a sleepwalker and failed to tell him?
What was that sound?
He listened for several long seconds before realizing it was his own wheezing.
Fuck. Fuck. Okay, take a breath.
But he couldn’t. And in some weird, parallel universe, he could hear sirens and smell the cloying scent of smoke. There was no fire. No one was in danger. But he couldn’t convince himself of that. Because Hallie could be somewhere out on the road in her pajamas or trapped somewhere. Was she trapped?
Now the dogs had gotten up to follow him around the house, their tails wagging, heads butting up against his knees. When did his pulse start ricocheting around the inside of his skull? He could hear the pumping of blood in his veins like there was a microphone inside of his chest. The kitchen, which he couldn’t even remember entering, was smaller suddenly, and he couldn’t remember the way back to the bedroom.
“Hallie,” he called, a lot more sharply this time—and the dogs started to bark.
Goddammit, he didn’t feel good. The closing of his throat and blurring of the immediate area, the stiffness in his fingers—he remembered it well. Too well. He’d spent four years trying to avoid this happening again, this helplessness running into him like a cruise liner splintering a rowboat. And before that, before the fire, he’d worked his whole life around not ending up here. So he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.
“It’s fine,” he told the dogs, but his voice sounded unnatural, his gait stiff as he moved through the dark living room to the front door, throwing it open, only vaguely aware that he wore nothing but briefs. The blast of cold night air on Julian’s skin alerted him to the fact that he was sweating. A lot. It poured down his chest and the sides of his face.
Panic attack. Acknowledge what it is.
He could hear Dr. Patel’s voice drifting forward from the past. From those sessions a hundred years ago, when they’d worked on emergency coping strategies.
Name the objects around you.
Couch, picture frame, dogs. Howling dogs.
Then what?
He couldn’t remember what the hell was supposed to come next, because Hallie was missing. This wasn’t a dream, it was too vivid. Nausea didn’t come in sleep like this. Nor did his jaw lock up, his hands useless and fumbling as he tried to get outside to go find her.
“Hallie,” he shouted, walking stiff-legged down the path toward the street, searching right and left for her figure in the darkness. No truck. It wasn’t parked in the driveway. Why didn’t he think to look for that? Why hadn’t he tried calling her? His brain wasn’t functioning the way it was supposed to, and that scared the shit out of him. “Dammit,” he huffed, rubbing at the concrete pouring down his throat. “Dammit . . .”
He needed to get back into the house to try calling her.
Focus. Focus.
The sound of tires on gravel stopped Julian short, just before he walked into the cottage. He spun around quickly, too quickly, to find Hallie running across the lawn, white as a ghost. Relief almost knocked him out cold, his hand gripping the doorframe to keep him on his feet. She’s okay, she’s okay, she’s okay.
But she wasn’t? Not really.
Her mouth was moving, but no sound was coming out.
He didn’t like that, didn’t like seeing her upset, and he needed to find out where the hell she’d been. If she’d gone out in the middle of the night, something had to be very wrong.
“Is there a fire?” he slurred.
“What? No.” She stumbled back, hands on her cheeks. “Oh God.”
“You’re shaking,” he forced out, jaw refusing to loosen.
“I’m okay, I’m okay.” Despite her assurances, she started to sob, and the sound dug into his gut like a shovel. “Let’s get you into the house. Everything is fine, I promise.”
You’ve always been a fucking head case.
The final blow landed in the form of humiliation. His legs weren’t working correctly and he sounded like an idiot and he was scaring her. Scaring Hallie. That fact scored his insides like a razor blade. On top of the unsteady feeling in his limbs and dulled cognizance, he was already anticipating the numbness that would follow. He wouldn’t be able to comfort her then. Wouldn’t be able to do anything. He couldn’t let Hallie see him like that. The way his father had witnessed him in the back bedroom of the main house. When Julian couldn’t mentally surface enough to help. To act. To be a useful member of the family in the most trying of times.
Stay away from the vineyard.
In her effort to get Julian back on his feet, the corner of something white peeked out of the pocket of Hallie’s windbreaker. He stared at it through the blur, through the blazing-hot mortification, not sure why it was triggering something in his memory. Something about the color and shape was familiar. If he wasn’t so disoriented, he might have asked to see the object in her pocket, but in this state, where nothing seemed normal or typical, he reached for it without asking and drew it out.
And stared down at a . . . letter from his secret admirer?
What was Hallie doing with it?
“Where . . .” He shook his head hard, trying to clear the debris. “Is this where you went? To go get this letter? Why?”
Now Hallie’s breathing matched his own. Scattered and wheezing and not making sense, as they were both sitting down on the steps of her porch, though he couldn’t remember when they’d taken a seat. “I’m sorry,” she said, hiccupping. “I’m so sorry.”
The truth hit him like the spray from an ice-cold hose.
Hallie had left in the middle of the night to get this letter.
Which meant she’d known it was there . . . and didn’t want him to find it.
Didn’t want him to read the contents. Because she already knew what they were?
With a swallow stuck in his throat, Julian tore open the envelope and read the letter, his concentration returning to him in that moment, like the blunt swing of a bat. It was hard to decide in that moment how he felt.
“I pictured you as the admirer the whole time,” he said, sounding foggy, words running together. “Should have listened to my gut, I guess . . .”
Hallie reared back, stricken. He tried to reach out and stroke her face, but his arm wouldn’t lift. Was he angry? No. Not exactly. He really didn’t know how to be angry with this woman. Was it humanly possible to be anything but grateful that she’d returned his feelings so strongly that she’d written letters to him? Grateful that she’d found a way to reach him when he’d had his head up his ass?
No, despite the fact that she’d lied, he’d honestly be a fool to be mad about this. Their connection, however it came about, was a gift. But now, the residual fear he’d woken up with—fear that she was hurt or in danger—threatened to choke him.
Julian lurched to his feet and entered the house, dead set on getting out of there immediately. It had happened again. Right in front of her. He’d just shown the woman he loved his greatest weakness. One that he’d done everything in his power to hide, to deal with, to overcome. And if he had to look at her sympathy for another second, he was going to die.
“Julian, can you please stop walking away from me? Say something, please?” She was panicking, crying, shredding the letter in her hands, and there was nothing he could do about it. Comfort her? He wasn’t capable. Not in this state—and not when he already knew what was coming next. At least she was safe. Thank God she was safe. “I’m sorry. I thought you would find it earlier today. The letter. I wanted you to know everything, but then . . . Please, everything was just so perfect, so perfect that I couldn’t mess it up.”
No, he’d been the one to do that.
The sweat was still clinging to his skin like an accusation.
His stomach burned. He couldn’t even look her in the eye. It only added to the humiliation that he couldn’t get his voice to work.
On legs he couldn’t even feel, he went back to the bedroom and dressed, shoving his watch, his phone, his keys into his pockets.
“No, Julian. No. Where are you going?”
All he could do was walk past her out of the house, away from what had just happened. Just like he’d done four years ago. But this time—and he could feel this in the marrow of his bones—the price was much higher.