Savage Collision: A Hawke Family Novel (The Hawke Family Book 1) (32 page)

Grabbing my phone, I open the last message she sent me, right before she arrived at my place to head to the gallery opening.

> Be there in ten! Can’t wait to see you in a tux…and out of one ;) <

Fuck.

I take a deep, cleansing breath, and try to shake off the fear making my heart race just thinking about talking to her.

Suck it up, you fucking pussy!

I start typing, not even sure what I am going to write.

< I’m sorry. I know that in no way begins to make up for what happened last night, but I don’t know what else to say. I’m fucked up, Danika, in ways you can’t even imagine, ways I didn’t even realize until recently. It isn’t fair to you to put you through this. I need to figure my shit out, and I am going to try to do that. But I don’t know when, or if, I’ll ever be in a place to be with you again. I just need you to know that I’m trying, and that I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t, couldn’t, tell you the other night, but I need you to know that. >

Staring at what I wrote, my finger hovers over the green “Send” button. Once I send it, there’s no taking it back. Maybe it’s wrong to tell her I love her. It certainly isn’t the most romantic thing in the world to do it via text message, but I need her to know. I need her to understand this isn’t about her.

Clicking “Send” feels like pulling the pin on a grenade. Once it’s done, there’s no going back. It could explode in my hand.

I close my eyes and drop my head back against the headboard, staring at the bright moonlight shining across the off-white ceiling. When my phone vibrates in my hand, I jerk up and scramble to open the message.

> Figure it out. I will be here. <

Seven words. But those seven words speak volumes to me about Danika, and who she is. She hasn’t given up, and that’s all that matters right now. That’s all I can ask of her, all I can expect after what I put her through.

I just hope it’s enough.

I fucking hate that brown chair. The leather creaks every time she moves, and it’s like nails screeching on a chalkboard, giving me a fucking migraine every single time I’m here. She moves a lot, constantly crossing and uncrossing her legs, adjusting her glasses, taking a drink of water. For a shrink, she clearly has some issues of her own if she can’t sit still for an hour-long session.

Three weeks of this has driven me almost to my breaking point.

“Savage? Did you hear me?”

Shifting my eyes up from the arm of the chair, I find her watching me intently, eyebrows raised. “What? Sorry.”

She smiles. She isn’t an unattractive woman, not really my type, but pretty, in that nerdy librarian way some men drool over. But the only woman I care about is tall, blonde, and not currently speaking to me, by my own choice.

“It’s all right. I said that you have been coming here twice a week for the last three weeks and I still feel like I know nothing about you.”

I internally roll my eyes at her. If I actually did it, she would call me out on it. I’d end up getting talked in circles about why her comment annoyed me.

“What do you mean? I told you all about myself.”

She smiles again, but it doesn’t reach her eyes and she jots something down on her notepad. “You’ve told me about your work. You’ve told me all about your relationship with Danika. You’ve told me about it, in great detail. I feel like I know Danika extremely well. She sounds like a wonderful woman. What I don’t know, is anything about you outside the relationship, and you haven’t told me why you are here other than that you said you ‘blew things’ with her.”

Shit.

She’s right, of course. I’ve spent weeks telling her how I met Dani, how we started dating, how our relationship progressed, but I never actually told her what happened. I’ve danced around the subject just like I’ve avoided talking about me and my family when she’s asked.

“So,” she continues, “today, you are going to tell me about you, and then you are going to tell me what went wrong with Danika.”

I hate talking about myself—truly. I’m sure there are people who love it, those vain people who get off on the attention, but I’m not one of those people, never have been. But, I guess if I really want to figure out how to fix things, I need to play along.

“What do you want to know?”

She smiles again. “Everything. Start by telling me about your family.”

I launch into the family tree, giving her the run-down of my parents and siblings as quickly and succinctly as possible. No need to volunteer too much information.

“You mentioned one of your sisters passed away. Can you tell me about that?”

My chest tightens. I should have expected she would ask. It’s only natural for her to wonder about that, and I should have been prepared to talk about it. She hasn’t asked about the chair either, probably waiting for me to mention it.

“Um, well, it was a car accident, three years ago. I was with her.”

“Is that how you were injured?” she asks, leaning forward slightly in her chair.

Creak.

I cringe. “Yes.”

Don’t volunteer information.

“I can see you’re uncomfortable talking about this, but sometimes the things we’re most uncomfortable discussing are what we really need to.”

Well, shit. Sense. Why does she have to make sense?

I take a deep breath and begin talking. I tell her about the accident. I tell her everything. I tell her the truth, the truth I’ve never told anyone—not Danika, not Gabe, not my siblings, not even my mother. By the time I’m done, I can’t see anything through my tears.

I fucking hate crying. There’s no other way to say it. I’m not a crier. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve cried in my life, and now, I am a blubbering idiot.

Something pushes against my hand, and through the veil of tears, I realize it is a box of tissues.

Jesus, I am such a pussy.

I grab one, blowing my nose and wiping my eyes quickly to destroy the evidence.

When I look back up at her, she’s watching me intently—no doubt analyzing me in ways I can’t even imagine. She offers me a kind smile. “Tell me about after the accident. Tell me about the hospital.”

Wow, she isn’t taking it easy on me, is she?

I talk, and talk, and talk, until I tell her all—every damn doctor, every surgery, every sleepless night, everything.

This isn’t so hard. Its clinical, it doesn’t rip my heart out the way talking about Star does.

When I finish, she simply nods. “Looks like we have a little time left. Do you want to talk about what happened with Danika?”

Jesus Christ, woman! Give me a fucking break!

I look at my watch. How could all of that only taken half an hour? Maybe because she didn’t say much, just nodded and gave me a lot of sympathetic looks. But I don’t want her sympathy. I want her to fix me.

“I kind of had a meltdown.”

“Meltdown? Explain what you mean by that.”

The night is all too clear in my head. “Well, the night started out great. Then it got weird…”

I tell her about the gallery, the run-in with Andrew and Becca, and everything else.

“When you say you froze, what does that mean? Tell me how you felt physically and what was going on in your mind.”

The answer to her questions isn’t readily apparent to me. “I don’t know exactly. My heart started racing, and not in a good way, my skin felt all tight, like it was shrinking all over my body, and I broke into a cold sweat. I felt like I was suffocating and couldn’t breathe.”

She nods and urges me to continue.

“I don’t think I was really thinking anything.”

She eyes me skeptically. “What was the last thing you do remember thinking before you had the panic attack?”

“I guess I was thinking how much I loved her, and how I just wanted her to be happy.”

“Was that all? Try to put yourself back in the moment, and tell me if you remember anything else.”

I close my eyes and remember the feeling of her skin against mine, her breath against my face and neck, her mouth on mine, her hand on my cock, easing it into her wet heat…

Shit. Getting a hard-on in the shrink’s office is not a good idea.

“Um, I guess I was thinking about what sex with her was going to be like.”

“What do you mean?”

What the hell do I mean?

All the fantasies I’ve had over the last four months of fucking Danika flood my brain—her against the wall while I slam into her, her pinned to the bed while I fuck her from behind, all the things I want to do and know I never can.

“I mean, I was wondering how I was going to, you know…do it…”

She leans back in her chair and nods. “Have you been with anyone sexually since the accident?”

What the fuck does that have to do with anything?

“No.”

“Have you tried to be with anyone else?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“How did Danika react when you froze?”

Dropping my head into my hands, I squeeze my eyes shut and try not to picture the look on her face before she turned her back on me and walked away. That will only lead to more tears.

“She was worried. She tried to calm me down, but I don’t think she had any idea what was happening.” The fear in her eyes is crystal clear in my mind, although I wish it was something I could forget.

“Did she say anything?”

I groan. “She told me she loves me.”

“You say that like it isn’t a good thing.”

“It is a good thing. I love her, too. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me. But…”

She waits for me to continue, but breaks the silence when it’s clear I won’t. “But what?”

I look back up at her when I hear the creak of the leather. “But I can’t give her what she needs.”

Dr. Cochran nods and leans toward me. “What is it you think she needs?”

“Fuck.” I pull my hair back and clench my eyes, remembering her words, her tears. “She needs someone who is fucking whole.”

“Did she say that?”

I shake my head, but avoid any eye contact with her.

“Savage. Please look at me.”

I finally look at her, and she smiles. “Did she say that?”

“No.”

“What did she say?”

As I could ever forget her words.

“She said it wouldn’t be a deal breaker if I couldn’t have sex, but that it was a deal breaker that I wouldn’t tell her what was going on.”

Doc relaxes back in her chair and watches me. “Hmm.”

“Why are you ‘hmming?’” My annoyance level has reached nuclear levels. Talking about this isn’t helping, all it’s doing is making me relive the worst fucking moments of my life.

“Well, you told me Becca left you after the accident…” I nod in agreement. “Why do you think she left?”

“How the fuck would I know?” I spit the words at her. “I never even spoke to her about it. All she told Storm was that she ‘couldn’t do it’ and then she fucking disappeared from my life.”

She left me when I needed her. She left me when my life had fallen apart.

“Just because she didn’t tell you doesn’t mean you haven’t speculated or thought about it. Tell me why you think she left.”

Her inability to see the obvious has my blood boiling. I am about an inch away from leaving and not coming back. “Why the hell do you think? Because I was a fucking wreck! I was in the hospital and had no idea how I was going to live like this, what it was going mean…she couldn’t deal.”

“Any chance you are projecting your perceptions of Becca’s feelings onto Danika?”

I hear the words, but they don’t process. They are a jumble of sounds in my head, mixing in with all the shit already floating in there. I shake my head, trying to clear away everything else, concentrate on what she said, but I can’t.

“Savage?”

“What?” I snap, but she doesn’t recoil. She watches me for a moment before continuing.