Kele Moon - Crossing the line

She couldn’t tell anyone she wasn’t capable of writing it because she didn’t know how it was supposed to go. It hadn’t happened yet. Her last book, The End of Innocence, had finished with a horrible cliffhanger. The heroine, Betsy, had left her longtime boyfriend, Garrett Shaw, to protect him from a terrible secret. Her brother sold her to the villains for something as worthless as money. Betsy had been forced to leave. If she hadn’t, Garrett, a superhero with humbling strength and speed, would’ve turned into something dark and sinister. She’d witnessed the darkness in him before. She’d rather see him weakened than turned into the thing he’d been raised to fight against.

All heroes had a weakness, even Garrett Shaw.

Betsy hadn’t been raped in the book. It was a story for young people, which was why Tabitha made the reason her brother sold her a little more palpable than drugs. Money, people could understand. A quick high was beyond heartless, even for an evil minion. In the book she had just been tortured and forced to give up her own powers to the villains. Betsy’s gifts weren’t as amazing as Garrett, or his sister Guinevere, or even his best friend Rocky, but hers could be used for terrible things in the wrong hands. Betsy’s gift was to drain any superhero of their powers, which was what had made her love affair with the biggest hero of Sapphire County so beautifully tragic. Every time he touched her, he got a little weaker.

Betsy was Garrett’s kryptonite, but he loved her anyway.

When the villains had won by draining the last of Garrett’s superhuman strength from him, it hadn’t even mattered. He was a broken young man. He didn’t want to fight anymore. It was a terrible place to leave off the series. When she wrote it, she told herself she’d fix the tragedy with the next book. She was a creative person. She could make up a better ending than the two star-crossed lovers dying old, weak, and alone, but the story had never come to her. She didn’t know how to fix it.

Tabitha smiled. Wyatt had turned out much better than where she’d left Garrett off in the books. She was proud of him, and she started writing for the first time in months, and this time she wasn’t inclined to delete it twenty minutes after she started.

Tabitha began to type. Three years later. She paused, reflecting that it was better than saying thirteen years, and added in that Betsy sat at her mother’s bedside, back home in Sapphire County after so long.

Tabitha was grateful to be writing again, and the words flowed as her fingers swept over the keystrokes. It was almost as if she’d never stopped.

She even borrowed the scene of her throwing up in the flowers despite it being horrifying in reality. Somehow laying herself bare in books was cleansing in a way few would understand. She was already to the part where Garrett took her to the cabin Betsy had rented from her friend Tony—a popular side character from the earlier books—when Wyatt came into the kitchen. He was bare-chested and barefoot, wearing only his jeans from earlier.

God, he was a sight with blond hair still mussed from the sex and that big, powerful body on display. He had to weigh at least thirty pounds more than he had when she left, and it was all muscle.

“Howdy, Sheriff.” She couldn’t help but grin at him. “You’re fine inspiration for a starving artist at this late hour.”

“Starving, huh?” He sat down across from her at the table and eyed her laptop. “Ain’t ya got a movie coming out next year?”

“Not my movie.” She looked back at the computer. “Someone else is making it. They just bought the rights.”

“You think they’re gonna cast someone handsome and charming to play Garrett Shaw?” Wyatt wagged his eyebrows, though the mirth didn’t reach his eyes the way it used to.

Tabitha laughed anyway. “I’m sure they will.”

“You wanna talk ’bout these books?” Wyatt asked her softly as his smile faded, and he went back to studying her intently. “I read them, Tabby. All of them.”

Tabitha closed her laptop rather than answer, and she stared at it for a long time before she whispered, “Wyatt—”

He shook his head before she could finish. “Forget I asked.”

“No, you have a right to ask,” she whispered. “I know I put a lot of things in there. Maybe they were things you wanted kept private and—”

“That’s not what I was saying.” Wyatt cut her off. “I don’t care what you use of my life. If it helps you, I want ya to put whatever the hell you want ’bout me in those books.”

“I just wanted kids to believe in heroes,” she said, hoping he understood in a way she always imagined he did when the books got so much more popular than she’d anticipated. “Kids like I was, who don’t have a reason to hope for someone to save them. You did that for me, Wyatt. You gave me that. No matter what happens after all this, please don’t ever forget that.”

Wyatt leaned his elbows against the table and put his face in his hands. “But I didn’t, did I? I read the last book. Garrett failed Betsy—horribly.”

“No, he didn’t. Betsy failed herself. She failed Garrett too.”

“Why’d you leave?” He said the words into his hands. “Please tell me.”

“No,” Tabitha whispered because she didn’t have a better defense against the question so soon after seeing him again. She didn’t know why she was surprised he would throw it at her. This was Wyatt she was dealing with. “I’m asking you not to press it. Please.”

Wyatt’s jaw locked. She could see the fury glowing in his eyes, something dark and far more formidable than she created in fiction. He stood up with a growl and turned away from her. He ran both his hands through his hair. Then he took a long, cooling breath as if searching for sanity.

“Did someone hurt you? Brett and Vaughn were living over in Mercy at that time, but I know your mama used to have lots of people over. Your uncles, their friends, that house was always full of criminals,” he snapped as if he’d lost the battle with himself. “I read the last book. I know it was something. I never believed it was just that fight. You don’t have to tell me what happened. Just give me a name and—”

“Wyatt—”

“Fine.” He threw up his hands and turned from her again. “I’m dropping it.”

“Thank you,” Tabitha whispered, even if she knew this wouldn’t last.

He covered his face with his hand as he stood there, the anger and emotion vibrating off him so strongly Tabitha could almost taste it. Finally, he said, “Why did I leave you that night? So young and stupid. Why did I start that fucking fight? I’d give anything to take it back.”

“Please don’t do this.” Tabitha wiped at her eyes frantically. “I shouldn’t have come back. I knew this was a mistake, and I sure as heck shouldn’t have gotten into your car earlier. We can’t fix this. We’re broken, Wy.”

“No, Tab.” Wyatt jumped forward and grabbed her by both arms so quickly she gasped. He forced her out of the chair. Then he hugged her tightly and rested his chin on the top of her head. “Listen to me, darlin’. You and me, we’re going to work together to make sure coming back wasn’t a mistake. I have no idea how we’re going to do it, but we are, okay? Whatever time we have, we’re going to make the best of it. We both got demons, but we’re going to hide them. We’ll shove them in a closet somewhere until we can get to a point that we can deal with them.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it’s supposed to happen,” Tabitha told him with authority, because she had been going to support groups since she first got to New York and recognized what a complete mess the rape and losing Wyatt had made her. “We could be doing more damage than good by lying to ourselves and trying to make this work. I don’t want it to be impossible for us, but I think—”

“It ain’t impossible,” Wyatt told her with that hard driving confidence he’d obviously never grown out of. “Nothing is impossible, especially if it’s worth fighting for, and you have always been worth fighting for. I should’ve fought the first time. I ain’t making that mistake again, and I don’t care how many letters you write me asking me not to.”

God, she wanted to believe it was so easy.

She needed this too. It felt so good to be in his arms again, and she had been so desperately lonely without him. She had forgotten how invincible Wyatt made her feel. He forced her to believe in happily ever afters, even if life had taught her time and again, in painful and traumatizing ways, that it was impossible. She wanted to know how the story was supposed to end, but for Wyatt’s sake she should have told him no and walked away.

Tabitha had doomed them both by agreeing to move into the old Conner house instead.

November 2012

A strange thing about demons.

Tabitha discovered they could hide in closets as long as everyone in the house was willing to keep the door shut. She and Wyatt made a commitment to keep them locked away, and it had worked amazingly well for months now.

Life wasn’t perfect, but it was close.

Her book was coming along nicely.

Jules was so busy with the final days of her pregnancy. She didn’t have much time to worry about them. Of course, that was Wyatt’s version, and Tabitha knew he always lied about those things. He spent Tuesday and Thursday evenings at her house while Romeo taught his karate classes. He usually came back bitching about Jules’s bad attitude since she’d been stuck on bed rest, but that was all Tabitha really knew about it.

Tabitha’s mother had come through her heart surgery well and was back home and recovering. Tabitha had paid a crew to do work on the house, and then she spent one full week cleaning it while her mother was in the hospital. She bought new furniture, and new linens for the beds. The house wasn’t spectacular, but it was clean and a vast improvement over what she’d found the first day back home.