Deep River Promise, Jackie Ashenden [large ebook reader .TXT] 📗

There was a long and terrible silence.

He’d never shown his temper to her. He’d shown her nothing but patience and calm. Sucking it up and carrying on the way she’d always taught him.

But he didn’t want to suck it up and carry on anymore. He was tired of pretending. Tired of forcing down what he felt and locking it away. Because that’s what he’d been doing the past few days, wasn’t it?

Only the past few days? Try the past few years.

His breath caught and he stared out over the river, unseeing, his thoughts whirling.

Years? Had he really being doing that for years? Forcing everything down? Locking everything away?

You know it’s true. Sucking up and carrying on is what you’ve been doing ever since Ella died.

It felt as if the very ground he was sitting on had shifted beneath him, rearranging itself into a landscape he didn’t recognize. A place where his emotions hadn’t been burned out, where his heart hadn’t died. Where the feelings he had weren’t the last electrical impulses from a dying limb or the last sparks in a dead hearth full of ashes. Where those feelings had always been there. Forced down and locked away—because that’s what he’d been taught to do—but still there. Always still there.

His heart felt painful, his chest full of glass, and this time he didn’t ignore the agony or tell himself he didn’t feel it. He sat there with it, examining it.

He knew where it was from. He knew why it was there.

You’re angry and you’re in pain, and you can’t stop thinking about her, can’t stop wanting her. Because you’re in love with her.

Love isn’t finite and you never lose the ability, that’s what she’d told him. It was only that fear gets in the way.

Was she right? Was this pain all because he loved her and was too afraid to admit it?

“Of course you were of some use,” his mother said at last, oblivious. “You couldn’t help Ella, and it wasn’t your fault that woman left. She should have stuck by you. I certainly never approved of her leaving.” She made a chiding noise. “Anyway, what’s got your goat?”

Damon took a slow, silent breath, pain seeping into every part of him. But it was different this time. It wasn’t the last gasp of his dying heart. It was more like the pain that came from sensation returning to limbs that had been frozen for a very long time.

“My goat,” he echoed, a strange amusement filling him. “You really want to know what’s got my goat?”

“I wouldn’t have asked you otherwise.”

“Fine. Why did you always say ‘suck it up and carry on’?”

There was another long silence.

“Because life is hard. I told you that.” She paused a moment, then went on, “And you were such a caring little boy. You felt everything so deeply and I hated to see you get hurt. My daddy always told me that carrying on was the best way when life got tough, that you had to develop calluses, otherwise you’d just fall down dead where you stand. And he was right.”

He’d heard that same story for years. About how tough life was and how you had to be hard to survive it. And he’d internalized all those lessons.

But now that story felt different, because he was seeing it differently. His mother hadn’t been cutting him off or abandoning him. She’d been trying to protect him the only way she knew how. Teaching him things that had worked for her because of her life and her choices.

You don’t have to do that, though. Your life is different and so are the choices you make.

The earth slowed and came to a dead stop. A moment hanging in time, endless, depthless.

Yes, he was different. And he could make different choices.

For years, he’d chosen the surface life. Choosing to drift with the currents and never go deeper. Giving only so much and no more. Never committing, never giving his all, because he was afraid of returning to that black place after Ella had died, where he was alone with his feelings and there was no one to help him through it.

But had he really come through it? Sure, he wasn’t in the darkness, but he wasn’t exactly in the light either. He was in a kind of half world, in limbo, where everything was muted and gray. Where there was no pain, but no joy. No sadness, yet no happiness. Nothing to regret, and nothing to look forward to.

He was a kite with no string, and it was freeing being that kite. But sooner or later, the wind was going to shred you or you’d crash into a mountain or the rain would make you come apart.

You needed a tether. You needed something to ground you. To hold you when the wind got too strong. To shield you from the rain. To watch for mountains in your path.

You needed joy and happiness and a future, even if it meant pain and sadness and anger. Because otherwise, what was life? What was the point?

You might as well fall down dead where you stand.

The truth dawned on him, slow and clear, like the first streaks of dawn after a cold and lonely night.

It wasn’t sucking it up and carrying on that protected you.

It was love.

And he could choose that if he wanted. If he stopped being afraid. If he opened himself up and didn’t hold back. He could put down roots and tether himself. Feel all the pain that love brought, but all the joy too, because he’d forgotten that there was joy.

Ella’s arms around his neck, her smile lighting up his world. His mother making him hot chocolate on a Sunday night as they watched TV together. Connor clinking bottles with him. Astrid holding him. Astrid smiling at him. Astrid’s gray eyes full of stars as they looked at him.

Astrid…

She was a woman who’d been dealt one of life’s shitty hands, but she