Taming 7 (Boys of Tommen, #5)

by Chloe Walsh

“You can hold my hand forever.” “You promise?” “Uh-huh.”

Claire Biggs had a lot of things. My back. My attention. My heart. My soul. Yeah, she had all of me and that wasn’t an exaggeration.

“Hurt people hurt people,” Shannon continued. “She’s a hurt person. A hurt but very redeemable person.”

Why are you the way you are,

“If Caoimhe was here, I would tell her that what happened to her doesn’t define her.” Darren looked me dead in the eyes when he said, “It defines him. He’s the monster in the story. The shame is on his doorstep.” He reached up and stroked his jaw before saying, “And I would tell her that it’s never too late to disclose.” His eyes burned with sincerity. “Never.”

“Omigod, Gerard, I want us to have sex with each other!” I blurted out, spelling it out for him in the most unsexy way imaginable. “As in, I want you to put your ladder in my tree.” “In your tree?”

Because at the end of the day, I had been carrying this cross for ten long years, and I had coped fabulously. I would continue to go on coping just fine once that monster was on the other side of the world from me. The way I saw it, I was making the best of a bad situation. The worst had already happened to me, and I’d survived.

“Yes,” she beamed at Patrick. “Just like Groundhog Day.” She turned to the rest of us. “The years are passing by for the rest of us, but she’s stuck in that moment.” Shrugging, she added, “Time can’t heal when it doesn’t pass by.”

Could I truly get the words out again, knowing that the one and only time I had spoken them before, they had fallen on deaf ears. I wasn’t believed then, so what was to say that Claire would believe me now? Yes, she loved me, I knew that was true, but love didn’t have anything to do with someone’s ability to believe in monsters.

I didn’t know how she managed to do it, but she healed the broken pieces inside of me. She patched me up in such a way that I was a functioning man again. For her. Only for her.

How could he do it? How could he live with his demons like this and mask his pain with a smile? I didn’t understand it, but I knew in my heart that I could never in good conscience allow it to happen another minute. He deserved to be saved, and I was determined to do that. Never again would I sit back and watch his head go under the water. I would bring him to the surface even if it meant drowning our relationship in the process.

“She won’t be able to love me now.” “She already loves you,” he strangled out. “We all love ya.”