Revive Me, Part Two: The Affair (New Haven, #3)

by J.L. Seegars

We were great. We were a collision of destiny and inevitability. We were fate personified. We were everything.

when I hear her speak, but it ends up serving another purpose completely when amber eyes begin scanning the crowd and land, almost instantly, on me. In a span of a heartbeat, the stalled air in my lungs becomes the only thing holding me to Earth because the rest of me is weightless, stunned, suspended in the liquid honey of her gaze.

His scent hits me first, whipped around by another gust of wind that transports me back to the days when leather and earth meant comfort and safety. Now it just smells like heartbreak. Like betrayal and stolen futures.

Grief is funny that way. A temperamental wave that strikes whenever it wants to, causing you to form attachments to things that never would have mattered, never would have been on your radar, if your person wasn’t gone.

But that’s what Chris and I are, what we’ve always been. A natural disaster. A tornado of tumultuous emotion that sucked us both in, but only left me ruined.

Why won’t you just try, Chris? I’m your wife, and I love you but you won’t even give me a chance to show you that I can make you happier than Mal—”

“Because I love her, and I will always love her.”

No one says my name like he does, like every syllable is unique, special. Its own incantation in a book of ancient magic.

and I do it with the weight of our past caving in my chest and the demand of my desire building a maddening pressure in my core. Suddenly, I know that this is what I came here for. Not to get answers, but to give one.

Because I love you. Because I’ve only ever loved you.

but I’d stop the world for you. I’d freeze time if it meant I would never run out of opportunities to look at you.”

Chris’ eyes fall shut, and I can see it on his face. Ecstasy. Pure, unbridled pleasure. The kind that either stuns you into silence or makes

impossible for you to hold in the sounds of satisfaction. Chris is a vocal lover, he always

been, so I have a pretty good idea of what I’...

how it kisses the ridged flesh on the front side of my inner walls, eliciting strangled sounds of need from my throat.

The way every union of our bodies is like walking the fine line between the past and the present. Glimpsing the future while being held tight by the certainty of precious memories.

Like I can do anything: kick grief’s ass, find a way to take care of the people I love without sacrificing myself.

“Because from the second I found out Eric was gone, all I wanted to do was hold you long enough to absorb your grief. To take every ounce of the pain you’ve been holding and carry it for you. When I boarded that plane, I knew I had no right to want any of those things, to want anything from you, but I want this, princess. I want to be here for you. Will you let me?”

Most people don’t know what it is to be completely selfless, to wake up every day and put someone else’s needs before your own, but Mallory lived that reality every day. So much so, that she lost herself to it.

Her eyes are still a marriage of fire and starlight. Her lips are still plush and kissable. And she’s still in possession of the purest, most open heart I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering.

Chris’ touch is a painful relief, a reminder of what brought me to the peak of emotion that has escaped me for far too long, in the first place.

And while I know that some of these tears are for my brother, I’m unsettled by the fact that Chris’ presence in my life is what unlocked them. That the relief I feel at finally having this moment of catharsis is muddied by the confusion of not knowing which tears are for Eric and which ones are for the future Chris threw away.

Grief is funny like that. It just comes out of nowhere, demanding your time and attention, not caring where you are or what you’re doing.”

“Mama always says it comes in waves, but I feel like I’ve just been swept away by a tsunami.” “That’s what happens when you try to go over it instead of through it.”

Fully convinced that I’d been spared the burden of walking the long, harrowing road of paralyzing grief, and gifted with the opportunity to start at the end, where the ache was there but bearable.

“Yeah, well, going through is hard.” That’s an understatement. Going through is hell. A torturous process with no end in sight.

“And I wanted you. I needed you. I needed you so badly I wished for you, Chris.”

“Do you know how desperate you have to be to wish for someone who destroyed you, to crave their presence even when you know it’s only going to cause you pain?”

A safe place to fall apart. In every other relationship in her life, Mallory has cast herself as the caretaker. The rock on which everyone else can lean, but when it’s me and her, she can be this. Vulnerable, trusting me to be her shield. Soft, allowing me to be her stone.

No one knows better than me how complex grief can be. How it manifests itself in different ways, hits you at different times. The way it slithers through all of your old hurts, using them to strengthen its grip on your life.

There will be no surprises, no secrets, no heartbreak. Just me, her, and the life we were always meant to have together.

missed your scent. I don’t even know how you’re here right now, but I’m so happy that you are.”

“I think I’ve never been so glad to see a plan I made fall apart. I think that if you hadn’t seen me, I would have gotten on a plane and gone right back to my miserable life.”

“Any reality without you in it is misery, princess.”

She tastes like the ocean.

She’s mesmerizing, all mahogany skin covered in marks that speak of growth, of extension, of living in a constant state of becoming. Full curves rivaling mountain-bound winding roads that take you through lush valleys before you get to the magic of the peak.

Her smile made a lot of things worth

scarred me in places I can’t see. Because of him, the deepest corners of my soul are a wasteland, and the memory of him kneeling in front of Giselle was the poisoned rainwater that soaked into the soil and stole the possibility of anything beautiful or real blooming there.

Stirrings of hope breaking through cracked earth, wanting to be nourished by his touch.

Our entire lives wrapped up in each other, tangled like the roots of a tree that’s now missing a branch.

It’s the magnetism that exists between two people even when there are a million other people in the room. It’s knowing exactly how many steps it will take you to get to them no matter where they are in relation to you. The frantic thrum of colliding hearts when you finally reach them, when you finally touch them.

When the curve of their neck suddenly becomes the only path you want to take. When their lips are your longitude and the unique swirl of color in the center of their irises is your latitude. And every part of you knows that as long as they’re breathing you have a reason to stay alive.

She sat me down and explained, as gently as she could, that no matter how high I jumped, I wouldn’t be able to reach my mom. She said the space between heaven and Earth was too vast to be conquered by my tiny hands, and that I should try sitting down and talking because my words could go further than my arms could ever stretch.”

look. It’s one that says he feels a million things he doesn’t know if it’s safe for him to say. I don’t know if it’s safe either, if my heart can withstand hearing him say things

‘us’ like we’re one. A permanent fusion of hearts. An unbreakable tangle of lives and love. How can he say that when he knows we’re not? When he made sure we couldn’t be?

“All the ones that matter belong to you, princess.” “Name them.”

“The first time I kissed you, everything before you ceased to exist. Your taste, your touch, your smell, eradicated it all. You erased me, turned me into a clean slate, a blank page that only you could fill in.

There was nothing before you, Mallory, and if I have my way there will be nothing after you. You are the first woman I’ve ever loved. The only one I’ve ever chased.”

“If I run are you going to chase me?” “I’d chase you to the ends of this Earth, Mallory.”

“These woods can’t hide you from me. Everything here smells like dirt and rain, and the air around you smells like flowers and sunshine.”