Read Online Saving Forever (The Ever Trilogy: Book 3) by Jasinda Wilder - Free Book Online Page B

against mine with a soft bump. He was breathing hard, his fingers digging into my shoulders. “Ever….” It seemed like nothing so much as a prayer.
    “Cade. It’s you and me. It’s always you and me.”  
    “I know.”
    “Do you?”
    He remained there, forehead to mine, as if unable to move. “Ever, just…no matter what, I love you. I’ll always love you. I’ll always need you. I’ll always be only yours. No matter what.”
    “No matter what.”
    “Don’t ever forget that.”
    I heard the plea in his voice. “I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”
    As Cade drove me home, I wondered, deep in the shadowy, secret places of my heart, if I would be able to keep that promise.

closer

    Days turned to weeks, and weeks to months. In some ways, it felt as if Cade and I were back at square one in our relationship, but a square one we’d never really had. We dated. Really, truly dated. He took me to therapy and encouraged me as I learned to walk and to write and to dress myself standing up and to do my hair, and helped me do my makeup and taught me to draw all over again. He was patient, and considerate. He went on walks with me, from the front door of our downtown Royal Oak condo building to the corner and back, shuffling slowly beside me, holding my hand, as if we were eighty years old together. He took me to dinner and to lunch and to breakfast. He left me for a few hours in the evenings to work, and I spent those times watching TV, walking from one wall of the condo to the other, slow and clumsy.  
    My art was gone. I had to relearn that, too. I could barely write my name. My mind knew what to do, but my body didn’t. I couldn’t even think of painting. It simply hurt too much. I refused to go near the studio. I felt like I was missing a piece of my soul, a fraction of my identity.  
    I spent many of the hours Cade was at work crying in frustration and loneliness. He was loving, attentive, sweet. He put my needs before his own. He helped me shower. Helped me dress. Helped me do everything and anything I had trouble with, and he never complained.
    He kissed me sometimes. Slow and delicate kisses, soft feather-light touches of his lips to mine. His hands never wandered, though. His kisses never regained that passion I’d once known. He was trying, I knew. He did love me. That much was obvious. But if I tried to push the kiss further, he would back away, acting scared, or guilty, or confused. I wasn’t sure which, or maybe it was all three. Something I didn’t understand and couldn’t fathom. He said it wasn’t me; again and again he reassured me that he loved me, that nothing had changed.
    He wanted to take it slow, he once said.  
    Three months after going home—three months of loneliness and self-doubt and emotional turmoil, I finally lost my temper with him. We were sitting on our couch, watching DVRd episodes of Game of Thrones . His hand was on my leg, resting an inch or two above my knee. Touching bare skin, since I was wearing one of his old T-shirts—and nothing else. He surely knew I was bare beneath the shirt, but he made no move to touch me, to skate his fingers up my thigh. I needed it. I needed his touch.
    I needed reassurance that he loved me, that I was his, that I was still beautiful. That I wasn’t alone. Because even though he was taking perfect care of me, and was physically present in my life, he seemed out of reach, distant. Untouchable.  
    Over the last three months, my tolerance for his emotional frigidity waned, and my temper reached a boiling point.  
    I was confused, hurt, angry. And, besides all of that, I was just simply horny. I was a young woman, and I was regaining my health, and I had a husband to whom I was deliriously attracted, with whom I was madly in love. Yet he never took any of the hints, no matter how subtle or blatant. In the hospital, before we left, I thought I’d been clear about what I needed.
    Now, with Daenerys and Sansa and Gregor and Robb playing out