Read Online When We Collide by A. L. Jackson - Free Book Online Page B

deep into my soul. But I’d been a fool, had chased her
when I’d known I could never really have her, when I knew it was
both wrong and so incredibly right.
    I closed my eyes, saw the face of Maggie’s little
boy, thought of the dreams, questioned my sanity. I believed
nothing in superstitions or fate or any of that other bullshit. But
whether it meant something or meant nothing at all, it didn’t
change the fact I was here and I had a son. One look and I’d known.
The other thing I was certain of was that Maggie would deny any
claim I made.
    And I had no idea what to do about it.
    God.
    The bed creaked when I rolled to my side.
    Confusion and emotions I didn’t know how to deal
with plowed through my senses, left me weak and drained and
unbearably restless.
    I couldn’t just leave the child there, but I didn’t
think I could take him away from his mother, either. I wouldn’t
pretend to know the boy, but his bond with his mother had been
clear. I also didn’t think I could ever openly expose what we’d
done, hurt her that way.
    Something inside wouldn’t allow me to believe she’d
put her child in danger, but did I really know her at all? I never
would have believed she could be capable of keeping something like
this from me.
    And then there was this little nagging voice that
kept asserting my instincts might be wrong and the boy might not be
mine. It whispered I’d just overreacted and made assumptions that
should never be made. I mean, I’d been careful every time,
but then I had to admit I’d been warned before nothing wasn’t
one-hundred percent.
    I groaned and flopped onto my other side.
    The worst part of it all was that gnawing in the pit
of my stomach. It was the same familiar ache I’d tried to bury and
stamp out beneath years of work and faked satisfaction, a need that
glowed bright, unearthed and exposed.
    I loved Maggie now as much as I did the day she
walked out of my life.

Chapter Eight
     
    Maggie ~ Present Day
     
    I sucked in a shuddering breath and tried to hold
the fractured pieces together. Regret splintered through my heart
and cut me in two.
    How could I have been such a fool to have believed
he wouldn’t be there? That one day, even if it weren’t today, he
wouldn’t have eventually returned? But I had spent my entire life
being a fool.
    So many years had been spent fantasizing about him
at night that I’d never imagined it’d be possible that he’d
manifest in the day.
    Sinking to my bedroom floor, I hugged my knees to my
chest and hoped for the same numbness that fell over me when the
fists came to pervade me now.
    But William had always made me feel alive, and there
was nothing I could do to shield myself from that light now.
    I felt everything.
    His anger, my shame, the love for him I’d kept
stored up and buried so deep inside—a flicker of his before it had
been chased away by his disgust. It all culminated in a searing,
scorching burn.
    I had known better, but my mom had been so insistent
earlier this afternoon.
    Every weekday after I dropped Jonathan off at
kindergarten, I would slip in the back door of the ratty old house
I’d grown up in, pushing aside the memories of that place. My mom
needed me, and the echo of my father that lingered in its walls was
not enough to keep me away. Usually I’d climb the stairs to find my
mom curled up in bed. I would feed her, bathe her—love her—even
though there was a huge part of me that hated my mother. It was the
same part that hated myself.
    Today, though, she had been downstairs where she was
hunched over the kitchen counter. Her hair was dingy and straight,
and almost an inch of gray roots had grown into the dull color I
had washed into it three months before. With unsteady hands, she’d
handed me the casserole she made and asked me to take it over to
the Marsch’s. Her eyes were glassy as she told me to tell them how
sorry she was for their loss.
    “Lara’s always thought of us...taken care of us,”
she’d said