DEAD IN BED By Bailey Simms: The Complete Second Book

PART 9, SECTION 9

Only the blanket I'd hung over the doorway separated me from Shawn.

"Just a minute," I said quietly.

I rinsed away the soap with the last of the warm water and wrung out my hair. I didn't have a towel. Normally after bathing I just sat by the fire until my skin was dry enough to dress. Now, I had to put on the only clean pants I had—the scrubs I'd arrived in—and I pulled the oversized sweater I normally slept in over my wet shoulders.

I knew I needed to talk to Shawn, but I wasn't sure if I was ready for this conversation.

Tentatively, I pulled the blanket aside from the doorway.

Shawn was leaning against the low stone wall, his hands in his pockets. Not only had he lost weight, but he'd become more muscular, and he held himself with a new confidence. He looked at me with a familiar shy gaze, but even his shyness had somehow become confident. Even before he said anything, I was taken by a surge of attraction to him. I didn't understand what I was feeling.

"I don't want to bother you," he said. "I can come back later. I just wanted to, you know . . . talk."

I nodded. "Yeah," I said. "Talking would be good." I pulled the blanket farther aside. "I guess now is as good a time as any." I took a deep breath. "Come in I guess."

Shawn sat on the stone ledge beside my sleeping bag. For a while, he said nothing. Then, a tear leapt from his eye. He wiped it away, and in the next moment it was as though it had never been there at all.

"I've made so many mistakes," he said, barely above a whisper. "I'm sorry. Ashley. I'm so, so sorry. I've been a horrible husband. I acted in such horrible ways. You didn't deserve any of it. None of it. And I'm so, so sorry. I know my saying that doesn't change things, but I wanted to say it."

I thought about Shawn's accident, years ago now, when he'd rolled his pickup and broken more bones than we could count, the days afterward when I'd sat beside him in the hospital, and the months of slow recovery when I'd helped him learn to walk again. I remembered way back to the night when we slept together for the very first time in the woods below the high school. But I also remembered how coldly he'd helped lock me up in the U-Haul, and the inexcusably hurtful things he'd said to me before shooting Bryce Tripp. None if it was justified, and it never would be.

But that didn't change the fact that I had really hurt him. I had betrayed him first, and I had sent his life spiraling.

I was trying not to cry. I wasn't sure what to say or how to say it.

"Shawn," I said, finally. "I have TGV." It just came out. "It affects me differently than anyone else. But I have it. I'm sick. I'm TGV positive."

A look of pure, caring concern overtook Shawn's expression.

"What?" Shawn moved to embrace me, but pulled back, aware that it probably wouldn't be appropriate. "Wait. But how? I don't understand. I mean, I thought you might be positive, after, you know . . . Bryce. But that was so long ago. And you seem totally fine." He looked into my eyes and started to cry. "Ashley, I'm so . . . I'm so sorry."

He said all of this out of what seemed like real sympathy, as if he cared deeply that I might be suffering. He really seemed to care.

I sat on the stone beside him. And I just started explaining everything, from the beginning.

I couldn't hold back. It just all came out. I told him that I'd lied to him. I told him that I'd slept with Bryce Tripp as early as the night of the fair. I told him about how I was somehow at stage-three TGV and that no one understood why I didn't have any late-stage symptoms.

We were both crying now. I sat on the stone beside him and pulled my knees against my chest. No one had ever been in this room besides me, and I realized how lonely I'd been for the companionship of someone I shared a long history with. I couldn't believe how badly I wanted Shawn to put his arms around me.

The feeling was just so unexpected, and strange.

"Just tell me, this, Ash," Shawn said. "Why? Why did you cheat on me? Why did you do it?"

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