Asher (Ashes & Embers 6)

“I don’t think you should. It’s part of the rules. For my progress.”

I grin. “I don’t really follow rules, Em.”

“Please? I don’t want you to give up your tour. I’ll feel bad. I don’t want to feel like any kind of burden.”

“Are you tryin’ to get rid of me? I thought you liked me being here.” The emotional whiplash is killing me. Out in the grass, I felt like we had a moment of closeness. Now I feel a wall sprouting up.

“I do…mostly. But you’re a little intense.”

I lean back in surprise. “Intense? I’m not intense.”

She lifts an eyebrow at me, and I’m shook for a moment at how beautiful—how much like her— she looks today with her hair shiny and styled, her eyes big and bright, accentuated by mascara and smudgy eyeliner. I’ve missed that teasing crooked eyebrow she’s shot at me a million times over the years.

I can’t even look at her pink-tinted lips. I’ll lose my mind trying not to kiss her.

“It’s the way you look at me, Asher.”

Ah. Maybe I have been staring at her lips too much. “What’s wrong with how I look at you?”

“You look at me like I’m a jack in the box, and you’re waiting for Ember to pop out.”

Yikes.

“I didn’t realize I was. I’ll stop.”

The corner of her mouth turns up a bit. “I don’t think you can.”

She knows me better than she realizes.

“Asher, I’m really trying to see that this is confusing for you too. But it’s pressure. All the expecting. It’s hard.”

My nerves rattle. Why the hell did I quit smoking?

“I just want you to know that I’m in this for the long haul, no matter what. You’re not alone.”

“That’s very nice, but I think I need to be alone sometimes. To kinda try to wrap my head around this.” She grins. “No pun intended.”

Just when I thought we were getting closer, she’s stepping back. And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. All the balls have to be in her court while she’s recovering. I can’t risk pushing her further away by forcing myself into her life.

“If that’s what you want, then I’ll go on the tour. I’d rather be here with you, though.”

Hey, I can at least toss some balls into the court, right?

“You can come back when you’re done. By then I should be a little better, right? I think it’s good for you to not be thinking about me so much. Everyone here is nice. Kenzi said she’ll come see me.”

Not think about her so much? Impossible. Never gonna happen.

“I think about you all the time. You’re my wife.”

The word wife has made her uncomfortable. She shifts in the bed and picks at the label on the water bottle. Refusing to look at me. She’s like an animal caught in a cage and taken to a place she doesn’t want to be.

“I’m no one.” Her voice is low and haunting. “I’m not a wife or a sister or a mother or a singer. I’m a mindless mannequin who looks like someone else.”

My gut twists into a knot of turmoil. The doctor warned me she’d phase through different radical moods. That she’d ping-pong from happy to depressed to angry and back around again.

I wasn’t expecting this, though. It’s not that she doesn’t connect to her past identity, it’s as if she sometimes wants to shut the person she perceives as Ember out.

Which also means shutting me out, as well as her family and friends.

“Don’t say that. You’re not no one. You’re someone who was in a horrible accident, and you lost your memory. But you’re still, and always will be, Ember Valentine.”

She continues to tear the label off the water bottle, tossing the scraps of paper to the side with angry flicks of her wrist.

I grab her hand to stop her, and she looks up, her eyes dilating with surprise as if she didn’t realize I was still here.

“Em, I’m sorry if I’ve been making this harder for you. None of us know how to act or how to feel. I’ll give you space if you need it, but I want to come back and be with you. Do you want that too?”

Her bottom lip quivers as she stares at me, a single tear clinging to her lashes like a tiny icicle.

“Yes,” she whispers.

“Do you want your memories and your life back? You can be honest with me. I won’t be mad. I promise.”

“I think I do. I want to remember who I was, what I did, and who I loved. But right now, I have no way of knowing if I want to live the same life. I don’t know what I want or would’ve wanted.”

“You have to try to trust me. I know the person inside you better than anyone. You’d want to be home. You’d want to be with me. I know that as sure as I know the sun is gonna come up tomorrow.” I gently wipe the tear from her face. “When you get scared, or unsure, try to hold on to that. Try really hard to trust that even though you don’t remember, I’m doing everything that I know you would want. It’s not just for me, Em. I’m trying to make sure that someday, when you get your memory back, that your life is still here. I’ll still be here.”