Elle
To my surprise, he lifts his hands innocently and steps back, although there isn’t an ounce of fear in his expression. Or rather, there doesn’t seem to be a lick of fear for his safety.
He eyes the tube and the IV pouch as if worried about the amount still left inside that’s no longer pushing through my veins.
“Fine. I’ll give you space,” he says slowly, his gaze flickering to me again. “For now. But not until you listen to me first. I need you to hear this.”
“I don’t need to hear your fucked up rationalisations,” I hiss.
“I’m not here to make excuses, and I won’t ask you to forgive me. Not until I have the answers myself because I have no idea how those tampered pointe shoes got into the wardrobe department. But I’m going to find out.”
I gasp incredulously, clutching the needle tighter. “You think I’m so stupid that I’d seriously believe those shoes weren’t your doing?”
“They were my doing. My making,” he says so coldly, so matter-of-factly. So honestly. “But I didn’t bring them into the theatre. I got rid of them beforehand.”
I blink. “But you made them.”
“Before we’d met again. Before the term even started.”
“And that somehow makes it acceptable? What sort of monster would make them to begin with?” I shake my head in awe. “It doesn’t matter if you didn’t know me then. No one deserves that! No one deserves to have their future ripped away from them — ”
“I thought you stole my future,” he says, his voice booming through the darkness. “My mother died thinking I’d betrayed her. She died, and she took away my hope, my joy, and my family because my father isn’t my family. I was alive, but my life was gone.” He gestures as if something’s vanished into thin air. “ Gone. I couldn’t see anything but darkness and misery and you . I wanted you to feel what I did. You said ballet was your only dream. My dream was to smother it and inject you with the same hopeless despair that I felt for years. I wanted you to be haunted too.”
“So you wouldn’t be alone in your misery?” I snort.
He nods unapologetically.
“But that’s exactly what you are, Gant. Alone. ”
I don’t miss the flinch of his left eye at the last word.
Hastily, I rip at the bow that’s tied behind my neck so that the hospital gown slips down my freckled shoulders. “When I said you were dead to me, I meant it. I don’t want anything from you, including this medical care.”
“Dove—”
“ Don’t. Call. Me. Dove . I’m not your fucking dove. I’m not your anything.” I throw the IV needle like a dart and hit my target. Not that he tried to dodge it.
He sighs softly, as if he’s the exhausted one.
“At least you’re in the right place to get treated for a stab wound,” I snark.
“Why would I bother?” he asks calmly, pulling the needle from his arm. “I’ve fucked you raw, split your cunt and licked our bloody cum from your pussy afterwards. You sucked it off my tongue, remember? Then you begged me to go get more so you could swallow it. Swallow us.”
Heat explodes up my neck, but I ignore the burning, refusing to avert my eyes and back down.
“I think we’ve shared enough already. This is the least of my worries.” He hangs the tube over the IV rack.
Rubbery footsteps, like a nurse in non-slip shoes, squeak down the hallway and past my door.
Call out. Tell her to escort his ass out. But I know, like I know , that it’s no use.
“It wasn’t right, making those shoes,” Gant says, peeling his eyes away from the crack beneath the door to meet my furious gaze. “I’m not saying that it was, regardless of the circumstances. I’m just telling you my role in it.”
“I don’t give a fuck about your whys.” I rip the hospital gown off and ball it up before tossing it onto the futon beside the bed.
He swallows, drinking in my naked form with the same amount of lust he’s always had. The same feigned lust. Games. All of it. A stupid game for a bored, angsty rich boy and me? A rag doll I’d let him use like a cum rag.
I push my arms through the long sleeves of a feminine designer, knee-length coat that’s three sizes too small. It still smells like her perfume. But not even the reminder of her presence can dampen the mild sense of victory flowing through my veins as Gant’s lusty gaze, fake as it is, falters.
“I give a fuck,” he says quietly. “It’s important that you know that when I said I couldn’t see a future, that was before I fell in love with you.”
In love with you. More lies he thinks I’m still stupid, pathetic enough to believe.
“Because I’m so fucking special?” I snap, dangling my feet off the bed and aligning them with the disposable bedroom slippers.
My surgery just extracted the glass shards. My bones were fine and, miraculously, so were my muscles and tendons. The doctor said what saved me was falling immediately out of pointe without completing any of the dance sequences while wearing the rigged slippers. It’s what kept most of the fragments superficial, with a few minor exceptions.
Still, that didn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t suffer from residual pain, unforeseen complications or infections. Or future surgeries if I was right that they’d missed a piece that would work its way deeper toward my vital anatomy.
Once again, I’m reminded of my lack of guarantee when it comes to dancing ballet at a high enough level to make it a career, and my fury flares along with angry tears that burn my eyes.
I grip the wheelchair I’d been lent this morning. I’m not allowed to put pressure on my feet for at least a week. Four more days to go. But as I wiggle the slippers on and attempt to slip into the chair, blobs of pure white burst through my vision from the sudden movement. I sway, and Gant circles the bed to scoop me into his arms before settling me back on the mattress and against the pillows.
A metallic clink reverberates around the room as he kicks the wheelchair so it sails across the tiles before banging into the wall beneath the massive window.
Before I can recover to fight him off, he’s already taking a step back and giving me space, for now. I can’t even glare at him as I squeeze my eyes shut to stop the room from swimming, but I can hear his feet shuffling across the tile before a door creaks. Before I can convince myself that he’s just an apparition, he returns.
“You’re not just special to me, ,” he whispers, leaning over me again. “You’re invaluable. There’s nothing I won’t do to have you. To keep you. And I’m going to prove it.”
Through the fog, I peer at him like the alien species he must be. “Are you slow? There’s nothing on planet Earth that could convince me—”
“Everyone has a price, .”
, not Dove. So he’d listened. For now.
“Even you.”
Those two little words send something sailing through my veins other than pain and fury. Fear . Because even in the dark, I can see something unworldly swirling in those black tunnels.
“You just said I was invaluable.”
“To me. Whatever it takes, whatever it costs, I’ll pay it.”
“As if I want your money. I already told you I don’t want anything from you, including this corrupt treatment. I’m leaving.” The last words slip out with more bravado than I feel. I can’t stand up, much less leave. Yet.
“I didn’t say anything about money. I said I would pay for it. No matter the cost. There’s always something. For me, it was you.”
I snort. “For me, it’ll be you, too. Your life. Get on your fucking deathbed, and then maybe the cost will be paid.”
He looks deep into my eyes, and it’s like I can see those tunnels lengthening as his mind recedes and he contemplates my words. Then, the tunnels snap back as he nods. “Done.”
Done?
He kisses my forehead, and before I can swipe at him like a rabid raccoon, he’s already turning on his heel, but he isn’t heading for the door. He’s slipping his hand through the split in the coat I’d donned, pulling it open until my left side is exposed.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I hiss, but I see the answer a second before I feel the prick and the rush of icy liquid into my glute.
How the fuck did he get his hands on that?! His family’s hospital or not, aren’t meds locked and checked in and out? My logic sways as I immediately slump into the soft pillows.
“I can’t trust you to stay,” he says, pulling the now empty syringe out of my flesh before tossing it into the sharps' container. “Not in this hospital. Not on this earth. But I can give you some temporary relief. A temporary return to the darkness until I retrieve you again. Until I can find the answers to bring us back into the light.”
My eyelids droop, and the world grows foggy, but not before the bed dips, and I’m enveloped by his body heat. By his hard cock pressing into my sore ass and his gentle heartbeat against my arm.
My muscles flatline, and I fall into the only person I want and the last person I need. It’s too familiar, too sweetly comforting. A comfort I’d been seeking for days, and naively I’d hoped to find it in Jaime. But Jaime never came.
But he did—multiple times.
To see me suffer.
Then why is he bringing us warmth?
“Get some sleep, Dove.” His hair tickles the underside of my chin as his lips graze my nipple. “We’re being discharged tomorrow.”