Chapter 9 #2
I did the right thing. I know that now, looking at the woman she became. I made myself into something she needed to leave behind so she could build this, and that is the right outcome no matter what it cost.
However, it doesn’t stop my chest from feeling like it’s being torn apart.
“I’m glad,” I say. “That you did that. That you got there.” I swallow. “I’m so proud of you, Sky.”
Her eyes fill with tears. She doesn’t let them spill. She holds them back, that controlled stillness of a woman who has spent her whole life learning not to cry in front of people.
I drag a hand over my jaw. “Shit. I didn’t mean to.”
“I know,” she says quietly.
Her eyes hold mine.
The room feels smaller.
Everything narrows to her face and the careful, bruised way she is looking at me. I watch the fight in it, the push and pull of everything she is not saying moving just beneath the surface.
“I’m sorry,” I say, the words coming out before I can dress them up or pull them back. It’s raw, unadorned, and about seven years too late.
Her whole body stills. That brief, involuntary pause of someone who has just heard something they were not prepared for and is deciding in real time what to do with it.
The old me would make a joke right now. Say something filthy. Hide behind my mouth because it was always easier than standing still while the truth took pieces out of me. But Rainer’s voice sits somewhere in the back of my head, quiet and certain. Start with sorry.
So I do.
“For what I said to you,” I add.
Her face tightens. She knows exactly what I’m talking about. That memory still has its teeth, and we both carry the marks it left.
I force myself to keep going because if I stop now, I will turn coward again, and I have been a coward about this for long enough.
“I told myself it was for you,” I say. “That if I made you hate me, you’d walk away and have a real life. One that didn’t have me rotting behind bars in the middle of it.”
Her eyes come back to mine. Wet. Furious. Alive.
“You made me feel dirty, Zane,” she says.
The words hit me so hard that I almost step back.
“Sky.”
“No.” Her voice cuts through me. “You made me feel stupid for wanting you, for trusting you, for thinking I mattered to you.”
“You did.”
Her laugh breaks apart on its way out. “Yeah? You had a funny fucking way of showing it.”
“I know.”
“No, Zane. I don’t think you do.” Her eyes burn into mine, and there is no looking away. There never has been. “Because when you said those things, I believed you. Every single word. I believed I had made myself nothing to the one person I thought actually saw me.”
I can’t breathe because there it is.
The damage I did. Not the noble version I fed myself in prison to survive the nights. The real wound, with my name carved into it, standing in front of me, tears in her eyes, furious at herself for them.
“I did it because I thought I had already ruined you,” I say. “I thought being with me had already dragged you into shit you never should have been near. The fights. The danger. The cops. All of it.”
Her lips part, but she doesn’t speak.
“I was sitting in that place, and all I could think was that if you loved me, you would wait. You would waste yourself on visits, phone calls, and letters. You would build your whole life around a man who could not even touch you. You would give me the best years of your life because you were too loyal to save yourself.”
Her eyes shine harder.
“And I couldn’t let you do that,” I continue.
“Not after everything you had already survived. Not after every person who had already taken something from you. I couldn’t be another selfish prick standing there with his hand out, asking for more.
” My throat burns. “So I made myself something ugly enough for you to leave.”
Her beautiful face looks so sad, and I see the pain in her eyes.
It guts me. Completely and without mercy.
“I said the worst things I could think of because I knew exactly where they would land. I knew sex mattered to you, that trust mattered, and that you did not give yourself to people easily.” My voice drops until it is barely holding together. “I knew that, and I used it against you.”
She looks away, blinking hard and fast.
“It was cruel, Sky. And it was fucked up. It was me making a choice for you because I didn’t trust you to make your own.”
Her breath catches, but still she doesn’t say a word.
“I told myself I was saving you,” I say, as a tear slips down her cheek. She wipes it away quickly, angry at it, angry at me, maybe even angry at herself for still standing here, listening to what I have to say.
“You should have let me choose, Zane,” she says.
“I know.”
“You should have trusted me.”
“I know.”
“You should have loved me enough not to turn my body into a weapon against me.”
My hands curl at my sides because I want to reach for her more than I have ever wanted anything, but I don’t get to. Not now. Not while she is bleeding from a wound I gave her.
“You’re right,” I say. “I should have.”
Her mouth trembles. “I struggled when you were away.”
The words destroy me. They reach into my chest and clench a fist around whatever is left in there.
“I could have survived you being gone,” she says, quieter now.
“I hated every second of it, but I could have survived that.” Her eyes hold mine, and no armor in the world is built for this.
“What I couldn’t survive was thinking you never loved me.
Thinking I’d given myself to you and you only remembered the parts you could use against me. ”
“Fuck.” My voice breaks clean in half. “Sky…I loved you then,” I say, making sure the past tense is clear, just in case she is happy and having me back in the equation will fuck that up.
“I loved you in that visiting room. I loved you so much I convinced myself that hurting you was the only decent thing I had left to give.”
She shakes her head, tears slipping freely. “That wasn’t decent, Zane.”
“No,” I say. “It wasn’t.”
“I didn’t need you to save me by breaking me.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to decide someone is better off without you, then destroy them so they’ll agree.”
“I know,” I whisper.
The air between us is no longer just heavy. It is alive.
Her pain. My guilt. The years. The want.
The old heat we have never been able to kill, no matter how much damage we buried it under. I stay quiet and do what Rainer told me to do, which is to shut up, let her feel it, and leave whatever comes next entirely up to her.
Her gaze drops to my mouth. It’s barely a second. Less than that. But I see it, and my whole body goes still.
“I should go,” she says, turning to leave.
I walk with her toward the roller door because standing here watching her leave is not something I am willing to do if I can have ten more seconds of walking beside her instead.
The evening air hits me at the threshold, cooler than in the workshop, carrying the scent of the street and the city beyond.
She reaches for the car door at the same moment I do.
Our fingers land on the handle at the same time, and the contact is so slight it should not register the way it does. The barest brush of her fingers against the back of my hand, warm, accidental, and absolutely devastating.
She goes still and so do I.
Skylar starts to turn toward me, her mouth already opening on a word she has decided on, and I have no idea what it is and I am never going to find out, because the distance between her face and mine is less than nothing.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remember sitting in the back of that police car and realizing with a clarity that has never left me that I did not kiss her.
That I have tried time and again to remember our last kiss.
That thought spurs me forward before the rest of me has consented to it.
I close the distance and kiss her.
I know I shouldn’t. Not after everything I have said to her tonight, and that is the honest truth of it.
But the moment my mouth finds hers, every other consideration simply ceases to exist. If I never get the chance to do this again, I am going to remember this as our last kiss, and I am going to make sure it is worth remembering.
She makes a small sound against my lips, and then she kisses me back, and it is nothing like two people being careful with each other or testing the temperature of something.
It is rough and desperate, her hand coming up to grip the front of my shirt as if she needs something solid to hold onto.
My hand finds her jaw and I tilt her face up, taking more than I have any right to and completely unable to stop.
My whole body is on fire.
Every nerve I have is firing at once, my cock hard and aching, the want for her so immediate, physical, and consuming that it takes everything I have not to press her back against the car and take this somewhere neither of us can come back from.
Her whole body shifts into me, that small, involuntary lean of someone whose body has made a decision before their brain has caught up. The feeling of her against me is enough to pull a sound out of me that I would be embarrassed by if I were capable of embarrassment right now.
But I’m not.
I’m just here, with my hand on her face, her fist in my shirt, and her mouth destroying what is left of me.