Chapter 14 #3
“Then why do you look like your heart is trying to crawl out of your chest and flee the state?”
I let out a deep breath. “Because I still love him.”
The words leave me and the room doesn’t collapse. I do not collapse either, which is either personal growth or shock, and I cannot tell which right now.
Cassie’s face softens. “I know.”
“No, I mean.” My voice cracks and I hate the sound of it, even now.
After everything, I cannot say this without it costing me something physical.
“I never stopped. Not when he hurt me. Not even when I was with Damien. Not when I told myself every single morning that I was fine and meant it less each time. Not once. He was always there, like some fucked-up permanent damage with a heartbeat that I could not medicate or outrun.”
Cassie squeezes my hand, saying nothing.
“I wanted to hate him.”
“I’m aware,” she says.
“I fucking tried so hard to for so long.”
Cassie smiles, but her eyes are glossy at the edges, a detail she would deny under oath.
“You loved him angry. You loved him broken, even when he was gone and you had every reason to stop. That is not the part you need to prove to anyone, Sky.” She tilts her head. “So why are you still holding back?”
I stare at her. “Are you serious right now?”
“Completely.”
“Because he broke me, Cassie.”
“I know.”
“Because I’m uncertain if love is enough this time,” I say. “I was eighteen, already broken and angry. Already so used to people leaving that some part of me had built the exit into the blueprint of what we were from the beginning. But it still hurt like hell when it happened.”
My throat tightens around the next part. “But now I have built something. Out of all that shit, all those houses, and everything that tried to make me nothing, I built a life. And if I let Zane back in and he destroys me again, I don’t know if I will recognize what is left of me the next time.”
Cassie falls quiet for a moment. Then she reaches out and presses a single finger directly onto the mark on my neck.
“Ow.”
“Sorry.” She does not look sorry. “Just checking if you were listening to yourself.”
She tilts her head. “You would rather hurt now and miss out, pre-empting something that might not even happen.”
I glare at her through tears. “You’re a menace.”
“Yes,” she agrees pleasantly. “But I am also right.”
She leans back into the cushions with the self-satisfied ease of someone who knows it and has no intention of pretending otherwise.
“You are not holding back because you don’t love him.
You are holding back because you do. And that is a very annoying thing you do, Sky.
You wait for things to break before taking what you desperately want. ”
I let out a shaky breath that does nothing to ease the tightness in my chest.
“There is something else,” I say.
Cassie’s eyes narrow immediately. The full-attention stare.
I pick at the hem of my shirt, unsure how to say it.
Her gaze drops to my hands before immediately returning to my face.
“Skylar.”
I close my eyes. “We had sex without a condom.”
Silence.
The specific silence of a woman whose brain has been handed information it was not prepared for.
I open one eye.
Cassie is staring at me. Her mouth opens, closes, then opens again. She blinks once, slowly, as if a computer rebooting after an unexpected shutdown.
“Okay,” she says at last. “I need a moment because my brain just threw itself down a full flight of stairs and is lying at the bottom, deciding whether to get up.”
“Cassie.”
“No, no. I’m fine. This is fine. We are modern women. We understand bodies, biology, and consequences. We also understand that Zane Rivera without a shirt probably lowers the average person’s IQ by at least forty points.”
I cover my face with both hands. “Please stop.”
“How many times?”
The silence that follows is its own answer.
“Skylar.”
“Three.”
Cassie’s eyes go wide and stay that way.
“You absolute dirty whore. I envy you,” she says with a smirk.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“It was exactly like that.” She straightens up. “Are you still on birth control?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Good. That’s something.” She pauses, turning it over. “But you don’t know whether he has been with anyone else since he got out.”
“No,” I say quietly. “I don’t.”
The word since sits between us, carrying with it everything it implies.
Cassie nods slowly, processing this. Then, because she is Cassie and cannot help herself, she says, “Was it good?”
I glare at her.
Her grin spreads across her face. “That good, huh? Of course it was. It was Zane. Condolences to every other man on earth. Truly. Thoughts and prayers.”
I drop my head back against the couch and stare at the ceiling, now regretting every single one of those drunken nights when the wine was cheap, my mouth was loose, and I told Cassie exactly how good Zane Rivera was at taking his time with my body, in specific detail.
A laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it and then I’m both crying and laughing at the same time.
Cassie puts her arm around me and wordlessly pulls me into her side.
I lean into her, letting myself fall apart.