Chapter 42
THREE YEARS LATER
My phone alarm blares and I scramble off the side of the twin-sized bed I’m perched on. The only thing keeping me from falling on my face is two strong arms wrapped tightly around my chest and midsection. The ratty black leather of the well-worn string on his wrist digging into my boob.
Fuck, what time is it?
Grabbing my phone, I turn off the offending sound and see my reminder to myself. Babysit Tyler with the silent asshole.
Fuck.
Fuuuuck.
“We have to get to Asher and Jade’s.”
“No, we don’t.” His muffled, half asleep voice is deliciously deep as he talks directly into my neck.
“We do, we promised.”
“I didn’t promise anything, chica. You volun-told me.”
“Jade needs a night out! Come on, she’s my best friend. Tyler’s my godson.”
“He’s also my godson.”
I roll my eyes. “Barely.”
Ty sits back, leaning away from me and I take that opportunity to detangle from him. This can’t keep happening. Us, hooking up when we’re feeling sentimental, or drunk, or stressed, or happy, or… Fuck, just horny. We can’t, it’s blurring the lines in my heart and my head.
“Don’t tell anyone we hooked up again,” I tell him quickly, locating my clothes quickly and running to his bathroom.
“I won’t,” he says loudly. “You can’t either.”
“Trust me, I’m not going to.”
“What is that supposed to mean, Roxie?”
“Ugh,” I groan, finishing my business just in time for Ty to barge into the bathroom as I flush. “It means, this can’t happen again.”
“What if I want it to happen again?” He’s said this shit before. But it’s always the same answer.
“Am I still nothing or are you ready to talk about it yet?”
“I’m not ready for your opinion of me to change. I’m not ready to face it yet. But how many times do I have to tell you that you aren’t nothing? Not to me. You never have been.”
This has happened so many times that I’ve made that the stipulation for us to even consider starting over. How can we go forward with something so big that it broke us up, still hidden?
“Am I still–” I start to say, but Ty jumps out of bed and covers my mouth with his hand. His dark eyes glaring down at me. It’s been a few years now where the mask he wears for everyone fades away around me. It’s like he figured out he was safe with me again.
Even though he’s always, at each step of our life together, been safe with me.
“You know I fucking hate that question. You just say it that way to piss me off,” he growls.
“You deserve it.” His bare, toned chest is pressed up against me while his big strong hands grip my waist tightly.
Fuck, the feeling makes me want to push him back onto the bed and have my way with him. It’s been…so long since I’ve felt him hold me tightly. It’s been light touches, grazes, or intentional movements for years since that night after the bar.
Then, we watched Asher knock his brother Hunter out cold– sending him off with a ‘rapist’ tattoo above his cock.
It was a hard fucking day when we all found out it was Asher’s brother who had hurt Jade.
He more than hurt her, he raped her and that was incredibly difficult for her to move on from.
He drugged her and raped her, and who knows what would’ve happened to her if Asher hadn’t gone down to the basement to check out what his brother was up to, who knows what would’ve happened to her.
I’m not going to lie, sometimes that thought haunts me. But at the same time, that one decision of Asher’s to go check it out brought Jade into our lives.
Asher brought Jade back to the shop, helped her heal, they fell in love, and since then we’ve been fast friends. Best friends. She lived with me for a while before they moved in together.
She knows all about Ty and me. All about our stupid, tumultuous love story where we’re now in a fucking standstill.
He wants me. He loves me. He protects me.
Yet…
I can’t trust him with my heart again when he’s kept some kind of secret from me for years.
And it breaks my heart every damn time I see him.
“I do,” he nods and sighs, resting his forehead against mine, pressing against me tighter so I can feel his heartbeat through the thin cloth of his shirt that I’ve stolen. “I do deserve it. But I can’t take that chance with you.”
“So tell me, Ty, where do we go from here? Forever stuck in limbo? You see me with another guy, come up behind me, scare them off and then fuck me against the wall like I’m some kind of possession?
” I throw those words at him, frustration leaking into my tone when really it’s need.
I need him to do those things. Everytime.
I need him to claim me over and over, each time he thinks someone is encroaching on what’s his.
But on the very same hand, he can’t control me.
We’re not together so I talk and flirt and hook up with and dangle boy toys in front of him because he’s made it clear as day that we’re not together.
He can’t say a damn thing because…he doesn’t want me officially.
He just wants to have his cake and eat it too.
I’m not that kinda girl.
Well, when it comes to relationships.
Have I mentioned how fucking exquisite Ty is in bed? Like, makes my toes curl, knows every spot inside me, one look and I’m a puddle, kind of good.
My mind drifts to last night and I resist the urge to shudder at the memory of how he held my legs up high enough that my lower back came up off my kitchen table as he basically used me like his own personal fuck toy.
Us and kitchen tables, I swear to god. We never seem to make it to the bedroom on the first round.
Ty growls in frustration, dropping his hands from my sides like I’ve burned him and turns the shower on.
“I can’t keep doing this. Being friends, the lines blurring and then you pulling back like us being together isn’t exactly what you want!
I’m…” I turn from him in frustration laced agony and stomp into the bedroom.
“I’m done with this back and forth, Ty. It’s been years and…
It’s either you want me or you don’t. But if you don’t,” I say, swallowing down the ‘please want me, please keep me, I still love you,’ that’s on the tip of my tongue.
Turning to look at the bathroom door, I see the love of my life.
Ty, bare chest and tattoos on display along with the little hickey I left at the base of his neck.
If this is the last time I get to see him in this kind of state, I want to memorize it all.
I blatantly look at him, not bothering to hide my gaze as I trace his body with my eyes.
His toned stomach, his narrow waist, the little bit of extra weight that I love seeing on his abdomen because it shows that he’s food-safe now.
His strong thighs with his briefs straining around them.
He’s a work of art and I know, I know, I’m going to need to draw him like this so that if I don’t have anything else but my memories, at least I’ll have that.
“If you don’t then you have to let me go,” I say the words that I’ve been thinking for a few weeks now, the ones that burned in my chest and tasted like acid on my tongue to say. Everything in me, in my heart, is screaming to stay with Ty, no matter what. But I can’t. I deserve… I deserve more.
“Don’t do this, Roxie,” Ty says softly, almost desperately, and pushes off the doorframe, rushing closer. “You know how I feel about you.”
“I don’t actually. I know what I hope you feel for me.
But you don’t say it. Your actions do, they always have, but they’re conflicting.
You put your arm around my shoulder and tuck me into you one day, and then the next, you ignore my fist bump.
You shove my date into the brick wall when you see us out and tell him to get lost, but then after you and I fuck, you give me the cold shoulder.
You wear that damn leather cord around your wrist still, after all these years, but you won’t be with me fully!
” I’m screaming at him towards the end because I’m just…
so twisted up and I don’t think he knows how much he’s killing me.
“Roxie, please,” Ty begs, grabbing my hands that hold my rumbled up clothes. “Please.”
“Tell me why you won’t be with me. Tell me.”
“Roxie.” His head drops and I know the answer.
“Got it,” I snap and pull my arms away. “I’ll see you at Jade and Asher’s.”
“Please don’t leave,” he calls, but I’m already throwing the dress I wore last night over my head and picking up the platform heels at the door. I need the fuck out of here. “Not like this, please Roxie.”
Hearing him like this, so broken and desperate and I can hear how he feels like he’s grasping onto air in his voice, almost makes me want to turn around and take him in my arms. It almost makes me want to turn and take whatever scraps he’ll give me.
But I can’t.
I know exactly how it feels to be embraced by Ty fully and I want that. I want him, fully, totally and completely. I’ve just been fooling myself.
But I can’t anymore.
“You spent years keeping me safe from that fucker!” His voice raises behind me and I stop mid-stride. Mickey. The name I haven’t thought about in years… Not since I lost the fight to Ty and he never came to collect.
I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I figured–or hoped maybe– that when Ty won the fight he somehow made it so Mickey never bothered me again.
I never went back to The Underground. I never needed to and with the concussion, Harriet and Asher were so worried I couldn’t do that to them.
Mickey well-and-truly vanished from my life and while I’m grateful and fucking relieved, I’m still haunted to this day.
“What did you say?” I ask, my voice coming out softly.
“I said,” Ty steps closer to me, his breathing coming out heavier and I know this is the moment.
He’s choosing me.