Chapter 43
43
Tovah
I was a mess by the time Isaac brought me back to his house. As always, he carried me out of his car, into the house, up the stairs to the ensuite bathroom, seating me on the counter and handing me a glass of water. Thirsty, throat still dry, I chugged it while he tested the shower temperature. Once the temperature was to his liking, he swooped me back up in his arms and carried me into the shower, gently placing me on the bench. Grabbing body wash, he lathered his hands and cleaned me, slowly, carefully. I was so overwrought that his touches made my pussy throb, but there was nothing sexual in the way he washed me, only a single, focused, almost devout care.
Once my body was clean, he stood me up, his chest to my back so I could lean against him, as he lathered up my hair with shampoo and then worked through the tangles with conditioner, holding his hand over my eyes so the spray didn’t sting them, like I was a child. I relaxed into his arms, forgetting to be pissed at him, and soaking up the tenderness in his touch.
Sitting me back down, he quickly washed and rinsed off his own body, before carrying me out of the shower. As he dried me with a towel, I could barely look him in the eyes.
What had happened between us had been so much , so intense , and I didn’t even know how to look at him or talk to him. Why had he accused me of being a liar again? Of writing the article? The article I’d abandoned, even knowing it was possibly the only thing that was going to save my mother? We had so much to talk about, but I was exhausted, and all I wanted to do was sleep.
I wanted to sleep with him, to have his arms around me. But if Eliana were right, if they were engaged, then all I was doing was sleeping with another woman’s man. All I was doing was prolonging the inevitable, and if Isaac was going to break my heart, I’d rather it happen now than later, when the break was irreparable.
“Let’s go to bed,” he said, kissing me, carrying me to the bed and tucking in before climbing in after me. He didn’t bother to cuff us together, and I was grateful for that as I waited for him to fall asleep.
Once his breathing had deepened and slowed, I gently, carefully lifted his arm and crawled out of the bed, grabbing a sweatshirt and heading to the guestroom. I closed the door and locked it, and then, only then, did I let the tears flow again.
Flopping onto the guest bed, I sobbed into the pillow.
How had we gotten here? How had we gone from a month ago, when he’d been nothing but my enemy, and a means to an end, to here, where he meant more to me than my own life, as much—if not more—than my own mother? How had we gotten to this place where he had the ability to break my heart, if he wanted, if he cared?
God, and he claimed he wanted to marry me! I bit the pillow to withhold the frustrated scream that bubbled up in my throat. Didn’t he understand we weren’t meant for each other? That we were destined to destroy each other, not love each other? It didn’t matter that he’d said he loved me, or that my stomach had dropped out of my body when he had. It didn’t matter that I loved him back, because I did. Anything between us was destined to end in tragedy.
I had to figure out how to end this, and if he wouldn’t let me, then to get away.
The door opened, and he was there, lifting me off the guest bed and carrying me back to his bedroom.
“You don’t leave me, not in the middle of the night, not ever,” he said gruffly. “I sleep like shit when you aren’t in my arms. Away games are torture. I refuse to let you out of my damn sight.”
He grabbed a new pair of cuffs, closing one around my wrist and the other around his.
“How did you even get into the bedroom?”
He laughed. “You think a locked door can keep me from you? Tovah, god himself couldn’t keep me from finding you and bringing you home.”
With those jaw-dropping words, he wrapped me up in his arms, not saying anything else. I didn’t know what to say, either. We both lay there in silence, skin touching skin, breathing in sync, lips inches apart. I couldn’t see him in the dark, but I knew he was watching me.
“I hate you,” I told him, my eyes burning from all the tears I’d already cried over him. “I love you, but I hate you, too. You hurt me. You keep hurting me. When does it end, Isaac?”
“It doesn’t,” he told me, his voice thick with emotion. “I’ll do my best to stop hurting you, I promise. But it will never end, because we’ll never end, bashert. I love you. My heart knows yours. My soul recognizes yours. Like we’ve known each other forever.”
He didn’t even know how right he was.
We lay in the dark like that, silent but not sleeping, our bodies wrapped around each other, a wall keeping the world out, like we could keep it from destroying us.
But as each second ticked by, I became more and more sure we couldn’t.