Chapter 21 Jonah - Past
twenty-one
Jonah - Past
THE TASTE OF CIGARETTES AND HOPE.
We were at the Meadow Park field again. We had been every other day for the past two weeks. Dex would text me to meet him here, I’d tell him no, and then I’d show up anyway.
The field was bathed in the warm light of the afternoon sun. It was a rare day compared to the weather we’d been getting lately, without a single cloud in the sky. It was still cold. The gentle breeze carried an unfriendly chill, but lying here in the grass, we were shielded from most of it.
I’d lost track of how long we’d been here, and I couldn’t find it in me to care anymore.
I hadn’t wanted to tell Becca about this, but when I was suddenly hanging out with her less and I wasn’t at home, the beach, or the diner, she’d all but guessed what I’d been up to.
To say she disapproved was an understatement, and I understood her concern.
I did, and yet here I was again anyway, because he’d asked me to be.
That first night he’d texted me to meet him here, I’d fully intended to stay away. But then an hour had passed, and it was the time we were supposed to meet, and Dex was silent. He hadn’t texted me again like I’d expected him to, hadn’t followed up to see if I was still going to come.
It was the silence that had propelled me into pulling off the covers, getting dressed, and facing the ache in my leg as I made my way here.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe something was wrong.
By the time I got here, I’d half expected him to be gone, but there he was, lying in the grass, looking at the stars.
In silence, I’d taken my place next to him, and we’d stargazed for an hour before he was on me.
That became our pattern. Dex would message me, and I would come, summoned like a loyal dog and hating myself for it.
We’d lie in the grass. He’d watch the sky, and I would pretend I was as well until he decided that enough time had passed and he’d give his attention to me instead, his hands or mouth on my body in a way I was growing dangerously familiar with.
Whatever hopes I had of getting him out of my system were shattered a little more each time he broke me open beneath him. Each time I unraveled from his touch only left me wanting more.
It was a dangerous thing. His touch felt like a drug.
Something powerful. Something deadly. Each time I’d swear it would be the last, and then I’d be back again at the very next opportunity.
I guess that was the thing with drugs; no one planned to become an addict.
“Just one more and then I’ll stop” becomes a constant mantra, and suddenly there’s a dependency that’s increasingly difficult to overcome.
I was at risk of becoming an addict for him. I still couldn’t bring myself to stop.
I turned my head to look at Dex, still gazing at the cloudless sky.
His eyelashes were ridiculously long, and I wondered if they obscured his vision.
Surely he could see them when he blinked.
It wasn’t normal, and it wasn’t fair, how they framed his icy blue eyes and made them even more striking.
His lips weren’t fair either, full and pink and perfect. Fuck, he was beautiful.
“Something on my face?” Dex asked, those perfect lips pulling up into a smirk.
“No.” My fingers reached for his as I stole the smoke from him, bringing it to my lips.
His eyes stayed on me, so I turned away, watching the smoke I exhaled dance in the breeze until it disappeared completely.
“What’s your dad like?” he asked. The question startled me. We talked sometimes, but never about anything serious, and certainly not about our parents.
I took my time answering, wondering if he’d drop the subject if I was quiet for long enough. He continued to stare at me, the weight of his attention increasingly heavy, like an anvil slowly cracking open the shield I kept around me.
“He’s…” I tried to think of a way to describe the man I shared a house with. When no good words came to me, I simply sighed and let out the truth that constantly bubbled under my surface like a poison. “He’s a piece of shit, is what he is.”
“Does he hurt you?”
“No, nothing like that. He’s just… not there. Hasn’t been for a long time.”
“Since your sister?” came his next question, and I was startled for the second time. Unpleasant heat clawed up my chest and throat. I didn’t talk about Adaline. Not ever. Not even to Becca.
“No, he wasn’t much of a father before then either,” I admitted. Whatever little fatherly instincts the man had possessed died along with his daughter.
“What about your mom?”
“She’s worse.”
“Does she hurt you?”
I turned to look at him, wondering where these questions were coming from and why he cared enough to ask them.
That wasn’t what this was. It wasn’t what we did.
My parents were none of his fucking business, and I was about to tell him as much, only when I met his pale eyes he looked so…
open. His usual smirk was absent, his expression soft in a way I’d never seen on him before.
Lately, keeping my rage around him had taken conscious effort.
Where it had usually been bubbling away in my core, it now simmered, cooled.
Still there but tolerable. Just like when I was around Becca and her presence soothed me, like a balm on a wound.
This felt similar, and yet different in a way I couldn’t place, or perhaps didn’t want to.
Maybe acknowledging the way things were changing would make them real, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.
“Why are you asking me this, Devil?”
“Because I want to know you.”
“What if I don’t want you to know me?”
“You do. You have from the start.”
It pissed me off, how confident he always was, how sure. Especially in the things he assumed about me. But I couldn’t even argue, because he was right. What I wanted—from him, from Becca, from my parents, from the world—was to be known. To be seen. To be understood.
“No, Dex. My mom doesn’t hurt me. My mom doesn’t care enough to hurt me, or maybe she isn’t capable of caring at all,” I started, and like a switch had been flipped, everything rushed to the surface.
The floodgates had been opened, and I was powerless to close them again.
That beast that always lurked inside me took its chance to claw its way up my throat and show its hideous form to whoever would look at it.
“Maybe she’s just a human-shaped void where a mother should have been,” I said as my throat grew tight and itchy and heat pooled behind my eyes.
“Maybe whatever motherly love she had left in her died with Adaline. Maybe my dad was the same. Both of them died as parents when she died. And fuck, maybe that’s to be expected after losing a child.
Maybe their grief was too much for them.
But I’m still here! I still needed them, and I was fucking hurting too!
I lost her too! I lost my sister, my best friend, and I lost my parents right along with her.
So no, they don’t fucking hit me if that’s what you’re asking, but I fucking wish they would, because at least then they’d have to fucking acknowledge me. ”
“Hey.” Dex spoke calmly, so infuriatingly calm, like he was trying to soothe a wounded animal, and that was exactly how I felt in front of him as my vision blurred.
He closed in, moved over me, and his hand cupped the back of my neck like an anchor.
But I didn’t want to be anchored. I wanted to thrash and scream until this ugly feeling escaped enough for me to push it back down into the depths of me where it could continue to rot away inside me until the next outburst. “I’ve got you.
You’ve been alone for so long, Rabbit, but you aren’t anymore. I won’t ever let you be again.”
I didn’t want to hear it, not those words, not from him.
If I heard them, I might believe them, and I couldn’t let myself believe them.
It would leave me too vulnerable. Would give him too much power over me.
Letting him have any part of me meant he could hurt me, or worse, he could love me.
If he loved me, then I’d finally have something to lose instead of just something I yearned for.
“Don’t fucking touch me!” I snapped at him, but I wanted him to touch me so fucking badly.
I wanted him to hold me hard enough to bruise.
To fucking hell with gentle caresses and soothing touches that faded away the moment they stopped as if they’d never been there at all.
I wanted to be held with teeth and claws, touched only in a way that left marks behind.
Scars. So that I could press and poke at the wounds and the pain could echo the touch for as long as I needed until it felt real.
“I’ve got you,” he said again, and despite me pushing him away, he only pulled me closer.
I shoved him, because I wanted him to fight me for it. I wanted him to prove that he wanted to touch me because this was real and not because it was easy. Dex shifted, his body moving over mine, and I thrashed against him, trying to get away yet hoping I couldn’t.
“I’ve got you.” This time when he spoke, his voice was firmer.
His hands, so big and warm and secure, grabbed my wrists, pinned them to the grass on either side of my head where I couldn’t hurt him with them.
Where I couldn’t hurt myself. “I’m not going anywhere.
You’re mine, Jonah Hargreaves, and if you want to fight me, then you fight me.
But it won’t change anything. I know your parents made you feel like asking for attention was a bad thing, that it made you feel like too much, but it’s not too much for me.
You’re not too much for me. I’ll give you all my attention.
I’ll give you everything. All you have to do is ask, Rabbit. ”
“Let go of me!” I shouted, because the walls I’d put up were crumbling.
Those walls kept everything that could hurt me out, but they also kept all the pain I’d been holding onto in as well, and I wasn’t ready to let it go.
I wasn’t sure who I’d be without it. “I hate you!” I told him, like I’d told him countless times before, only this time when I said the words, they felt wrong; they tasted like a lie.
“Stop, Jonah.” Dex’s voice was firm but not cruel—in the way I both hoped and feared it would be when he finally realized how difficult I was.
“It’s time to stop running. I think you started running when you were a child, and you haven’t let yourself stop.
It’s time to stop now. I know you’re tired of it. It’s okay to stop.”
“I don’t know how,” I confessed, the words burning my throat like acid.
“I know. And that’s okay. I don’t know either. I’ve never wanted anyone like I want you. We can figure it out together.”
“What if you change your mind?”
“I won’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do.”
I just do. Like it was that simple. I didn’t understand how he could say those words, how he could be so sure and certain of them, but now more than ever I wanted to believe him. I was so fucking tired of doing this all on my own.
From the very first moment I’d seen Dex in the diner, something had been building between us.
It was something I didn’t understand, and every time we saw each other, touched each other, it grew.
Bigger and bigger, like a balloon about to burst. That’s where we were now.
At the breaking point. I didn’t know what would come after this; I only hoped it wouldn’t break me right along with it.
“What do I do?” I asked him, and I didn’t even try to mask the fear in my voice, the pain that came from not knowing.
“Well, that one’s easy, Rabbit. Just let yourself be mine.”
“Easy,” he said. There was nothing easy about this.
It was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.
But he wanted me, all of me, and I wanted to be wanted.
More than that. If I was honest with myself, completely truly honest, I wanted to be wanted by him.
Because I wanted him too. I had from the very first moment.
“Okay,” I told him, letting my body still beneath him. Letting myself surrender.
“Okay?” he asked, his brow furrowing, like he expected it to be a trick, that I’d run away again the moment he released me.
“Okay.” Such a simple word to change everything. “I’ll be yours.”
I watched as Dex’s brows twitched again, and he swallowed heavily. Those eyes that matched the sky darkened like a storm, and then it rained. Droplets falling from him to me. Water on fire. His tears extinguishing me. His pain soothing me.
He wanted me so deeply that when I finally accepted him, his relief hurt more than my rejection ever could, and I understood that. I saw him now. I saw him, and I wondered how I’d been so blind to him before this point. He was just like me.
“Will you please kiss me?” I phrased it like a question, but it was a demand.
Because I needed to feel him. I’d thought too much, and whatever this was now, we would figure it out together like he’d said…
but later. Right now, I was tired. Right now, I wanted nothing else but to taste the lips of the man I belonged to. The man who belonged to me.
Dex fell into me. We’d kissed before, so many times, and each time it felt bigger than the last. This one was no different.
He tasted like the cigarette I’d dropped somewhere in the grass around us when I’d tried to fight against this so futilely.
More than that, he tasted like a comfort I’d never known. He tasted like hope.