Chapter Twenty-One—Sophia
When I get out of my class and see Blake there, leaning against his Mercedes in the dim fall evening, my heart sinks.
I should have known he would be here. I should have known he wasn’t going to stay away for long. I slide my eyes from left to right, seeking a way out of the situation, but it looks like I’m going to have to see this through.
It’s been nearly a week since... that happened in the restaurant. It doesn’t entirely feel real, not yet, like it must have happened to someone else—the pressure of the gun against my temple, the smell of blood in the air, the way Blake pulled the trigger without a second thought.
I approach Blake’s car, and his eyes meet mine, impassive, unmoving. I’ve been doing everything I can to avoid him the last few days, and he can’t blame me. It’s not like we can just go back to the way things were before, just pretend like nothing happened, nothing changed, and he’s the same man he always was.
"Get in," he orders as he pulls open the door and gestures for me to get inside. "We need to talk."
I do as I’m told. I’ve learned by now that it’s smarter not to piss him off if I can avoid it. I slip into the front seat, and he slides in next to me, pulling the door shut and then putting his foot down on the accelerator.
Rain begins to streak the windows outside. I stare at it tumbling down the window and chew my lip hard. I don’t know exactly what I want to say. But I have to start somewhere.
"Blake, I’m sorry," I blurt out, finally. "I-I'm sorry I haven’t spoken to you after what happened, I just didn’t know what to say."
"It’s fine," he replies, his voice pointedly even. My heart sinks. I can tell that all the work he did to open up to me before has been undone. He’s slid right back to normal, back to the harsh, hard man I knew before.
"No, it’s not," I admit. I can feel the tears starting to pour down my cheeks, and I don’t know how to stop them. I want to scream, I want to slam my hands against the glass, I want to plead and beg him to understand that I can’t just go through all of this without losing some part of myself, but he doesn’t see that.
He can’t.
"What happened the other day... I... I..." I trail off. I feel so useless. His eyes stay pinned to the road ahead, and I wish he would just look over at me and tell me that it’s all going to be alright—hell, even if he doesn’t really believe it.
"You haven’t been by the house in a while," he points out, his voice low. I almost laugh at how ridiculous that sounds.
"How could I, after what happened?" I demand. "I had a gun pointed at me, Blake! You killed a man, right in front of me. I can’t just turn around and pretend like it didn’t happen."
"I killed him because he threatened you," he growls.
"Yeah and that doesn’t make me feel any better about it!” I argue. "A man is dead because of me. Fucking dead!”
"He’s not dead because of you," he replies calmly. "He’s dead because he tried to steal from me."
"But if he hadn’t pulled the gun on me, you might have thought twice, right?"
The person we’re talking about is Raul, one of the cooks at the restaurant. Turned out he had been siphoning cash from the lockboxes for a while and had gotten greedy about how much he could take without being caught.
I had worked with him, known him, heard about his brother, who was starting college, how proud of him he was. Of course, I have no idea if that was all just a lie he told to hold his cover, but I still feel like I knew him. And knowing what happened to him, knowing what went down as a result of him putting his hands on me... it haunts me.
Blake doesn’t reply. But he doesn’t deny it, either. I want to scream. I grit my teeth, forcing myself to keep going.
"I’ve never seen a body before," I breathe to him. "I-I've never..."
"You know this is the kind of person I am, Sophia," he shoots back, his voice harsh. "You know this is what I do, what I have to do for the sake of protecting my family."
"It’s one thing to know it, and it’s another thing to see someone’s brains spattered all over the floor!"
"So that’s how it is, then?" He drives a little faster, the roar of the engine rumbling beneath us. "You wanted to be with me until it got hard? Until you actually had to face up to what I do?"
"That’s not what I said—"
"It’s what you meant," he snarls back. I fall silent.
Is he right? I mean, no matter what lies I’ve tried to tell myself, I know that death has always been part of his game. His family didn’t earn their money and power without a few casualties along the way. But being faced with it, seeing what it looks like—the cold, hard sound of a bullet leaving a barrel, those bloodied, empty eyes staring back at me, knowing that, just a few seconds earlier, it could have been my skull blasted across the office—it's a horror I can’t come to terms with.
I curl into myself, arms crossed, staring out of the window.
"You need to take me back to my dorm," I tell Blake softly.
"What?"
"You need to take me back to my dorm, Blake! Now!”
My voice is sharper than I intend it to be, but harshness feels like the only way to get through to him in this moment. The Blake I knew, the Blake I thought I had, the one who can soften and show me the sides of him I need to see, he’s gone. The walls are back up. And this Blake needs me to be sharp with him. It’s the only way he can understand.
He screeches the car to a halt in the middle of the wide road that leads out of the university, nearly tossing me out of my seat, and does a U-turn. I want to curse him out for being so reckless, but I remind myself—this is what I signed up for.
He drives me back to my dorm and stops the car outside the door. His eyes are still fixed straight ahead. He won’t even look at me. He’s clutching the wheel so tight, it looks as though his knuckles are going to bust right through his skin at any moment. I want to touch him, to reach out, lay a hand on him, and try to assure him that it’s going to be okay. No matter how much trouble I know he is, no matter how much danger I know I’m putting myself in when I’m around him, there’s still a part of me that wants him—that needs him.
"Blake, I—"
"You need to go," he snaps at me before I can get another word out. I draw in a sharp breath, reeling back from him.
"Maybe we can talk about this some other—"
"You’ve made yourself clear."
He stretches across my lap and opens the door. He still won’t look at me. I can feel his rage coming off him in waves, just like that day at the restaurant. I can still recall, all too clearly, how he glowered at the man who had his hands on me, like he wanted to rip him to pieces.
Is that what he wants to do to me now?
I step out of the car. The tears won’t stop falling. I feel like I’m being ripped in two, one part of me wishing I could just stay with him, the other knowing, knowing above all else, that I need to put as much space between myself and this man as I possibly can. He’s dangerous. The tiny glimpse I got into his world, it’s enough to tell me everything I need to know.
And I can’t handle it.
I watch him drive off, waiting for him to at least look over at me, but he doesn’t even bother. I dissolve into sobs as I sink down on the stone steps in front of my dorm, my heart ripped straight from my chest. I can still feel his arms around me, his mouth against mine, his grin on my lips first thing in the morning when the two of us were all tangled up together.
And now I know I’ll never get to experience that again.
And I don’t know how I’m going to live without it.