Chapter 11 Angelina #2
That's going to be you. That's going to be Chesca, except she won't even have thirty years of memories. She'll have eight. Eight years and a mother who went to work one day and didn't come home.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes until I see stars. The pressure doesn't help. Nothing helps.
What are you doing, Angelina? Lying here counting ceiling cracks like that's going to change anything?
What else am I supposed to do?
Live. You could actually live, for once, instead of just surviving.
The thought lands like a verdict I didn't see coming. Eight years. Eight years of surviving, of building walls and checking locks and counting Chesca's breaths and never, not once, letting myself want anything that wasn't safe and controlled and carefully managed.
And now I have twenty-four days. Maybe less.
What if you die without ever feeling alive again?
I'm out of bed before I've made the conscious decision to move. My feet carry me across cold hardwood, out my door, down the hall toward the landing where the stairway meets the upstairs halls.
This isn't about sex. Not really. Not tonight.
This is about mortality and fear and the desperate, clawing need to feel something other than the countdown ticking in my chest.
The monitoring station door is closed.
I stop. The blue light still bleeds underneath, so he's in there, but the door is closed and it wasn't closed last night. Last night it was open like an invitation, like he was waiting for me to come to him.
I'm wearing an oversized t-shirt I stole from a college ex-boyfriend whose last name I'd have to think about to remember and the sleep shorts I've worn to bed for three years running.
My hair is down because sixteen hours of pins left my scalp aching.
My feet are bare and the hardwood is cold and I am not dressed for anything other than what a woman wears when she is going to bed alone on a Tuesday night.
Maybe he doesn't want you to come.
Maybe last night was enough.
Maybe—
I knock. Soft, barely audible, but in the silence of the sleeping house it sounds loud.
Footsteps. The door opens.
Cole fills the doorway, backlit by the glow of monitors. His expression shifts when he sees me and something flickers across his face that I can't read, there and gone before I can name it.
"Angelina."
Just my name. No question, no invitation. Just my name hanging in the air between us like a held breath.
"I can't sleep."
"Neither can I."
We stand there, the door between us like a threshold neither of us is sure how to cross. He's in a black t-shirt and cargo pants, still dressed like he's expecting a threat, still wound tight with the tension that hasn't left his shoulders since this morning.
"I keep thinking about Patricia Brown," I say. "About her grandchildren. About how she was supposed to retire next year."
His jaw tightens. "That's not going to be you."
"You don't know that."
"I know that I won't allow it."
"You can't control everything, Cole." My voice comes out harsher than I intended. "You couldn't control someone walking into my chambers while we were… while I was…" I stop. Take a breath. "You can't promise me twenty-five days. You can't promise me anything."
He doesn't argue. That's worse, somehow. The fact that he knows I'm right and won't lie to me about it.
"I don't want to be alone." The words fall out before I can stop them. "I know that's— I know I shouldn't be here. I know last night was—"
"Last night was what?"
"I don't know." The admission scrapes my throat raw. "I don't know what it was. I don't know what any of this is. I just know that I'm scared and I'm tired of being scared alone and I—"
I want you to hold me. I want you to make me feel something other than this countdown in my chest. I want—
"I need you."
The words come out barely above a whisper. Not a demand, not even a request. Just truth, raw and unvarnished, offered up like evidence I can't take back.
Cole's hands curl into fists at his sides. I watch the tendons stand out along his forearms, the visible effort of restraint.
"You need to go back to your room. Someone was in your chambers fifteen hours ago." His voice is steady. The voice he probably uses for threat briefings. "I need to be watching those screens."
The rejection hits like a slap and blood rushes to my face so fast my vision goes bright at the edges. My stomach drops, the same lurch I've felt every time Adrian's mood shifted and the temperature in the room changed before I understood why.
"What?"
"If you stay here—" He stops, his jaw working and he seems to consider his next words. "And if you come to me like this, scared and vulnerable, I won't be able to stop. And you deserve better than that."
"Better than what? Better than wanting you?" I hear the edge in my own voice, the hurt bleeding through despite my best efforts to contain it. "Better than needing something for myself for once?"
"Better than a man who takes advantage of your fear."
"That's not—"
"Yes. It is." He steps back, putting distance between us.
"Fifteen hours ago, someone left a death threat on your desk.
You're terrified and exhausted and not thinking clearly, and if I touch you right now, I won't be able to tell the difference between you wanting me and you wanting to feel alive. "
He's right.
The realization lands cold and unwelcome. He's right, and I hate him for it.
"So what?" I wrap my arms around myself, suddenly aware of how thin my pajamas are, how exposed I am standing in this doorway. "I'm supposed to go back to my room and lie there alone, counting down the days until someone puts a flower on my grave?"
"You're supposed to let me protect you." His voice drops, rough and strained. "Even from myself."
"I don't need protection from you."
"Yes, you do." He moves toward me, slow and deliberate, until he's close enough that I can see the war playing out behind his eyes.
"Because if you stay, I will take you back to that bed and I will make you forget every fear you have.
And tomorrow morning, when the fear comes back, you'll wonder if any of it was real.
If you actually wanted me or if you just wanted to feel something. "
His hand comes up. Hovers near my face without touching.
"I need you to want me when you're not afraid. I need it to be a choice, not an escape."
Adrian never waited for a choice. Adrian took what he wanted and called it love.
The thought surfaces unbidden, sharp and clarifying. Cole is standing here, feeling desire—I see it in the tension of his shoulders, the grip of his fists—and he's saying no.
He's saying no because he cares about the why.
"When this is over." His voice is barely a whisper. "When the threat is neutralized and you're safe and you've had time to think clearly—if you still want me, I will be here. I will be right here."
"And if I don't have time?" The words come out cracked. "If twenty-four becomes twenty-three becomes zero and I never—"
"Then I will have failed you." His hand finally touches my face, thumb brushing my cheekbone with aching gentleness. "But I will not fail you tonight. Not like this."
He steps back. Lets his hand fall.
"Go to bed, Angelina."
I want to argue. I want to close the distance between us and kiss him until he forgets all his noble reasons for saying no. I want to be the kind of woman who takes what she wants without caring about the consequences.
But I'm not that woman. I never have been.
"Goodnight, Cole."
"Goodnight."
I turn and walk back down the hallway, and I don't run, because I've spent eight years learning that running is a concession to the thing chasing you. I close my door with a soft click and lean against it with my palms flat on the wood and I breathe.
He said no.
He was hard. I saw it, straining against his pants, undeniable. And he said no. Not because he didn't want me. Because he wanted me to want him for the right reasons.
Adrian never said no. Adrian took what he wanted when he wanted it.
He called it love. He called it his right.
He called it what I owed him for the house, the car, the ring, the life he'd given me, and if I didn't feel like giving it he took it anyway and told me I'd wanted it, told me my body had wanted it even if my mouth said otherwise.
And I believed him because what did I know?
I'd only ever been with one man before him and that man had left me.
Cole is sitting twenty feet away behind a wall, watching screens, because he told me no.
If I touch you right now, I won't stop.
Not I don't want you. Not you're not enough. He wanted me so badly his hands were shaking with the effort of not taking and he chose to sit in a chair and watch a screen instead.
Not my parents. They chose the family name. Not Adrian. He chose his own entitlement. Not even Sal, who freed me so he could own me differently.
When did anyone ever choose me over themselves?
I slide down the door until I'm sitting on the cold hardwood, my back against the wood, my father's medal pressed between my palm and my chest.
Twenty-three more days.
Twenty-three days, and the man in the other room chose my clarity over his need.
I don't know what to do with that. I don't know how to file it away or cross-examine it or reduce it to something that makes sense in the framework I've built for understanding men.
So, I sit on the floor in the dark and let the tears come, silent and hot against my cheeks, and I don't know if I'm crying because he rejected me or because he didn't.