Chapter 9 #4
Although I don’t want to. Although this is one memory I try not to bring up when I’m punishing myself for falling in love with him.
That night. The rain. His mouth. His Mustang with foggy windows.
“No,” I whisper.
“Yeah, you do,” he counters. “You remember everything. Like I do.”
He does remember everything and now I know why.
Because like mine, his present is the product of his past too.
Our past.
Instead of fighting against it, the past and his tight grip, I let myself go loose then. “I remember.” I let the floodgates open. I let this one memory douse me. “I remember that you let me go. You let me escape your clutches.”
His eyes narrow for a second. “Unscathed.”
Maybe it’s madness. Insanity. Maybe Mercury is in retrograde tonight.
Because none of it feels wrong.
Remembering doesn’t feel wrong. Remembering with him doesn’t feel like wrong either. It doesn’t feel like I’m about to drink a toxic potion labeled love.
“I didn’t want you to,” I tell him, which of course he knows but still.
His fingers around my wrist tighten as if to say that he won’t make the same mistake again. He won’t let me out of his evil clutches a second time.
“I know.” His jaw tics as if remembering it. “Hardest fucking thing I’ve ever done in my life. Noblest fucking thing too.”
“And also so atypical of you.”
“Fuck yeah, I’m not a good guy.”
“No, you’re not. But that night you were.” I breathe heavily. “For me.”
Another tic of his jaw. “Yeah.”
I bite my lip before saying, “It’s strange, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“That I become a bad girl for you and you become a good guy for me.”
His lips twist with a humorless smile again. “Yeah. Although it wasn’t really worth it.”
“What wasn’t?”
“Becoming a good guy.”
I frown. “Why not?”
“Because it sucked. Being the good guy.” His grip on my wrist shifts as he continues, “Especially when you have a monster boner in your pants refusing to let up. For days.”
“For d-days?”
“Yeah, what the fuck did you think would happen, Fae? When you give me a lap dance and beg me to bang your brains out.”
“I didn’t beg,” I protest and also lie.
Because I did.
He chuckles again because he knows I’m lying and continues, “And when my Mustang smelled like you.”
“It did?”
“Yeah, for weeks after that. Even though you drowned it in the lake for your revenge. Even though I had to change the seats, I’d still smell you. I’d get a whiff of your candy smell and just like that I’d get a motherfucking boner the size of your pretty little arm in the middle of the day.”
I press my lips then, to stop my laughter from spilling out.
This is not a laughing matter. None of this is, but I can’t help it and he obviously notices, obviously, and growls, “You think this is funny, Fae?”
Dutifully, I shake my head. “No.”
“If your brother knew I was taking a hit of his sister’s scent every time I drove my car, he would’ve drowned it in the lake himself. He would’ve hunted me down and this time instead of using my body as a punching bag, he would’ve killed me.”
“But you could’ve handled him, right?”
He gives me a lopsided smile. “Fuck yes.”
“Now I’m happy,” I blurt out.
“What?”
I swallow, debating whether I should tell him but already knowing that I will.
Already knowing that I’ve drunk the potion now and it’s making me crazy. So much so that I arch my spine and move against him. His hard body shudders and I revel in it.
I revel that I made him do that.
“That you suffered,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Yes. When I was crying in my pillow at night and in classes and during lunch and practically all the time, I’m glad you were suffering too. I’m glad that when you were haunting me, I was haunting you too.”
Maybe that’s what I want.
I want to haunt him, his dreams, his thoughts, his empty chest like he’s haunted me.
Maybe I want to be his demon like he is mine.
A demon that needs to be exorcized.
Maybe I want to be his Fae in all the ways he is my Roman, even though I don’t want him to be.
“You want to hear all the ways you’ve haunted me, Fae? All the little ways you’ve crept up on me over the past two years?”
I nod. “Yes.”
“Let me tell you about that then,” he says, finally letting my hands go, and so I touch him back.
While he puts his hands on the tree, making a cage of bones and muscles, I put mine on his waist. I touch him, his strength, his heat even though he’s always cold on the inside, after two long years and my eyelids flutter.
My fingers jerk with life.
“Let me tell you about that night, when I saw you sneaking out to your studio. I’d just driven down from New York after a long fucking day in that shithole office to go to another shithole office and I was tired as fuck.
But I couldn’t sleep. So I decided to drive around, and there were a million places I could’ve gone to but I chose that highway for a reason.
I chose to cross over from Bardstown to St. Mary’s for a fucking reason. I chose it for you.”
He licks his lips, shifting his body against mine, and I’m so hypnotized by his words, by him, that I shift too.
“Because I knew that’s where you lived. I knew that beyond that brick fence, you might be sleeping in one of those cinderblock buildings.
But you weren’t, were you? You were sneaking out.
After everything that I did — not that I did a lot — but after how I wanted to keep you safe, you were running around town at midnight.
It pissed me the fuck off, Fae, I’m not gonna lie.
It made me furious. It made me want to pick you up off the road, put you in my Mustang and drive you to an isolated, unknown place just to put the fear of God in you.
Just to teach you all the dangers lurking in the night. ”
He is the danger.
Him.
I’ve always known. I’ve just not cared and even now, a current goes through me at his furious words.
I fist his t-shirt, his muscles rippling under my knuckles. “But I’ve been doing it for two years now. It’s perfectly safe, Reed, and —”
“I know,” he says with clenched teeth, cutting me off.
“I fucking know. Why do you think I showed up at that shitty bar the next night? My sister didn’t just tell me about your fucking cupcake shop and she doesn’t just tell you things either.
She tells me things too, and for the past two years, she hasn’t shut up about you.
Every time she talks to you, every time she sees you, she can’t stop talking about you.
And I pretend that she’s bugging the fuck out of me.
I stomp and I kick things and I tell her to shut the fuck up. All the while hoping that she won’t.”
My breaths are all jumbled now.
I’m breathing so fast that they’re stumbling, falling all over each other. “I-I didn’t… I didn’t think you’d… I didn’t know.”
I did haunt him then. I did.
He lowers himself even more then, pushes his chest into mine. “Yeah, you didn’t. You didn’t know that even now, my Mustang smells like you. Even now when I get inside it, the first breath I take is you.”
Before I can say anything to that, he does something so… primitive and primal that all I can do is let him.
He smells me.
With his hands still planted on the tree by my head, he dips his face and takes a whiff off my forehead. But that’s not all. He grazes the side of my face with his nose as he smells me there too.
And he growls.
Like he really is an animal, a predator, and I bite my lip really, really hard.
So hard that I think I taste blood.
But it’s okay.
It’s fine because everything else inside me is bleeding too. Everything else inside me is bleeding lust.
Thick and tangy and coppery and so, so syrupy and delicious.
“Geranium,” he rasps against my skin. “Yeah?”
“Yes.”
He nuzzles his nose on my jaw. “And sugar.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Rare body oil.”
I tilt my head back even more, giving him access to my neck, to my scent as I hold on to him like he’ll save my life, when in reality, he’s the one drowning me.
He’s drowning me in desire, and wordlessly I nod as he rubs his nose on the column of my throat.
“Because you like them. Still.”
“Still.”
He looks up at me then, bowed over me with his strong, big body.
“You wanna know how you haunt me, Fae? This is how.” He shows it to me again by taking a whiff of my skin and I arch into him.
“This is what you do to me. This is what you did to me two years ago. You made me an addict, a junkie who’s looking for his next fix.
Who’s been looking for it all this time.
Because two years ago, I had a taste of a drug.
I had a taste of my Fae and she’s been in my system ever since.
She’s been running in my veins, my bloodstream and I’ve got no way to purge her.
I’ve got no way to get rid of her. And I’ve got no way to get more of her either.
So I’m stuck. I’m stuck with this need. This ache.
I’m stuck with you. I’m nothing but haunted, Fae.
I’m nothing but this ache. I’m nothing but pain. ”
I look into his bright eyes, bright with haunting, bright with pain as he said and I whisper, “Me too.”
He licks his lips. “What?”
“I’m pain too.”
Like him I’m nothing but pain. I’m nothing but haunted. I’m nothing but his.
Still.
After all this time, I’m still his. And I don’t want to be.
I don’t want to be his.
Somehow I already know what he’s going to say next.
“You remember what I told you?” he asks. “That night.”
I dig my nails into his hips. “Hold on to my dress.”
“Yeah.” He licks his lips again as if he’s already tasting me on them. “Can you do that for me again? Can you hold on to your dress for me? Don’t let me see her.”
Can I?
Can I hide from him again? Can I hide what’s between my legs from him again?
I did that once.
I listened to him. I obeyed him. And look where we are now.
I let him protect me, my body, but he didn’t protect my heart.
He broke it instead and I’ve been in pain ever since. He’s been in pain too.
We’ve both been haunted and caged in so many ways because of what happened, what we did to each other. It’s time we end this.
It’s time we break away from each other for good and move on. And somehow I already know what we have to do in order to do that.
I know what I have to do also.
In all my madness and desperation and my veins filled with that toxic potion that I drank because it was labeled love, I shake my head. “No.”
“What?”
“I won’t hold on to my dress for you. Because you don’t have to protect me anymore,” I say, looking into his eyes. “B-because I was… I was with someone else.”