Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Love made me do it.
That’s what I’m going to say to myself years later when I think of this night.
When I think of what I just said to him.
Love and a broken heart. That’s what made me say it.
I can’t believe I did though. I can’t believe I said that and I can’t believe he heard it.
Not only that, he understood it too.
Because as soon as I told him, his breathing got wild.
His chest expanded and swelled under his t-shirt and his shoulders became massive and even broader. And now he’s crowding me even more, eating up all the air, all the space around me with his enhanced, heavily breathing body.
“What’d you just say?”
Even though I’m trembling now and the night has gone darker because of how changed, how angry Reed has become after my confession, I forge ahead, my voice calm.
Because that’s the only way.
That’s the only way this will end.
“There was someone else. After you.”
He shifts on his feet, his torso rubbing against mine, his chest scraping against mine too.
I’m surrounded by him. Surrounded and trapped and at his mercy.
“What someone else?” he growls.
“A guy that I met.”
“Where?”
“At the bar.”
“The shitty bar that you go to.”
“Y-yes. Toby.”
He breathes out sharply at the name, his chest contracting, his stomach hollowing out. As if in revulsion. In protest.
“What about Toby?”
I’m still fisting his shirt at the hips but now I open my palms and splay them over his hard muscles. I try to absorb all his anger, his violence in my skin.
Because I know he’s going to get even angrier. When I tell him everything.
“I met him one night. Back when I started at St. Mary’s. Back then everything was… difficult. Everything hurt. Everything made me feel lonely and… You… I was still so mad at you. My anger was so fresh and…”
“And?”
God, I know this will hurt him.
I know it.
I know how possessive he can be. How dominating and authoritative. Even when he has no right to be any of those things with me.
Not anymore.
But I remind myself that this is the only way.
“And I wanted to forget you. I wanted to forget everything about you. I wanted to forget that I ever met you. That I fell in love with you. So I…”
His biceps are vibrating now.
I can feel them disturbing the still air. Still and somehow charged too.
Smelling of wildflowers and woods and geranium and sugar. And lust.
Smelling of us and our desire.
“You what?” he bites out, his eyes blazing with anger.
His features are so tight that I raise my hand and cradle his jaw, his rough, stubbled jaw, as I hurt him with my words.
“I… He was nice to me. And he had these laughing brown eyes and he was… kind. He was kind, Reed.” I press my fingertips on his ticking jaw.
“He was kind to me. He didn’t make me angry like you do.
And he didn’t make me mad or blush or… or bad. Like you do. He didn’t…”
He didn’t do anything for me, to be honest.
He was nice and he asked me why I looked so sad. Why my eyes were puffy and why my lips looked like they never smiled. He asked me why I looked like a girl who was lost.
I never would’ve noticed him if not for Poe.
Back then I used to be sad all the time and even though Poe didn’t know the reason she always stuck by me. It was her idea to sneak out and unwind. And I was too sad to care about getting caught so I went with her.
“What happened?” Reed asks, his words sounding like blades in the air.
“I… I let him… He kiss —”
“Don’t,” he snaps, cutting me off, almost pressing his forehead against mine, making me taste his command on my tongue, my trembling lips.
And that jaw that I’m touching now after two long years, I rub it.
I try to soothe away the tightness from it. I try to soothe him because I’m not finished. Because I have to keep going for the both of us.
“He didn’t just…” I tell Reed. “He did… other things. He took me to this dark corner, away from everyone and I went with him and he —”
That’s when his hands come off the tree and he puts them on me.
He wraps one around my throat and buries the other in my hair. He messes up my neat and tidy strands as his fingers latch onto my hair. He even squeezes my throat to get a good, possessive grip around it.
When he’s satisfied with how he’s trapped me and how my lips have parted at his dominating hold, he says, “Are you trying to hurt me?”
“No,” I whisper.
“Is this your fucked-up way of giving me pain? Of teaching me a lesson for breaking your heart. For throwing away your love.”
“No, Reed. Listen —”
“Then what the fuck are you doing?” he snaps so loudly that I flinch.
He grips my neck so tightly that I go up on my tiptoes to give him more access. To give him more of me to squeeze and grope and grab.
“I’m trying to tell you that you don’t have to protect me anymore. That I’m not some innocent flower that you met in the woods two years ago. I’m not. I haven’t been that girl in a long time, Reed, okay? You don’t have to tell me to hold on to my dress or to keep my legs shut when you’re around.”
His thumb presses down on my pulse. “I don’t, huh? I don’t have to protect you. I can do whatever I want with you then?”
“Yes. That’s what I’m saying. And where do you get off trying to protect me anyway?
You’re the guy who hurt me. You’re the reason I’m like this.
All broken.” My hands creep up to his hair then and I grip his longish strands.
I grip them and a breath puffs out of me because they feel the same as they did two years ago.
Rich and soft and cozy, and tugging on them, I continue, “And I’m the reason you’re haunted. And I want this to end.”
“To end,” he says roughly.
“Yes. I want this to end, Reed. I don’t want to be broken anymore.
I don’t want you to be haunted. We need to move on.
We need to forget about each other. We need to forget that we ever met.
” I look into his eyes that have turned even harsher now.
“I need to forget that I ever met you. That I ever fell in love with you. I need to forget you, Reed. I want to. And I want this to be the last time.”
“Last time what?”
“That we see each other. I don’t want… I don’t want you to come here anymore. To pick me up or to drive me around. I’m safe, Reed. So I don’t want you to be my chauffeur anymore. Besides, the audition video is done. So I don’t need you anymore.”
It got done last week. So this is it.
This has to be.
“You don’t need me anymore,” he repeats.
“No.” I shake my head, feeling all achy and sad. “So promise me.”
“Promise you.”
I nod, my neck in his grip, my head feeling heavy. “Promise me this is the last time. And maybe one day…”
“One day what?”
“One day I can meet someone and I can fall in love with him. I want to fall for someone. A different guy. A good guy. A guy who doesn’t hurt me like you do.”
The muscle on his cheek tics and tics. “You want to fall for someone?”
My heart sinks.
It goes all the way, down and down, to the bottom of my stomach. I don’t even think that I can hear it anymore. I don’t even think I feel it.
As if my heart is hiding.
It’s running away from me at the thought of falling for someone else.
But my heart is stupid. It has always been.
“Yes,” I whisper.
He goes still then. At my response.
As still as my own chest. Like his heart ran away too at the thought of me falling for someone else.
But that’s not true, is it?
He doesn’t have a heart to begin with. His chest is a wasteland where no heart, no flower will ever grow and I was foolish to ever think otherwise.
I still am.
Because his stillness makes me want to cry.
Makes me want to take back my words and fall at his feet. It makes me want to tell him that I will never ever fall for anyone else.
I can’t.
Because two years ago, I loved him too much and sometimes I still feel that love.
I hate it.
I hate that I can feel it in my chest but I feel it nonetheless.
But then, that’s why I’ve done this, right?
To not feel it anymore. To end it once and for all.
“So say it,” Reed commands after a few seconds. “Say the words then.”
I’m not surprised that he already knows what I’m going to say. It’s the strangest thing that we can sense each other’s thoughts like that but I’m not going to dwell on it.
I’m going to say it.
“I-I think we should…”
His grip flexes around my throat, in my hair. “We should what?”
“You should f-fuck me.”
It took me what felt like forever to say it but it doesn’t take him more than a fraction of a second to repeat it. “I should fuck you.”
I jerk out a nod and swallow that I’m sure he can feel on his rough palm. “Yes.”
“Because you’re not an innocent flower anymore. I don’t need to tell you to hold on to your dress. Or to hide your pussy from me.”
I’d forgotten.
I’d forgotten how filthy his words can be. Or at least what they made me feel when he talked to me like that. How they affected me.
How they sent currents running through my body, my stomach, my limbs. How my skin would tremble and become coarse with goosebumps.
“Yes,” I reply, swallowing again. “It didn’t work the last time. Protecting me, my body. So I think we should d-do it.”
“Do it.”
“I think we should get each other out of our systems. Get closure. So we can move on. We can —”
“Yeah, you said that.” He squeezes my throat again. “You already said how you wanted to fall for someone else.”
“Reed —”
He cuts me off again. “So you want me to fuck you, fuck that thing between your legs, so you can offer it up to someone else. A good guy. A guy who doesn’t hurt you like I do. Am I getting it right?”
At his angry words, jealous words, a great, mighty tremble rolls through my thighs, through the thing between my legs, and I have to press my thighs together to keep my balance.
But then, I shouldn’t have worried about falling because he’s got a good hold on me.
A possessive hold.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant that we have to end this and —”