Chapter Nine
Ryker
This is not going as planned. I wanted her to beg for me.
To want me. I wanted her to feel ashamed when she learned who it was that was fucking her all night, but the night is almost over.
And I find myself wanting more of her, not being able to let her leave my side.
I have completely forgotten why I started all this.
She took away three years of my life, yet I am still in love with her.
She is peacefully lying on her side; I have my arms around her as we catch our breath. I haven’t had enough of her yet. I want to tell her everything, but instead, I choose to talk about something else, to know more about her while I still have her by my side.
“Princess?”
She moves her head to look at me, waiting for what I have to tell her.
“Yes, Sir?”
“Tell me about you. I don’t want to know your name or anything that you would tell someone random.” She looks away, taking a moment to answer while she thinks about my question.
“I don’t like people ignoring me.” She finally replies, and I already knew that, but I pretend I don’t. I choose to remain silent while she talks, clearly having more to say than this.
“People think it is because I am self-involved, but in reality, it is because I am afraid I will be alone if no one wants me.” She turns her head to look at me, waiting for a reaction, but my eyes wander around the room. I know the feeling.
She parts her lips to speak again, taking a deep breath first. I patiently wait for her words to come out, knowing it might be the only time we get to be like this.
“When I was little, my dad was my whole world. I did everything for his approval, but I never got it. When I was ten, he left us, and we had to move into a trailer since it was too hard for my mother to keep our house.” I didn’t know that about her.
I knew her father was absent and that there were some daddy issues involved with her behavior, but I assumed that was always the case.
“I understand; you don’t need to talk more about it if you don’t want to.”
She shakes her head and rests it again on my chest as she continues talking.
“I would like to continue since I am probably not going to see you again. If you were to continue seeing me after this night, you would have told me something about you by now. At least your name. You chose not to do that, and even though this night was amazing so far, I would like to take advantage of this intimate state to share with someone what I will never be able to tell any of my friends.”
I smile; she feels safe. My heart swells with happiness and feelings. I am trying to shove them back, but there is no point. She is still my world, and she will still reject me at the end of the night.
"When I was in high school, there was this boy. He kept giving me all the attention I ever needed. He was rich, and it wasn’t a problem for him to pay for things for me." My heartbeat fastens. I pretend I don’t notice, hoping she won’t either. She is talking about me.
"Even though he was rich, he wasn’t popular.
He had an alternative style, only hanging out with one other guy.
His friend was really popular, but even with that influence and the potential to be the same, he never seemed to care about it.
He only appeared to care about me." She pauses for a moment, then continues. "I was in love with him, but back then my image was everything. I had nothing, and I fought to get where I was. I couldn’t be with him even though it pained me. It was worse when I noticed he was changing himself for me; he would chase me like a lost puppy, even though he wasn’t like that at all.
To everyone else, he was a troublemaker, an outcast. But for me, he was sweet.
He would bring me gifts and pick me up for school every day for years before I got my car.
" She stays quiet as she contemplates whether she should continue talking.
"What happened?" I question, as this is the first time I am hearing the story, even if I lived through it. I am pretending I was not that boy.
"One night, he had enough. I was supposed to meet him but chose to go out with the guy I was seeing at the time.
My boyfriend was clearly cheating on me, and everyone knew, but he was the captain of the football team and the most popular guy in school.
I guess when he learned the news, he decided to take revenge by burning my car.
" A sob escapes her, and I realize she is actually crying.
I lift her head and wipe a tear from her cheek.
"Keep going, princess," I press, wanting to know why she is crying.
"Everyone pressured me to turn him in, so I did. He had good lawyers and got away with just serving time in a psychiatric ward instead of prison since he was already eighteen. He had some issues of his own, and it wasn’t the first fire he started.
They diagnosed him as a pyromaniac, adding a bipolar diagnosis to it.
I regret treating him the way I did, turning him in, manipulating him, giving him false hope so I could keep having everything he was offering.
I was using him, and I know I shouldn’t have. "
She releases a breath she had been holding the whole time she was talking, now silently crying in my arms.
I had no idea she knew my diagnosis; clearly, they weren’t wrong about any of it.
Fire does something for me that I can’t explain.
Bipolar wasn’t a surprise diagnosis either, since I had episodes of mania and depression from an early age.
I did not expect her to know any of this, to have followed the case so closely that she knew classified information only my family and Kayden knew.
"I was hoping to see him tonight," she finally admits, more to herself than to me.
Her statement is like a knot in my throat, blocking my ability to breathe.
I try to ignore the feeling, switching my attention back to her.
She is still crying, but in silence, wiping her tears with her fingers every few seconds.
"Princess, why did you want to see him? It sounds to me like you are not on good terms."
She chuckles. "We are not, but I was hoping to either fix it or at least see where he stands now that he's back."
Oh, sweetie, if only you knew. You have had me by your side since the moment you stepped into my house. If only you knew I was balls deep inside you half the night, having you in my arms as you gained your strength for the rest. If only you knew how much this meant to me, but you will never know.
At this moment, the realization that I can never share my identity with her hits me. She would hate me if I did, even though I wanted her to despise me when this night started, to feel betrayed as I did. I don’t want that anymore.