17 #4
“Stop saying that,” I roared, advancing a step. She stood her ground, a miracle in itself. “Stop wielding your sorry like it’s a magic wand that gets to erase the scars. It doesn’t touch the damage, Aura. It just salts the wound.”
I was close to her now. Close enough to see the individual tear tracks, to smell the salt and sex on her skin. Her breath hitched, but she didn’t retreat. She never retreated from me in spaces like this. That was the sickest part of our whole twisted dance.
“You knew I was safe,” I said, my voice dropping to a low, dangerous rasp.
She went utterly still.
“You knew,” I repeated, the truth finally tearing its way out of me.
“Don’t you dare stand there and pretend you didn’t.
You let me command you. You let me put my hands on your throat.
You let me pin your wrists, turn you over, do things to your body that would have sent anyone else running for the hills. ”
My hand lifted before I could stop it, the motion sharp and violent, cutting through the ruined air between us like I was pointing at every ghost standing in the room with her.
My finger stabbed toward the door, toward the world outside my shitty apartment, toward Darian and Maddox and every piece of filth that had ever walked away breathing after touching something they had no right to touch.
“You handed me absolute power in the one place you were most terrified,” I said, my voice dropping into something ruined and lethal, “and I never, not once, made you regret giving it to me. You trusted me with your body, with your rules, with the dark where he fucking destroyed you.”
My arm stayed there for one brutal second, aimed at an enemy who wasn’t even in the room, my knuckles throbbing under blood-soaked gauze like my body still wanted to finish the sentence with violence.
Then I dropped my hand because if I kept pointing at the door, I was going to walk through it.
A raw, guttural sob broke from her lips. She nodded, unable to speak.
“You trusted me there,” I whispered, the anger bleeding into a pain so profound it made my voice shake.
“But you didn’t respect me. Not the man who loved you.
You trusted me with your fear, but you didn’t trust me with the truth.
You let me be your sanctuary when it suited you, then made me your embarrassment when it got too heavy.
You kept me small, Aura. You kept us in a fucking box because it was the only way you could control it, and I let you.
Because you were the only light in my life that didn’t come with a bill attached. ”
She covered her mouth with both hands, her shoulders shaking.
I was already coming apart, and watching her break was going to finish me.
“You were my escape. From my mother’s double shifts, from Vivi’s therapy bills, from Skylar’s silent sacrifices, from the scouts and the captaincy and the fucking weight of the whole world.
You were the one thing that was mine. And you looked at that…
at me… and you acted like I was a burden for wanting more than the scraps you threw me in the dark. ”
“I know,” she wept, the words barely audible.
“No, you don’t.” The words were gravel in my throat, each one scraping raw on the way out.
I looked at her, really looked, and saw the reflection of my own emptiness in her eyes.
“You were the only place I had where I wasn’t a paycheck, a captain, a therapist, a pillar.
You were the one thing that felt like mine.
Not my responsibility, but mine. You didn’t just take it from me.
You stood there and acted like I was a fool for grieving what we had. ”
Her breaking wasn’t cinematic. It happened quietly at first, somewhere deep inside her, before a violent tremor tore through her entire body.
Her spine curved, her shoulders caving as if the bones themselves had turned to dust. A raw, ragged gasp was torn from her, a sound with no tears behind it, just pure, undiluted agony.
She clamped both hands over her mouth, but the sob escaped anyway, a muffled, animal thing that shook her entire frame.
Her knees buckled, but she caught herself on the edge of the coffee table, knuckles white, head bowed.
The elegant, untouchable Aura Clarke was gone.
In her place was a woman coming apart at the seams, and it was the most terrifying thing I’d ever witnessed.
My body moved before my mind could veto it. One step. A single, instinctive lurch forward, my hand half-raising, muscles coiled to catch her, to pull her into the shelter of my own brokenness.
I stopped.
My boot heel ground into the floorboard. The space between us—three feet of charged, ruined air—felt like a canyon.
She felt the aborted movement. Her head snapped up.
Mascara was smeared in dark, desperate arcs under her eyes.
Her lips, still swollen from my mouth, trembled uncontrollably.
She saw the hesitation in my stance, the war written in the tight line of my shoulders.
And the hope that had flickered in her drowned eyes when I’d moved…
it died. The realization that I’d chosen to stay on my side of the rift hurt her more than if I’d never stirred at all.
It was a rejection of instinct, a cruelty of calculation.
“Please.” Her voice was a threadbare whisper, stripped of all its usual armor, all its sharp edges.
I closed my eyes. I couldn’t look at that naked need. It was a black hole, and I was already splintering at the event horizon.
“Please,” she begged again, the word wet and broken. “Forgive me.”
Every part of me wanted to.
The desire was a physical ache, a tidal pull in my chest so strong it threatened to overrule sense, memory, and self-preservation.
I wanted to cross the room. I wanted to sink to my knees in front of her, wrap my arms around her shaking body, and bury my face in her hair.
I wanted to whisper that it was okay, that I understood, that Darian was a ghost and Maddox was a corpse walking and none of it mattered because I had her here, now, real and breaking and mine.
I wanted to absorb her pain into my own, to let it live in me so she could be free of it.
I wanted to be the shelter all the time.
But I was standing in the brutal, unforgiving daylight of what she’d done. And in that light, love wasn’t a healing balm; it was salt ground into a year’s worth of open wounds. The bruise she’d left wasn’t on my skin; it was on my soul, a deep, permanent staining.
“I can’t.”
The two words fell into the silence like stones into a still pond. Her face didn’t just fall; it disintegrated. All the fragile hope, the desperate pleading, crumpled into an expression of such profound devastation it stole the air from my lungs.
“I can move on from you,” I said, forcing the words past the barbed wire in my throat.
My voice was low, hoarse, each syllable a conscious effort.
“I can survive you. I can learn to sleep in a place that doesn’t smell like you, walk down a hall without listening for your laugh, look at my phone without expecting your name.
I can do all that. It’ll fucking kill a part of me, but I can do it.
” I swallowed, the motion painful. “But I can’t forgive you.
I can’t forgive the year you spent making me feel like a beggar for scraps of your heart.
I can’t absolve you for teaching me that my love was something to be ashamed of. ”
“Easton.” My name was a sob.
“No.” The denial was sharp, final. I shook my head, the tears I refused to shed burning like acid behind my eyes.
“You don’t get to say it like that. Not now.
You’ve turned my name into a tool. You used it as a command when we fucked and used Wade as a weapon to keep me at bay.
You called me dramatic when I was being honest, begging when I was giving you everything I had.
You don’t get to use it now as a landing pad for your guilt. My name isn’t your fucking church.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, a futile attempt to hold her pieces together. Her chin dipped, her gaze falling to the floor between us. When she spoke again, the words were so quiet I felt them more than heard them, a vibration in the charged air.
“I love you.”
The world didn’t stop. The rain kept hitting the window.
My throbbing hand kept aching. The neighbor’s TV blared a laugh track through the wall.
But inside me, everything went terribly, perfectly still.
The three words I’d craved, starved for, built altars to in my heart…
they landed like a death sentence too late to save anything.
“What a tragedy,” I choked out, my voice wrecked beyond recognition.
“I do.” She took a hesitant step forward, then froze when she saw the violent rejection in my eyes.
“I love you. I think I loved you before I even knew what to call it. And I was so fucking terrified that you would become the thing that could finally destroy me… that I destroyed you first. To save myself.”
A harsh, humorless bark of laughter escaped me. It sounded like something breaking. “That,” I said, “is the most pathetic, self-serving, fucked-up love story I have ever heard in my life.”
“I know.” She didn’t deny it. The admission was its own kind of pain.
“Do you?” My voice climbed, laced with a fury that was really just grief in a sharper costume.
“Because I am still in love with you, Aura. Right now. Standing here, hating you, wanting to shake you until your teeth rattle, I am so fucking in love with you it feels like a sickness. It’s not pure.
It’s not sweet. It’s twisted and dark and it hurts.
It hurts because I’m so angry I can’t see straight, and the only thing I want is for you to be closer. ”
She cried then, in earnest. Silent, shoulder-shaking tears that streamed down her face, dripping onto the black fabric clutched in her hands. She made no move to wipe them away.