Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SHILOH
“What’s your favorite color?”
The question comes out of nowhere a week after the night Donovan caught me at the youth center. Up until then, we’d been sitting on his couch watching some old movie that I wasn’t really paying attention to while he played with my hair and I let myself drift on a cloud of hazy relaxation.
He’d asked me about the youth center before too, and I’d been surprised when I’d answered. It wasn’t like I could hide it.
And honestly, it wasn’t hard to tell him when I remembered the way his eyes had been so warm as he’d watched me with Iggy and the other kids. I didn’t tell him why I was going into art therapy, and he’d been more happy to ask about my volunteer schedule and how many classes I’d taught.
Since I’d only been there for a few, it was easy to give the information.
And now he’s asking more questions.
It’s not really the words that take me aback as much as the intensity. I frown, shifting in Donovan’s arms so I can look at him while I answer.
“Red.” My eyes flick from his hair to the posters on the wall, and I hope since I didn’t say crimson, he doesn’t associate it with blood.
“I could have guessed that from your art, actually.” I start to settle back down, but he grabs the remote and pauses the movie. His fingers slide through my hair, warm palms shifting to cup my face. “What’s your middle name?”
I pause. “Ryley.” The word comes out cautiously. The questions are innocent, but Donovan’s hands pull me until I’m straddling his lap, and his nails raking along my scalp make my mind go fuzzy as he keeps talking.
“What’s your last name?”
I have a moment where I think I should probably put an end to this, because he seems to have some kind of goal in mind… but his lips land on my neck, and the hot stripe of his tongue licking along the line of my pulse distracts me enough that I moan the answer. “Lake.”
“Shiloh Ryley Lake.” He whispers it against my pulse like a prayer, and I wonder if he can feel the way the syllables make it go rapid-fire.
I don’t like this, because I like letting him see little pieces of me. I liked it earlier when he was at Helping Hearts, and I like it now hearing him whisper my name as if I’ve told him some secret to the universe.
I don’t like how much I like feeling important to someone.
“Donovan…” I start, but his lips find mine, and he licks my protest straight from my mouth in warm, sure strokes of his tongue that make me melt against him.
It’s not fair how good Donovan is at kissing… or maybe he’s not, and it’s just the fact that he’s the only person I’ve kissed.
Whatever it is, I’m lost in the feel of it, in the sensation of his big hands as they slide beneath my shirt and skate along the length of my spine in a delicious tickle of heat that leaves me shivering against him.
I’m not sure if I like sex so much as I like the way it feels to get lost in Donovan’s want… but…
When I open my eyes, that heat isn’t there. Sure, it’s somewhere in the background, but his expression is deeper. Warm and soft and full of something that looks a lot like fear.
I don’t like him looking at me like that.
“What?” I try to pull back, but his hand at my back keeps me effortlessly in place when he drops his other hand to the top of my thigh.
“I want to know you, Shiloh.” He says it softly, whispered as though he knows how dangerous those words are.
Dangerous for me—dangerous for him. Dangerous because the last person who really knew me ended up dead.
“You know me enough.” I try to lean in for another kiss, but his hand skates from my thigh to my waist… and I freeze.
I can feel what his fingers are doing. They trace the pattern of the scar beneath my tattoo like they do some nights when he thinks I’m asleep. Now, though, he’s looking at me.
I want to know you.
He doesn’t need to know that part of me. I don’t even want to know that part of me. I spend nights lost in blood and paint to try to forget.
“What happened?”
I jerk back, shoving at his chest hard enough that a startled little exhalation punches through the air. It gives me a chance to scramble out of his lap, standing up while he stares at me with a mixture of hurt and confusion on his face.
“Nothing that matters.”
His expression shutters when I answer. It’s still not a lie, but it’s the closest I’ve come to one.
“Shiloh, it matters.” I open my mouth to protest, and I’m shocked when he cuts me off in a sharper tone than anything I’m used to hearing from him. “If it’s you, if it hurts you, it matters.”
Fuck.
Fuck, I don’t know if I can do this.
“I don’t,” I answer, and the way his mouth pinches tells me my mistake. I try to cover it with a sarcastic laugh. “I mean, it doesn’t.”
Donovan sees right through me, though. He stands faster than he has any right to, and his long legs carry him the few steps I’ve put between us. His hand cups my face, warm and calloused and everything I’m starting to get addicted to…
“It matters, Shiloh. You matter.” His thumb streaks a warm line across my lower lip. “To me.”
I can’t.
I can’t. Because if I do, I’ll have to tell him about that night.
About my mom dying, and how it feels to have a knife in your stomach.
I’ll have to tell him that Shiloh the little boy died that night, and a monster crawled into the places he was cut open and found a home wrapped around his spine and flooding into a hollow chest.
I can’t.
“No,” I breathe, and I watch the lines of warmth on his face start to break.
“Shiloh—”
“No, Donovan.” I have to force myself to step back. “No. Not this. Okay? Ask me my favorite color, or where I want to work when I graduate, but don’t ask me about this. You don’t want to know this.”
It’s there again, that warmth, that heat.
Those emotions I saw trapped behind glass the day he found me at Helping Hearts…
and I’m drowning in it. Donovan isn’t the sky, or the stars, he’s an endless fucking sea, his freckles nothing but light refracting at the top of the water.
It’s his emotions that drag me down. His emotions that threaten to drown me, to scrape my skin off against the sharp stones at the bottom of his depths and leave me flayed raw for the salt to purify my sins.
I can’t. I can’t be that vulnerable. I can’t be the person Donovan thinks he sees when he looks at me like…
Like he…
“Shiloh, whatever hurt you, I can help. I’m here, I—”
“I’m not broken, Donovan. I figured out how to put myself back together a long time ago.” What I can’t say is that I did it in ways that would make his blood curdle, in ways that would make him hate me.
More than the questions, more than him trying to pry apart my ribs to see the monster I truly am inside… I don’t want him to hate me.
I don’t think that’s a wound I could recover from.
“Shiloh… Loh, please?” The way his voice breaks as he says that soft syllable nearly makes me turn, but I shake my head.
I need to get out of his apartment, or I’m going to do something ridiculous… something like ask him to touch my damn scars again, because when he does, I don’t feel haunted by memories. I don’t know him well enough for that… and he’s right. He doesn’t know me at all.
“I have to go.”
I don’t like the way he’s looking at me, or the way he’s standing there like he’s going to try to stop me. It makes me throw my arm out between us, the motion like the slice of a blade, severing something I don’t want to kill.
“Shiloh—”
“Don’t.” He freezes. “Don’t, Donovan. Don’t fuck this up, please. I can’t… I…” I swallow hard, sharp little shards of glass cutting me open from the inside out. “I’ll talk to you later.”
And I turn before he can catch up, shutting the door to his apartment quietly behind me and wondering if the one thing that finally made me feel a little human is ruined because the monster inside me refuses to give up its hold on my heart.