33. Maybe I am broken. But he likes me that way
Maybe I am broken. But he likes me that way
Oliver pulls in at the tree line where the cliff drops into a dark valley, the field ahead wide. The engine idles, a low hum between us. He doesn’t speak or move. Even his breathing stays even, like any sudden sound might send me backward.
My parents once told me it’s never the place that hurts you; it’s what people choose to do there. Sitting beside him, it finally makes sense. I unbuckle and get out. The headlights wash the clearing for a moment before he switches them off, and the dark settles. His door shuts behind me.
Warmth at my back tells me he’s here. “Dollface?”
“Why do you call me that?” I ask, still facing away.
“The first time I saw you, your eyes were wide and bright. I remember thinking they looked like the trees in the forest. Your mouth was soft and glossy. I wanted to bite it. Your hair was whipping behind you as you ran, and I had to keep my hands to myself so I didn’t fist it, tipping your head back to learn the line of your throat.
” His gaze moves over me, slow and sure.
“Your freckles on your chest looked like a constellation, like the stars above where we stood. A perfect representation of your name. You looked precious. Something I wanted to keep, and ruin. You were my perfect Dollface.”
My breath leaves me in a woosh. Oliver is not a man for pretty speeches.
He speaks in quiet acts that add up, where he stands, what he notices, what he puts between me and the world.
He makes me feel. He knows me. He may not speak love in the way the world expects it, but he says it in every language he knows.
I turn to him with a soft smile before looking back out and finally reliving one of the worst nights of my life.
“I met Jade in our freshman year of high school. She played volleyball with me, but she made it a competition at every turn. If I did something new, she did it next. I never knew what I did, and eventually I stopped trying to figure it out.” I walk over to him, wrapping my arms around his waist. “That didn’t stop her from trying to isolate me.
I chalked it all up to petty high school drama and hoped college would change things.
That was until I realized we had both gotten into Willow Hill.
I made a point of staying away from her, and it worked until I met Blaine. ”
I look at him. “We met freshman year, and by the time I found out he was friends with her, we were already—” I cut off when I see the dark look in his eyes.
“I only told him the basics. Blaine never forced us to socialize, even distancing himself from them. He and Molly are childhood best friends, so she has always disliked me. That only grew as I took Blaine away and she got closer to Jade.” I look out at the moon bright above us.
The cloudless dark sky. “Maybe if I had told him how deep Jade’s resentment ran, everything that happened afterward could have been avoided. ”
I meet his eyes once more, being pulled into a trance. “Six hours is all it took to change my life.”