Chapter 65 The Present #2
“Cut out for what?” I shot back, my frustration bubbling over. “For living life? For having fun?”
“Amelia,” Sabrina interjected, sensing the tension rising. “Why don’t we all just enjoy dinner?”
After dinner, as we moved to the living room for games, I took a deep breath, my heart pounding.
I couldn’t bear the tension another second. I feigned interest in the game that Alex had brought. A sickly-sweet party charade that required far more social lubrication than any of us possessed. While my eyes kept drifting to Caiden, who brooded in the corner, jaw ticking, eyes flat and dangerous.
A knife in a drawer, waiting for a hand to draw it.
The game itself was a fever dream of laughter and humiliation; I watched Shane perform a ludicrous pantomime of “pterodactyl mating season” and Sabrina dissolve into gleeful peals at his dinosaur squawks.
I laughed too, but it was a mechanical sound, the kind my mother used to make in the good years, before her pills stripped the brightness from her throat.
Alex dominated the room, his energy relentless, his confidence engineered to absorb every photon of attention.
His hands were always in motion, like he was conjuring the air, and he kept finding excuses to brush them against my arm, the small of my back, the inside of my wrist.
“Amelia, you are absolutely brilliant at these clues,” Alex enthused, locking his gaze onto me, blue eyes alight. “I’d want you on my team for any game night, hands down.”
The compliment was harmless, but it sent a jagged ripple through the air. Caiden’s gaze flicked up. He looked at Alex, then at me, then back down at his cards.
His knuckles whitened, gripping the plastic so hard it warped.
Shane, predictably, made a joke to cut the tension: “Let’s not all fight over Amelia’s superior intellect, gentlemen, she’s got enough brilliance for the whole table.”
The room laughed, but the sound felt hollow, a bell rung in a crypt. I smiled, but my mouth was dry, the inside of my cheeks bitten raw.
I wondered if they could see it, that every jibe and touch from Alex was another bone in the graveyard Caiden and I haunted.
As the night wore on, laughter and games filled the room, but I felt like an outsider, trapped in my head. My gaze kept drifting to Caiden, who was now sitting across the room, his expression hard to read.
And then I noticed Alex watching me, a hint of something more in his eyes. It sent a shiver down my spine, reminding me of the growing connection between us.
As I glanced over at Caiden, I saw the pain etched on his face, the internal struggle that mirrored my own. And in that moment, I knew this was far from over.
The scent of Alex's cologne hung in the air as I sat beside him, his arm casually draped across the couch, grazing my neck, while I locked eyes with Caiden, his face a mask of seething anger.
Two can play at this game, Caiden.
I sent a silent challenge to him with my gaze. He shifted in his seat. The brown specks of his eyes were adorned with an inner heat that caused my stomach to flip and twist.
Caiden watched as I leaned into Alex, giggling like a giddy schoolgirl at something he said.
The game ended, but Alex's arm remained where it was, a comforting weight against my side, it was a nice change from the iciness radiating from Caiden across the room.
He didn't speak, didn't touch, but the intensity in his eyes promised a continuation, a battle waged not with words, but with actions.
With the silent language of hearts entangled and torn, battling within the fury of winter and delicacy of starlight.
The storm within us raged on, a prelude to a confrontation that felt both inevitable and terrifying. This tension being unresolved and electric.
Alex stood and stretched, his shirt riding up to reveal a stripe of tanned skin. He caught me looking and winked, so deftly I wondered if he’d been practicing in the mirror.
“You want to try that new gelato place around the corner?” he asked, pitching his voice low, just for me. “I hear they have blood orange. Your favorite, right?”
I managed a nod, because what else was I supposed to do? Say that every flavor tasted like teeth and regret now?
Alex offered his arm, and I took it. The others watched with varying degrees of amusement, but when I glanced back at Caiden, I saw the vein in his temple pulsing, his jaw set like concrete.
He didn’t say a word, only stared at the wall, as if he could bore a hole through it and escape into the blackness beyond.
I let myself get to the bottom of the porch steps before the chill of the night air bit into my arms, and I remembered too late that I’d forgotten my bag.
“I’ll grab it,” Alex offered, but I shook my head, already halfway back up the walk.
Inside, the house was quieter; the laughter had faded and the lights were low, everyone else gone off to their own corners. I grabbed my purse on the counter.
As I turned, I nearly smashed straight into Caiden: six feet of silent fury, standing in the half-lit hallway like a warning.
He didn’t move.
I tried to brush past him, but his hand shot out, catching my wrist. The grip was tight, but not cruel; his thumb pressed right over the flutter of my pulse.
“Are you seriously going to fuck him?” he whispered, not even looking at me. “Is this just for show, or are you actually that desperate?”
I tried to yank my arm free, but I was held captive by the force of his strength. “You don’t get to police what I do.”
He laughed. “No, I guess I don’t. You’re a free woman.”
He stared at me, his face a study in rage and hunger.
The silence between us was like the vacuum after an explosion, where the only thing left is the ringing in your ears and the pressure in your chest.
“You want to pretend?” he said, voice low and lethal, each word weighed out in ounces of venom. “Go ahead. Play house with him. See if it fixes anything.”
I tried to wrench my hand away again but he held me, thumb tracing the line of my pulse as if he could erase it, as if he could pull the blood right out of me. “Let go,” I said, but my voice was thin and unconvincing, a child’s voice, a ghost’s.
He made a sound. Half laugh, half snarl. “You don’t actually want me to let go.”
I hated that he was right.
Even as shame flushed through me, even as I imagined Alex waiting outside with his easy smile and his clean hands, I didn’t want to be free of Caiden’s grip.
I wanted him to pin me here, to force me to admit that nothing about me had changed except the cut of my scars. On some level, I wanted to be ruined all over again, but with intention this time, with a witness.
“Why are you doing this?” I whispered.
His breath was hot against my face, something dark and chemical, like gasoline on a summer sidewalk. “You know what I want. I want you to admit that nothing, nothing, will ever satisfy you except this.”
His hand on my wrist tightened, and I felt the bones in my arm grind together, but I didn’t make a sound.
The pain was a relief from the ache that gnawed at my insides every waking hour.
I had no answer.
All the words I’d ever stockpiled bled out of me at once, leaving only the hush of my own shallow breathing.
The truth was, even in my best moments I was half-invisible, a shadow stitched together from scraps of other people’s longing.
If Alex wanted to fuck a ghost, who was I to stop him?
If Caiden wanted to break me open just to see if anything was left inside, maybe that was the only thing I deserved.
He pressed me against the hallway wall, the drywall cool through my shirt, his hand still locked around my wrist.
His thighs caged mine, and I knew if I tried to run he’d let me, but he’d follow, and I’d let him catch me.
My pulse stuttered. From fear or want, I couldn’t tell. Maybe they were the same thing, in the end.
He brought my hand to his chest, where the beat of his heart was frantic as a sparrow’s wings. “You think Alex knows what you look like when you’re scared? When you’re starving? You could be anyone for him.”
His words thrummed through my bones; the truth in them hurt more than the grip that left bruises on my skin.
I finally wrenched myself free, but even then, the heat of his touch lingered like a chemical burn. “And for you?” I spat, my voice shaking. “What am I for you, Caiden? Just another thing to break?”
He shook his head, almost violently. “No. Never that.”
He reached out, and this time I let him, too numb or too desperate to resist. His hands settled on my hips, fingers biting through denim to the flesh beneath, anchoring me where I stood.
“I can’t stop thinking about you.” He said it like an accusation, as if I’d infected him somehow. “I hate you for it.”
I wanted to laugh, but my throat had closed around the sound. “So what now, Caiden?” I asked, voice cracked open. “You want to drag me into a room and prove you’re the only one who matters?”
He looked startled, then something like hunger flashed across his face. “I want you to stop lying to yourself, you’re not fooling me,” he said, and with no warning at all, he bent and kissed me.
It was greedy, filthy, ruthless. A claim staked with teeth. I could feel the anger in it, the months of wanting and not having, the years of training himself to hate what he could not have.
My hands clutched his shirt, either to push him off or pull him closer, but I didn’t know which, and when his tongue forced my mouth open, something inside me uncoiled in response.
There was nothing careful about it; this was not a kiss meant for healing. It was a cage with the door thrown open just so I could see what it meant to be trapped.
He lifted me easily, pushing me up against the wall so my feet left the floor. My back collided with the plaster, and the sound must have been loud, but I only heard his breath in my ear, ragged and near feral.
He held me there as if I weighed nothing, as if letting go was not an option, and I realized in that moment how much I wanted this, how much I needed someone to eclipse my own will.
His teeth dragged down my throat, scraping past the collarbone to the hollow at its base, and I heard myself gasp, the sound animal and unhinged.
His hands roamed—back, ribs, ass—nothing tentative, nothing gentle. He gripped the meat of my thigh and hiked it up around his waist, pressing himself so close I could feel the bulge in his jeans, hot and urgent against me.
There was no air left between us.
“You want to go, go to him,” he hissed against my ear, but his hand squeezed tighter. “See if you can be touched by him without thinking about this fucking hunger.”
He let go, sudden and sharp, like a dog unclenching its jaw.
My arm hung at my side, numb and tingling.
He stepped back.
For a split second I caught the look in his eyes, how starved he was, how deeply, perfectly broken.
Then he slammed the door and was gone.
I watched the shadow of him all the way to the end, confused and hot all over. One minute, he was distant and cold. Then, suddenly he was possessive and all hunger.
I sighed and let myself out into the night, into Alex’s waiting arms.
We went to the gelato place, and I smiled and laughed and tried to be normal, to be someone who could enjoy the clean, citrus tang of blood orange on the tongue.
But it all tasted like memory, like the sweetness you only recognize after it’s gone. Alex touched my hand and told stories, and I nodded along, but the heat of Caiden’s mouth lingered, a ghost on my lips.
And as I lay in bed that night, I felt uncertainty press down on me, knowing that whatever came next would shape the course of our lives.