Chapter 30 #2
He exhaled harshly, looking away from me.
“I want you to tie me up and fuck me and take care of me afterwards. Watch all my movies you probably don’t care about and shower with me and sleep with me and talk to me about your life.
” I took a deep breath. Micah was already doing most of this, but it was different.
It wasn’t right. The lack of honesty I’d been living with, but combined with other things, it was hard to accept.
“I just want us. I want you. I don’t care if—”
“Dakota,” he said loudly, cutting me off. “I can’t do that. I know what you meant. I can’t do our normal anymore.”
I paused, my mouth open, all my words dying on my tongue. My eyes stung.
“Why not? You don’t want me anymore?”
“That’s not it. I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my whole fucking life. I just…” He trailed off, the rustle of tree branches claiming the forgotten end of his sentence.
“You just what?”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t know.”
I pressed my lips together, blinking back the tears that always threatened to spill down my cheeks. My fingers curled into my palms, nails pressing into the skin.
Mason and I weren’t sustainable because of his violence, but Micah and I were unsustainable for a different reason. His distance. I couldn’t be in a relationship like this forever.
It was a truth I’d been trying to ignore, because it was so much easier to accept the inevitability of my decay with Mason than with Micah.
Understanding that two people who craved death would never last was simple.
Understanding that I was attached to my anchor with a rigid metal rod rather than a flexible chain was not simple.
He kept me close, but never close enough.
Nervously, I turned to watch him again. Each of my heartbeats belonged to him.
I regretted everything. I wished things were different.
There were so many pieces to Micah’s puzzle, and I felt I held such a small, pointless amount of them.
I knew fucking nothing about his life, other than the fact that he taught classes in chemical engineering and conducted research at the same university.
What I hadn’t initially realized was that him taking care of me meant I’d never be allowed to do the same to him.
The power was only allowed to flow in one direction.
My mind raced.
Maybe that was just it.
The power.
My eyes flicked back to stare out over the ocean as the gears in my brain whirred, my teeth anxiously chewing my lower lip. Micah wasn’t wired the same way I was, so I couldn’t apply my own thought patterns to him the same way I might’ve been able to with Mason.
I couldn’t be gentle with him, nor could I be abrasive. To Micah, my sympathy felt as bad as my arguing. Neither one of those things gave him the control, and maybe that was what he needed.
I’d been looking at the situation and seeing two paths, when I should’ve seen three. The first path was to fight with him, make him jealous, make him snap. The second was to show him how much I cared about him, how obsessed I was, how much I’d love him.
Those things could work with someone else, but not Micah.
I needed to back off completely and grant him complete control over the situation, over me. It wasn’t that he didn’t like me caring about him; it was that my care always came with imposition.
This could be simpler than I’d been making it.
I hope.
Slowly, I got off the rock, lowering myself to my knees in front of him.
He looked down at me kneeling with a tortured expression on his face.
I don’t know what I’m doing, but I want you to see that I’m trying.
I laid my palms flat on my thighs and cast my eyes downward.
“You can tell me to do anything you want,” I whispered. “I won’t fight you.”
Micah was quiet for a solid minute, and I glanced up to watch him staring out at the waves. His expression was unreadable, but the intensity in his eyes made me look back down at my thighs.
What are you thinking?
I was tempted to lean forward, to put my cheek on his quad and hug his calf and wait for him to hold my face with his hand. But he hadn’t asked for that, so I wouldn’t do it.
“You’re done doing that immature shit with him. No more fucking him to try and make me jealous,” he finally said. The sheer authority in his tone thrilled me, waking up all the butterflies in my stomach. “Repeat it.”
“I’m done with it,” I breathed without looking up.
“Your body is mine, and you know that. Doesn’t matter if Mason gets to fuck you sometimes. He’s not in charge of you. I am. Repeat it.”
“You’re in charge of me.” My palms were still warm on my thighs through my jeans, and I wholeheartedly believed every word I was repeating. Micah’s dominance threaded itself through my bones, all the way to the marrow, each strand keeping me together.
“You are mine to break and mine to fix. My evil, precious, broken girl. I told you to be patient, and I’m only half satisfied with your following of my instructions. How does that make you feel?”
“I wish you were fully satisfied.”
“Right. But that means you have to listen to me. You have to trust me to do what’s best. I’m not sure you do.”
“I do,” I said quickly, looking up at him now. “I do trust you. You know what’s best.”
“Show me,” he murmured, fingertips brushing my jaw, just barely. A whisper of comfort in the storm. “Give me a reason to believe you.”
I nodded, then turned and crawled a few yards to the cliff’s edge before laying on my back, the top of my head just barely off the edge. Micah stood up and walked in my direction, gazing down at me lying on the ground for him.
“Farther,” he ordered.
I obeyed him without thinking.
I trust you so much. More than I should.
I listen to you.
I pushed back further off the edge of the cliff, the wind sweeping under my skull, twirling in my hair. Micah wasn’t touching me still, but he was here. I’m safe with him here.
“Farther,” he ordered again, standing over me.
Again, I followed his instructions instantly.
I used the heels of my boots to push my whole body back a few more inches, my head unsupported now, the tops of my shoulders breaching the edge of the drop.
Shallow, nervous breaths slipped between my parted lips, my stomach all fluttery.
I swore I could feel the heat of his body from here, softening the bite of the wind.
He knelt, his knees on either side of my midsection, bringing his warmth so much closer.
“Show me,” he started, “how much you trust me.”
My palms were sweating now, my heart slamming on my ribcage as I got a fresh hit of my drug of choice. Pure fear. Clear and liquid, dumping into my veins with my adrenaline. It was only made better by the promise of obedience I exhaled in every wind-veiled breath.
I pushed backwards until every other thought in my brain disappeared, all of them dropping off the cliff and hitting the ocean-wrapped rocks below me. Micah was the only thing that existed, kneeling over me, watching me obey him to the edge of my own life.
His hand wrapped sacredly around my throat, fingers laying over my pulse.
A shuddering exhale escaped me as he pulled my body back onto the solid ground below him, lowering himself to put his forearms on the ground next to my shoulders. His eyes hooked on mine, his irises made of silver steel and blue ice and cold satisfaction.
Micah leaned down. I didn’t move an inch, hardly breathing.
Nothing more than the space of a single exhale existed between us.
I looked down at his mouth.
And then he kissed me.