Chapter 30 - Olivia #3
“I didn’t choose this, Olivia.” His words wrap around me like a silken noose, frightening yet intoxicating.
“This obsession with you… It chose me the moment I laid eyes on you, and I don’t want it to end.
Not ever.” His hand slides down my throat to splay on my chest, coming to rest on top of my frantically beating heart.
“I love you to the point of madness and I will never stop. Never.”
I can barely breathe. My mind is robbed of all rational thought. His words have sunk into me like claws, and the worst part is that I don’t even want to shake free.
His intensity is magnetic and terrifying in equal measure, and that’s what makes it so irresistible.
Haven’t I always known this about him, even in his tender moments? His relentlessness, the way his eyes track my every move, how he never lets me stray far from him. And isn’t that what drew me to him in the first place, even as much as I try to deny it?
Before I can say anything, he leans in, his forehead pressing against mine, his breath shallow and uneven. Both hands now cradle my face, his touch so gentle it makes my chest ache.
“So now you know,” his voice is a broken whisper. “Whether you stay… Whether you run…” His thumbs stroke my cheeks, his eyes piercing mine. “Where you are is where I’ll be.”
Then, abruptly, his hands fall from my face and he steps back. The shift is small in distance but enormous in sensation. The warmth he’d pressed into my skin drains at once, leaving a raw chill in its wake.
The space he’s now offering feels disorientating, as if my body had calibrated itself to his closeness without asking my permission.
My fingers twitch at my sides, restless with the urge to reach for him. The impulse is humiliating in its immediacy—my body tipping forward, my breath snagging as if some instinct is dragging me back toward the heat I’ve just been pulled from.
Nathaniel catalogs my every reaction, but he offers no reassurances. His restraint reads like provocation, a mirror held up for me to witness my physical craving revealing itself before my mind can catch up.
“You’ve asked your questions,” he says, voice low and maddeningly even. “It’s my turn now.”
A beat.
“Why are you still here, baby?”
The words land with surgical precision, pulled from the mouth of someone who already knows the answer.
Why am I still here? After everything he’s done? After everything I’ve just learned?
The truth rises before I’m ready for it—an involuntary pull, the same one that made me lean toward him the moment he stepped back. My body answered him even while my mind recoiled, and now I feel the echo of that reach in every shallow breath.
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t coax or close the distance. His stillness forces me to sit with what my own reaction revealed, and that knowledge unsettles me more than any confession he could have made.
“By now, you’ve seen every red flag,” he continues. “You’ve had every reason to walk away. You’ve even tried to give yourself space.” His gaze dips to the slight forward tilt of my body. “And yet…you always come back.”
My spine stiffens.
“Have you ever asked yourself why that is?”
His hands remain loose at his sides, relaxed, as if there is nothing left in him that needs defending.
“Do you know why your accusations don’t land the way you think they do?” he asks, tilting his head slightly.
Then he smiles, slow and knowing. I hate the arrogance of it, yet my heart skips a beat all the same. He’s beautiful in a way that’s entirely unfair. Even now, he is still the most handsome man that I’ve ever seen.
“It’s because none of this surprises you,” he says.
Heat rushes to my cheeks, equal parts indignation and the sickening awareness that he’s right.
“Some part of you always knew what you were getting with me,” he continues. “And you liked it. That’s why your accusations ring hollow—even to you.”
He’s right. On a subconscious level, I have always known. I felt it in the way he watched me, followed me, and claimed me long before there were words for any of it.
“I may have hidden things from you,” he goes on, voice steady. “But I’ve never lied to myself about who I am or what I feel for you. That’s the difference between us.” His gaze holds mine without wavering. “You, on the other hand…you are dishonest. Especially with yourself.”
The accusation lands exactly where my fears and desires intersect.
I’ve reached the edge of what I can deny.
What he offers—the certainty of his pursuit—is exactly what pulls me in.
I’ve always known he would chase me, no matter the distance I try to put between us.
And standing here now, I’m forced to confront the truth—I’ve never really tried hard enough to outrun him.
Some part of me always wanted him close enough to follow.
“I know why I do what I do. Obsession, devotion, whatever you want to call it—I’ve never lied about that. But you…” His eyes narrow as he regards me. “You keep pretending this isn’t exactly the kind of love you crave.”
The accuracy of his assessment leaves me feeling more exposed than ever before.
“You want the kind of love that leaves no room for uncertainty,” he says.
Indeed, he’s reshaped his world around me, arranged every facet of it with the conscientiousness of a man who refuses to misplace what he deems most precious to him. I think back to all the times he centered me without ceremony—his fidelity evident even in the smallest gestures.
“The kind of love,” he continues, “that will shoulder every burden for you.”
And he has. Nathaniel has always moved to intercept anything that might weigh me down.
He anticipates my needs with an intuition that borders on unnerving.
Meals ready before I ask. Plans smoothed out before I’ve voiced the worry.
A hand on my back when the day threatens to tip.
His attentiveness is meticulous, unwavering, and so unlike the household I grew up in—where stability depended on my ability to carry everything without faltering.
With him, I’ve been allowed to set the weight down.
Allowed to be held instead of bracing for collapse.
“And the kind of love,” he murmurs, “that sees you completely and refuses to look away.”
Undeniably, he is the only person who has ever perceived every shift in my voice, every tightening of my shoulders, every fracture beneath the surface.
The only one who has read me without demand or judgment.
I never had to hide with him—my fear, my exhaustion, the parts of myself I spent years concealing from everyone else.
He sees all of it, and somehow his desire sharpens rather than dims. Something inside me—starved for that level of recognition—unfurls with aching, trembling need.
“And I give all of that to you, Olivia. With no conditions but one: that you allow me the privilege of staying by your side.”
The words strike directly at the heart of everything.
To stay by my side…that has always been the crux of it all, hasn’t it?
The raison d’être behind every line he’s crossed, every act of interference, every manipulation of circumstance.
It was never about controlling my choices.
It was about protecting his place in my life.
And suddenly every transgression rearranges itself.
Each one orbits the same singular instinct: preserve the one thing he cannot bear to lose.
He has never tried to bend me. He has bent everything around me—reshaping pathways, cushioning consequences, removing obstacles before I ever collided with them. He built a world where nothing could pull me out of his reach, where I would land softly every time.
The job sabotage sharpens into context. It still stings—of course it does—but the contours shift.
He didn’t destroy my future or strip opportunities away.
He steered me toward a path he believed was safer, more stable, more aligned with who I am and what I’ve worked toward.
He didn’t undermine my ambition; he rerouted it toward a life where I wouldn’t have to carry everything alone.
Where I wouldn’t have to climb in isolation.
My resistance begins to fray, thread by thread—because he’s right about me in ways I’ve never dared to articulate.
He’s the only person who has ever been wholeheartedly on my side.
No one has ever put me first the way he does—not once in my entire life.
He closes the gap at last, a small step that feels bigger than it is. His presence settles around me, steady and enveloping.
“If not with me,” he murmurs, “then at least be honest with yourself, baby.”
He’s close enough that I feel the heat radiating from him, but he keeps his hands at his sides, refusing to touch me. The restraint is deliberate, a line drawn so I have to face the truth without the distraction of his touch.
“If you truly wanted a simple, ordinary love…” He sounds almost amused. “Someone who gives you space… Someone who would let you walk away… Wouldn’t you have left the first time I crossed a line?”
His voice softens into something unbearably intimate.
“So tell me, Olivia.” A smile curves at the corner of his mouth, small but certain. “What is it you keep coming back for?”
The question suspends the room in time. My breath holds without instruction. The resistance I’ve worn like armor crumbles, piece by piece, until there is nothing left of the scaffolding I built to keep myself sensible and contained.
All the reasons I had clung to—self-protection, independence, logic—scatter like dust. I can’t even recall them properly anymore. They feel outdated, flimsy, relics from a na?ve girl who thought she could prevent the inevitable.
What fills the space instead is clarity—startling, and strangely freeing.
“You.” The answer rises with no shame or hesitation. It feels like stepping into something I’ve been circling for far too long.