16. It’s Me, Not You #3
“Give it time. You’ll change your mind when you move on and meet someone else, but this thing between us isn’t going anywhere.
I don’t want it to,” I respond just as firmly, not knowing where I’ve got the bravado to hold a straight face when every nerve in my body is screaming at me to shut up and just step forward into those thick, beautiful arms that are waiting to hold me.
But I can’t; it’s not fair to him. “Not because of you, Marcus, but because of me,” I tack on at the end because it’s also not fair to let him believe he’s lacking in any way. It’s not him that I’m running from; it’s myself. I’m the problem.
His eyes narrow as understanding crosses his face, a flicker of fight blazing in them, followed by an almost sardonic frustration.
“The classic, it’s me, not you,” he huffs out almost sarcastically.
I grimace at that and look away. I’m the one causing the storm of emotions that are passing through his face, and I damn well know it’s not fair to look away from the pain that I’m causing just because it’s painful for me to see it, but I can’t handle it. Selfish on top of selfish.
“The classics exist for a reason; they’re cliché, but no less real. At least in this case, you know it’s me, and not you,” I remind him quietly, not quite meeting his eyes.
“But I don’t care,” he says equally as resolute, and I know he’s not saying he doesn’t care about my feelings on the matter.
He’s telling me he doesn’t care about all this shit that’s happening that’s got me in this place.
He doesn’t care that I’m fucked up, or that Kingston showing up here is turning me into a mess.
I mean, he cares, obviously, but it doesn’t change how he feels about me or his desire for something to happen between us, which just makes everything so much more painful.
It would be easier if he’d just realize that this is all just a bit too much for anyone. I would get that better than I get the concept that he likes me enough to take this empty house filled with nothing but haunts and horrors.
I let out a sigh, the exhaustion between wanting to fight for him and fight against him weighing on my heart and making everything feel so heavy.
“But I do care, Marcus. Find someone else. This thing between us is over,” I grit out, almost inflectionless, trying to get the words out without showing how deeply they cut my throat on the way out.
“Qiang…” he starts to say, reaching out and laying his hand on my arm, the slight touch sending flares of life through my skin.
The jarring sensation, although completely, almost desperately welcome, is enough for me to take the energy of it and use it to propel my arm back out of his grasp.
“I mean it, Marcus,” I almost growl, my eyes flicking back up to his with unrelenting resolve, even as I feel the tingles in my arm that his hand left behind, and that stupid, desperate desire to have his warmth seep back into my skin.
“I really, really need you to stop. If you care about me at all, you’ll let me go,” I tell him, knowing if ever there was a way to make him stop, it was with those words. ‘Stop, if you really care, I need you to, ’ direct, basic, and without a trace of wiggle room or workaround.
Marcus takes a shaky step back, and his jaw tenses up at my words. I can practically hear the arguments he’s screaming at me from inside his head.
He holds my gaze, searching my eyes until there’s a shift and his face falls.
A flash of something so painful it almost brings me to my knees to see it there in his eyes because I’m the one who put it there.
He masks it quickly before forcing a smile.
The look in his eyes is the look of a man who has conceded defeat, and my heart rattles angrily in my chest at me, knowing I’m the one who did this, to both him and me.
“I’ll stop pushing you, Qiang, but you need to understand that while you have full grounds to tell me to stop approaching you, you have absolutely none in telling me how to feel.
My heart is my own to do with as I please.
I won’t burden you with it any longer, but it’s still yours regardless.
I’ll keep it safe until you're ready to readdress this conversation,” he says resolutely before taking two steps back and pivoting around towards the door.
I grit my teeth because even though I got what I keep telling myself I’m supposed to want, I still feel like I lost every part of this conversation.
I knew Marcus wasn’t going to give up without a fight, but somehow he made it to where he’s taken himself off the battlefield completely to wait out the fight and step in at the end to claim his ultimate victory.
Obviously, I’m not going to let that happen, but it doesn’t mean the strategy isn’t gonna be ten times harder to beat.
There’s not really much left to do at this point, though. So I square my shoulders and follow him out to meet the others so we can go to this frat party that I’m not feeling at all.
Something keeps twisting in my gut at the thought of it now. The more I dwell, the more uncomfortable I get, like something is waiting just around the corner to happen. But really, how much worse can things get?