Chapter Thirty-Eight
Ifollowed August up the stairs to his room silently. He toed off his shoes, then bent to slide mine off too. Without touching me again, he leaned against the back of the couch and glanced down at the floor.
I took my bag off, setting it next to his gently, then went to his bathroom to pull the hand towel from its hook on the wall. I opened his mini fridge next, and poured the small amount of ice in the tray into the towel, bundling it up in my palms.
“Come sit,” I said as I moved around the sofa to perch on the edge of the coffee table.
August moved reluctantly, like he’d rather be arguing with me than doing as I said, but eventually, he sat in front of me, looking anywhere but at me.
I slid closer, spreading my legs so his knees fit between mine as I leaned in to press the cold towel against his cheek bone.
He flinched at first, then seemed to settle into it.
His long fingers came up to wrap around mine, fingertips tracing the ring on my hand, as he said, “I can do it.”
“Then you should’ve done it this morning,” I whispered, not moving my hand out from under his. “It’s going to look worse tomorrow.”
He grimaced. “Okay, Mom.”
I felt my brows pinch and I swallowed my natural instinct to bite back. Instead I used my other hand to gently sweep the curls away from his face. “Will you please look at me?”
It took a moment, but eventually his green eyes lifted to meet mine through long lashes. His gaze was both sharp, and pleading.
“Why are you being short with me right now?” I asked, indignant.
“Because I don’t like how quickly you forgave me,” he huffed.
“Do you not think you’ve been punished enough?” I said, gesturing to the cut on his cheekbone.
“You don’t have to forgive me because your pet quarterback hit me,” he said dryly.
“I should probably tell you he’s a tight end, not a quarterback.”
He let out a humorless laugh. “Great.”
“You don’t get to decide how I feel, August.” When he didn’t respond I added, “I’m sorry that Andy acted like such an ass.”
A million emotions that I couldn’t decipher passed over August’s features before he said, “If you know he’s an ass, then why are you dating him?” He sounded exhausted, as if it was a conversation he’d already had in his head a thousand times.
My gaze dropped to the ice pack, where his fingers still splayed over mine.
The sensation of his warm skin and the cold from the ice sent electricity up my arm, into a much deeper part of me.
I hadn’t realized I was biting my lip till his other hand came up to press his thumb against the tortured flesh, forcing me to stop.
My mouth popped open, and his finger lingered there for just a moment before dropping completely.
“Tell me,” his voice came out a low plea. “Tell me what a guy like him does to deserve you.”
I fight the burning on my lash line as I’m locked in his gaze again. “I can’t,” I whisper.
“Then why—”
“We’re not,” I cut him off. “I mean, we’re not together anymore.”
The ice crunched beneath the towel as his grip on my hand tightened. “When?” he asked, but the words came out barely audible.
“Yesterday. After the morning service,” I said with a soft smile.
August pulled the icepack away from his cheek, and I began to protest but he cut me off with a pinning stare. His cold finger found my knee, and traced gently against it, as if he was trying to work out the equation of it all against my skin.
His mouth thinned as he asked: “You broke up with him?”
I nodded. My heart was racing, and I wanted so badly to be touching his face again. To smooth the deep wrinkle between his eyebrows, and tell him that everything the voices in his head were telling him weren’t true. But I needed him to be able to say it himself.
I was fighting every feral part of myself waiting for him to realize how badly I wanted him. For him to stop second guessing himself; or to gain the confidence he deserved to yield. I’d almost lost the will to do so when he surprised me.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” his voice was hoarse, and his attention was entirely fixed on the pattern he was still mapping out across my knee.
I slid back on the table immediately, out of his reach. The movement seemed to startle him, and his eyes shot up to find mine. Like he could find exactly which of those words were offensive in my expression.
“You think I broke up with Andy because I felt guilty?”
He swallowed tightly, and gave a pathetic lift of his shoulders. “I don’t know, Lola,” he admitted with defeat.
“August,” I said too sharply.
His pupils dilated a bit at the sound of his name, which sent another heated thrill to my center I forced myself to ignore.
“I broke up with Andy because I want to be with you. I want to be your girlfriend. I want to hold your hand in the hallway, and play dungeons and dragons with you every Friday night until we go to college. And then I want to call each other on the phone and talk about our day, and drive hours to see each other every weekend until we can have a normal life together. I want you, August. All of you. I don’t know how else to make you believe me. ”
I could feel my pulse radiating in my throat, my ears, and between my legs.
His shoulders fell back against the sofa cushions, as if he were a cornered animal. As if the answer to the question he was about to ask me was going to hurt him, and he was bracing himself for the impact.
“I don’t know how you could want me like that. How anyone could ever look at me, and see anything but something temporary.” He stared at me so intently that I wondered if he could hear the way the organ in my chest ripped apart.
“August,” I breathed out slowly. I placed my hands on his knees, and pushed them apart.
I fit myself between them as I sank to the floor, and leaned into him.
Grabbing a fist full of his shirt, I pulled him toward me.
His face hovered over mine, just inches away, as I craned my head back to look up into his green eyes.
I wanted him to know that he can take control any time he wanted.
He could pull away the second he needed to.
His tongue swiped across his trembling bottom lip and I felt his cool breath against my face as I asked, “Do you want me like that?”
He nodded slowly, his glistening eyes not leaving mine. “Tell me what you want then,” I pleaded.
His swallow was audible before he said, hesitantly, “I want all of you.”
I ran my fingers through the curls that had fallen into his face, pushing them backward. My cheek grazed his as I said tauntingly in his ear “I want you to have me.”
“No you don’t.” He removed my fingers from where they were still tangled in his shirt, and threw himself against the couch cushions again, the loss of his warmth devastating.
“Do you really want to hear about every terrified little thought that goes through my head on a daily basis? Do you want to hear about how miserable I am because there’s a part of my brain that won’t stop trying to convince me that my sister hates her body because I bought her a shirt that was too small three Christmases ago?
Do you want to hear that my mom stopped going to church because I couldn’t stop scrubbing my skin raw at twelve years old after hearing a sermon about how cleanliness is next to Godliness?
Is that the kind of pillow talk you want to grow old with, Lola? ”
His chest was heaving as he went on, working himself up. My own heart is thumped wildly against its cage.
“If you even get the chance. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up like my father and try to drown the voices in alcohol until I drive myself into a telephone pole,” he added with too much apathy in his voice.
“I love you, Lola. But I will not put you through what my father put my mother through. I can not give you what Andy could.”
Panic surged through me then. “What is it that you think he can give me that you can’t, August? You’ve been saying that for weeks, and I still don’t know what it means.”
“Peace,” his voice was a broken desperate plea as he said the word like it should’ve been obvious.
A strangled sound left me as I looked up at him through wet lashes. “There is no peace on this earth for me in a life that I have to live without you, August.” I took his hand, pressing it to my chest.
“You don’t know that,” he argued, trying to pull his hand away, but I wouldn’t let him. “You’d find someone to make you happy.”
“I do,” I pleaded. “I see it every day with my father. He used to be so full of life. He used to follow her around to these little witchy festivals, and take care of the garden of herbs she used in spells she thought would protect us from invisible demons. And every time her brain would convince her that we were better off without her, he would track her down to the ends of the earth to bring her back home.”
I sucked in a sharp breath, as I stood, forcing myself to say the things I hadn’t even admitted to myself.
“And the last time she left, when he couldn’t find her again, he went mad with it.
He threw himself into a religion he’d always hated because it was the opposite of what she loved.
He changed the gaelic music she always kept on to a christian radio station to fill the silence.
The only person he ever lets close to him is a woman who looks just like her.
He will not look at me, because I am the painful reminder of the one thing he loved and lost. It haunts him every single day, August. And you would haunt me just the same. I know it.”
He leaned forward after a moment, his long fingers coming up to fidget with the hem of my skirt.
He surprised me when he said “You wore this the first time you came over. Drove me absolutely mad when you got out of your car is this short little thing, after being in those jeans at school. I hadn’t expected you to change, and I thought you’d be able to hear my heartbeat from ‘cross the room as you sat right there.” He pointed his chin in the direction of where I’d sat, not taking his eyes away from the fabric in front of him, “with your long legs folded under you like a fawn.” His fingertip dropped to my bare skin.
His finger traced from the front of my thigh to the back of it, making my knees weak.
His eyes snapped up to mine as if he could tell, as if his stare could pin me to that place above him.
My hands fell to his broad shoulders, bracing myself there. My breath sat waiting in my chest, even my lungs too afraid to move—too afraid to break the spell that kept him talking.
“I’ve thought about this stupid skirt every day since then.
I wondered why you wore it, and why it bothered me so much.
Until that night we went to see The Amen Thieves and you looked at me with the same god damned look you’re giving me right now.
Then I forgot all about this stupid skirt, and that look started haunting me instead. ”
“What look?” I breathed.
“Like you want all of me,” he ground out.
“Then why can’t I have you?” I pleaded.
He gave me a sad smile. “Because I think loving you and trying to give you a good life, and still disappointing you would be worse than just disappointing you by doing nothing at all.”
My heart sank, and I did with it. August fell back into the couch as I moved my knees on either side of him. I settled in his lap, straddling him, as my hands found his jaw. He swallowed tightly beneath my palm.
“Is that all?” I laughed, “You’re scared you’ll disappoint me?”
“Isn’t that enough to be scared of?” He asked hesitantly.
I shook my head, smiling now. “August, I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’re going to disappoint me.
Probably more than once. And I’ll disappoint you too.
There will be days that we can’t stand each other.
Days that your condition, and my abandonment issues are going to butt heads and we’ll probably fight.
Often. But I want that. I want it so bad it hurts. ”
I leaned forward, pressing desperate kisses along his jaw.
“I don’t want you temporarily. I don’t want you as my pool boy, or in second place.
And I don’t want to run into you some place in the future and remember you as the only person I could ever be honest with.
I want you as mine. Either here,” I pressed his hand to my heart again, “Or as a fucking ghost, August. I won’t have you any other way. ”
His gaze dropped to my mouth. He leaned forward, and I leaned back. “Do not kiss me if you aren’t going to let me have you,” I warned.
August’s lips curled into a soft smile before he closed the gap. His lips pressed to mine, reverent and slow. He mumbled against my mouth gently, “You can have me for as long as I make you happy.”
I sank my weight fully into him then. His hands traced my sides until they reached the tops of my thighs, and then slid underneath my skirt. “Say you’re mine,” he begged. And I knew he wasn’t asking me to tell him, but the voices in his head.
“I’m yours. You cannot hurt me. Or contaminate me. Or curse me, August. I am better for being loved by you.” I said, punctuating each sentence with a kiss across the bridge of his nose where blush was spreading.
He pulled me closer at that, and the friction of his jeans through my panties sent a jolt of desire through me. A small moan escaped me against his skin, and I felt him smile against my throat.
“Hey, Sin?” he said softly, though I could hear the tender amusement lacing through it.
“Yeah?” I whispered back.
He rocked his hips upward as he said, “I think I’m ready now.”