32. Chapter 32 – Peyton
Chapter 32 – Peyton
I couldn’t get over how different the landscape was here. It was early December, but there wasn’t a single snowflake to be found in sunny Miami, Florida. It made me miss home.
Massachusetts never felt like anything spectacular when I lived there my whole life, but since being gone for over three months, I ached for its familiarity. I ached to smell the crisp winter air with each breeze and the age-old Christmas scents lingering from the trees and decorations as I prepared for the holidays.
My new apartment was bare. No tree. No stockings. There wasn’t a lit string of lights to be found. It was bare.
Like my heart.
Every single day that passed since I left Hartington made my heart a little more unrecognizable. I couldn’t feel anything .
It was as though I was on autopilot, surviving with the little pieces of myself piled in my arms. I was no closer to putting them back together again, because I couldn’t move forward when I was stuck in the past. Instead, I just carried them around with me, balancing them precariously so I wouldn’t drop one of them, losing it forever and getting that much further from repairing myself back to what I was before.
Or better.
God, I just wanted to be better than I was before.
I wanted to be who I thought I was with Dane.
I wanted that brief glimpse back of the girl that his attention, affection, and dedication had blossomed into.
Before I learned the truth.
Before I saw the video.
Before I walked away from the one thing I wanted, because he was all made up in my head.
The worst part of it all was I missed Dane. I missed him with every single ounce of myself. And part of me missed Lincoln too, now that I knew he was the man I’d fallen for as well. I just couldn’t convince my heart to stop hurting every time I thought of him.
And then I’d remember that he hadn’t reached out once. Not that I exactly left my forwarding address or anything, but still. For a man of his abilities, I thought he would of at least… I don’t know, called me . Maybe thrown in a I’m sorry or twelve.
But there had only been radio silence. And the longer it went on, the longer I had to believe it was for the best.
Because if I didn’t, Olivia was the first one to remind me I was better off without his lying, manipulating, overbearing ass.
Her words, not mine.
She was my savior in the whole thing, actually. Without her and her own tech skills, I wouldn’t have known where to turn when I walked away from Hartington for the last time. She scooped me and my little pieces up and hid me away from the world and Dane’s watchful eyes while we made a plan. My whole life I had protected and guided Olivia, but she was there to do the same in my moment of need and I’d never be able to repay her for that.
After a few days of mental breakdowns and pity parties, I had to get another job and another plan. Because tears and self-pity didn’t pay the bills.
And since I didn’t have my apartment or savings account with Tyson anymore, I had a lot of fucking bills to pay.
Tyson.
Oof.
I didn’t know if I’d ever know the full story, but according to the news reports, a freak car accident on a rainy night outside of Boston left him permanently blind. I’m talking the kind of blind where they had to remove his actual eyeballs, blind.
I shuddered just thinking of it. Which I didn’t do often, because then I’d have to acknowledge how deep down I knew his loss of sight wasn’t from a car accident at all.
It was Dane’s doing. For what Tyson did to me.
And if I thought about Dane physically blinding a man for me, I got warm and fuzzy all over, in some warped sense of commitment and loyalty from him. Which wasn’t true at all, given he’d lied about something that was so much more important than Tyson.
He watched the video.
He saw my attack and didn’t tell me.
A part of my soul would never heal knowing he saw firsthand how broken I was. How all my little pieces fell apart in the first place.
No man could love someone through that. Not entirely. There would always be darkness around something that was supposed to be built in beauty.
So I ran.
Then I hid .
Until I just existed.
Working in a popular tourist hotel in Miami gave me enough mental stimulation to not want to stab a fork into my thigh to make sure I was still alive, but just barely. I used a fake name, thanks to Olivia, to get the job, and got a small studio apartment where I slept in between wild shifts. But that was it, that was the extent of my life, post Dane.
Or Lincoln.
I didn’t even know how to refer to him. So I didn’t.
I had just worked a double at the hotel, managing the night shift and staying when the day shift manager called in sick. The only benefit to doing doubles like that was I was so bone weary tired after it, there wasn’t much energy left to think in the end.
So as I slowly climbed up all four flights of stairs to my apartment, I didn’t have the energy to miss him. Or hate him. I didn’t even have the energy to think about him.
But when I started down the hallway toward my door, though, I noticed something laying on the ground outside my door, and I instantly saw his face in my mind. I saw the packages he had delivered to me in secret when I was right next to him in real life.
At first, I wasn’t sure it was at my door, thanks to the long row of apartments, but as I got closer, I realized it was.
And that’s when I stopped walking, afraid to get any closer to the large brown box sitting on the ground. My heart started racing in my chest as I stood immobilized.
Did he find me?
How?
I looked up and down the hallway, but it was empty. There was a bit of hope burning in my chest that as I looked behind me, he’d be standing there, watching me. But he wasn’t .
Would I feel awful embarrassment if I picked up the box only to realize it was meant for one of my neighbors and he still, in fact, didn’t care that I was gone?
I rolled my eyes to myself, intent on proving that it was, in fact, at my door by mistake, but as I leaned down and picked it up, it was my name on the label, with no return address.
My real name, not the one I’d been using for the last three months, either. Again, I looked up and down the empty hallway. Anxiety crawled up my spine as I undid the three locks on my door and rushed inside, with the box of uncertainty clutched in my arms.
I set it down on the small table and walked away from it, almost as if it would blow up at any moment if I stayed too close. Or maybe that was just my erratically beating heart that could blow up any second.
Part of me wanted to tear into it right away, and the other part of me wanted to throw it down the garbage shoot without cutting the tape open at all. So instead of making a rash decision either way around it, I walked away and busied myself with a steaming hot shower.
I stripped down, ridding my body of the clothes I wore for the last almost twenty-four hours straight, and turned the water on. And as with most days, I stared at the gold bracelet still wrapped around my wrist when it caught my eye.
The only piece of Dane I allowed myself to keep, because it had been about me. The jewels in the eyes of the skull matched mine. When he gave it to me, he told me he wanted me to wear it in honor of choosing myself above everyone else for the first time in my life.
Yet when I was alone, it reminded me of him. And that was one minor reason I kept it on.
Additionally, it was locked, and I would have needed to break it in order to take it off, but I wasn’t prepared to destroy it. Not yet, at least .
I scrubbed every inch of my body even though it wasn’t hair wash day to stay as busy as possible while I wrote out a pros and cons list in my head.
To open it, or to not.
To know if I was crazy, or to not.
“Fuck.” I sighed, staring at it thirty minutes later after avoiding it as long as I possibly could. I had to know!
I grabbed a knife and slit the tape open, but instead of setting the knife down, I held onto it, like I may need it for whatever was inside.
Though when I pulled out the carefully packaged mass in the center, nothing at all made sense.
It was a tablet and a cell phone.
My hands shook as I eyed up the technology I hadn’t afforded myself since I left Lincoln’s house three months ago. I didn’t want him to have free access to me like he did when I lived there, so I went without.
I was the only almost thirty-year-old in the world without a cell phone. And I didn’t hate it.
But eying up the fancy block in my trembling hand, a shiver ran down my spine, knowing he could have been watching me again already through it. That familiar excitement of being the very center of his attention bloomed in my lower belly.
A folded piece of paper sat between the phone and the tablet, and I hesitated before pulling it free. My hands shook so hard I nearly dropped it twice before I could get it open.
Almost instantly, my heart fell to my stomach when I saw the manly script written across the entire piece of paper.
Dane.
My heart ached immediately from just seeing his handwriting.
I fell down into the kitchen chair as my eyes started flying across the words, eating them up with an intensity like a starving man’s first smell of food in years.
Puppet,
My achingly beautiful Puppet. I’ve started and stopped this letter a hundred different times since finally locating you four days ago. I haven’t been able to stop the spiral inside of my head every time I realized you were finally within reach for the first time in months.
I can’t describe the burning need building inside of me every single second of every day since you ran away from me.
I’m crazed by your absence.
I’m feral for your touch.
I’m desperate for your love, again.
Puppet, I love you. And I can confidently say I’ve never loved another human being on this planet before. Not once.
Not until I met you. It wasn’t by choice; it wasn’t a decision I had any control over. It was necessary.
You. Are. Necessary. Peyton.
I love you.
And I know I shouldn’t have lied to you about who I really was. I simply didn’t know how to convince you to love both sides of me.
The sane, and the not.
The good man, and the wicked one.
But fuck, Puppet, loving you is easy. God, it’s the most natural thing I’ve ever felt before. It gives my deepest troubles peace for the first time in my life. I’m so sorry I broke you before I told you that.
I’m so sorry you know what happened to you that night, because the only thing I ever wanted was to shield you from that memory returning. I never wanted that pain in your soul. I wanted to burden that for you. Damnit Peyton, I wanted your soul free of that darkness .
I should have given you that choice, and I should have been there to hold you when you saw it. I should have done better.
I’m sorry.
You came into my life because I needed you. My need manipulated every single piece of our story past you applying for a random job. My desires and needs were the driving force for everything.
But no more.
I’m giving you the choice to let me back in or not. I’m begging you to give me the chance.
The cell phone and the tablet were programmed specifically for you by a friend of mine. They’re completely impenetrable to me, I can’t access them no matter how hard I try.
And I’ll fucking try, because I’m that obsessed with you.
But you’re safe, and you’re in control. Because they’re not only impenetrable to me, but they’re also linked to me.
To my phone.
To my cameras.
To my life. You have full access to every single second of my life.
Watch me. Study me.
Stalk me, Puppet.
You’re in control of this, from this moment on. Learn as little or as much about me, both sides of me, as you want. But I beg of you, baby, give me the chance.
Give me the chance to show you every part of me before you decide if you can let me in again.
I love you.
I’ll always love you.
I’ll always want you.
Come home to me, Puppet .
Come home to your monster and let me feed your needs the way only I can.
-Yours, Dane.
My tears blurred the ink at the bottom of the page and I tipped my head back to staunch the flow as I waved the paper back and forth through the air, trying desperately to dry it.
I wanted to reread his words every single day because they were the truest things I’d ever been given from someone before. I believed every one of them.
But I didn’t know how to go back to him after everything, so much time had passed.
Wiping away the tears and taking a deep breath, I eyed the electronics again like I was staring at Pandora’s box.
All the secrets to Dane’s world laid at my fingertips, but I knew if I gave in to taking even just a peek, I’d be even further from moving on than I’d got in the three months since leaving.
If I was being honest, though, I wasn’t any closer to being over him. I didn’t think I ever would be.
Before I could convince myself not to, I powered on the tablet and felt my heart do somersaults in my chest as it loaded. As soon as the menu popped up, I gasped as I saw all the available cameras to view.
Forty-two.
Forty-two different angles to use, to watch him. There was nowhere to hide from me.
The camera’s with movement on them were highlighted in red to signal which ones were active and before I could stop myself, I clicked on the one that was labeled office.
And then there he was.
In vivid color was Lincoln. But he didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen the mysterious businessman look like before .
He sat in the chair at his desk, working on something, but I couldn’t see the screens because the camera seemed to be tucked between two of the screens, facing him.
“My god.” I whispered as I let my eyes rove over the man sitting there.
Man didn’t quite describe him, though. Because the figure sitting in the chair looked wild .
His hair was longer, mussed up like he constantly ran his fingers through it instead of the effortless style he normally wore it in. He also had a full beard covering his jaw, adding to that animalistic look he had.
He was shirtless, showing my hungry eyes all of his delicious tattoos I only saw in the picture he first sent me.
My mouth fucking watered as I stared at him, and my pulse picked up, thrumming through my entire body.
Specifically, low in my stomach. God, I missed the monster in front of me more than I could bear to admit. In the bottom corner of my screen, other camera views were available, and I flicked through them, looking down on my monster from every angle in his office.
He didn’t have the cameras before everything happened; I was sure of it.
He did it for me.
So I could stalk him.
I stood up from the table, staring at the screen uninterested in anything else around me as I crawled into my bed, covering my body up with the thick blankets and propped the tablet up so I could keep watching him.
He was coding something on his computer screen and I simply stared at him, memorizing every inch of his face and body now that I knew he wasn’t just my boss that I lusted after, but really the man that had touched my body deeper than any other man ever had.
Every night shared with Dane played on repeat in my head as I watched him on the screen. But as the memories played out, I finally had a face to put on my monster’s body as he fucked me wildly in my biggest fantasies.
He stopped typing suddenly and clicked something as I switched views to see his screens.
My breath caught when I saw that every single screen on the wall had changed to—me.
Pictures of me, from so many different times covered the screens. Dane sat back in his chair and ran his hand over his face and sighed as he stared, and I leaned closer to the screen to watch him. Part of me wanted to get in my car and drive straight back to Massachusetts and back to Hartington.
Another part of me felt like I didn’t know the man in front of me at all, though. He was a mystery. And that was why I stayed still, watching him as he stared at pictures of me for a while before going back to whatever he was doing before that.
And I just kept watching.