34. Konnor #2
“Not without me.” I’m shaking my head back and forth. “No way.”
She cups my face again, directing my gaze to her and stopping my incessant head. “I can do this, Konnor.”
“He beat you for years, Duch.” My jaw tightens. “You’re not walking in there alone.”
“Konnor—”
“Not without me. That’s final.”
She breathes out slowly, eyes panning across to where Elise stands with Jax. A soft smile forms on her lips. “I have to. For both of us. To tick off our fucked-up bucket list, remember?” Her expression becomes serious. “I can do this.”
“No, no, no, no.”
“Stop it, Konnor!”
“Duchess.” I take her hands in mine. “I’m not letting you walk in there alone. I can’t. I left you alone once. Fuck. I can’t do it again.”
She looks down at her feet, then back at me. “I will take Elise in with me. I won’t be alone.”
I blink at her, feeling pulled in two directions at once, tearing slowly down the middle.
She is brave. She is… whatever she wants to be.
If she wants to be brave… I— I should let that happen.
But knowing it and feeling it are two completely different things, and right now every part of me is screaming that I can’t let her down again… fuck. This isn’t about me.
I squint out the window at Elise before saying, “Fine, Duchess, but don’t tell him anything about you. If that means he doesn’t give you any information, then fine. Don’t mention your name, your university, anything, understand?”
“He thinks I’m dead,” she says. “Remember?”
“Yeah, so he’s gonna have questions.”
“Konnor,” she says, reaching out to stoke my cheek. “He won’t be able to find me. I live in a different town. I live a different life with a different name. I will be fine. I’m going to tell him who I am. But give him nothing else."
I massage my temples. “Kiss me,” I order like it’s the only rational thing to do now.
She leans in and presses her mouth to mine.
As her tongue teases my lips, I fist her hair, pulling her in more deeply—desperately.
I love her. God, do I love her. The thought of someone hurting her kills me.
I pull away and look at her. Stern. “Be careful.”
“He can’t hurt me in there.”
“Here...” I tap her chest. “He can hurt you here.”
Her face softens. “I won’t let him.”
Then she is out of the car, talking to Elise, and too soon, walking with Elise through both layers of fencing, then through the sliding doors, and out of sight.
My face tightens, molars clamping together as I step from the car and make my way towards Jax.
I slump down on the grass beside his feet. He drops down beside me, and we both stare at the sky.
I can feel my frown. It almost hurts. What will happen in there? Will the guards search her or Elise? The thought alone makes my ears burn. What if her dad tries to touch her? What if he lunges at her? I groan at the thought and rub my face roughly with both hands.
“Say something,” I groan, wanting Jax to take my mind off the images in my head. “You clearly have something to say, so just fucking say it.”
He scoffs, but it’s pained, and fuck. That’s my fault.
Guilt punches me in the gut. “Fine,” he announces, “I will. This isn’t normal.
This whole thing, you and her, the intensity of it.
You have started doing this awesome new thing where you phase the fuck out, and it is just fucking magical.
I mean, really, it’s like you aren’t even there anymore.
It’s really freaking me out, and yet, you won’t tell me what’s going on.
It’s fucked up and it’s making you act like a psycho. ”
I entwine my fingers and cup the back of my head. “Maybe I was always a psycho. You just didn’t know it.”
He sighs against the grass, lifting his hands and cushioning the back of head just like me.
What a fucking pair of dickheads, we look.
“I’ve known you for a while now. I knew you have an issue with confined spaces.
Figured that out pretty fast. No elevators.
No Basement Lounge. No tunnels. But… you’ve known this girl for, like, what?
Five seconds? And whenever she’s around, you’re in this weird daze, like you’re not even Konnor anymore. ”
I turn to look at him. “It’s not her. It’s…us.”
He makes eye contact with me momentarily, before turning back to the sky. “Listen, Slater, the past month you have been acting crazy, missing practice, missing games, missing classes, missing fucking grad classes.”
“Oh, come on,” I groan, my body humming for intoxication of any kind. I’d take a punch to the head at this rate. “It has been one fucking month. Get over it.”
“Yeah, it has been a month. One month of you acting like a complete lunatic.”
I roll my eyes. “I have known her a lot longer than you. I’ve known her for seventeen years."
“Right," he drawls. "When you were children.”
“Don’t say it like that! You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Well, then tell me!”
“I can’t,” I snap.
“I like B. You know I do. She’s a cool chick. But you two are crazy together. Way, way too intense. Too… I don’t know. Just too much. I keep feeling like I need to watch out for shrapnel 'cause you’re gonna explode at any moment.”
He’s so right.
“Yeah, I feel like that, too,” I mumble.
“You know that isn’t normal, right? That kind of intensity? You are meant to improve each other’s lives, not derail them.”
I frown at the sky. “No, it isn’t normal.
It’s phenomenal! Every goddamn part of it.
I’m totally okay with the intensity. I’ve been in love with her forever, since before I can remember anyone else, and I am not ashamed to say it.
I don’t care if I sound like a pussy. I just don’t care.
Her face has more familiarity, seems more like family, and has more connections to the word home than any other face on earth.
We are working through things at the moment, Jax.
Things will get better; it just isn’t a quick fix. ”
He sighs. “I don’t understand.” He shakes his head. “I just don’t get it.” Jaxon groans, frustrated. “Please, for fuck’s sake, give me more than that. That makes fuck-all sense. I’m worried about you.”
This is the barrier in lived trauma. The one Blesk and I share.
That no one else will understand. I can explain it to him, but he’ll never break that barrier—the one only kids with trauma have.
“Okay, Jax! Okay! No one knows this stuff, Jax.
My family knows what happened, obviously, because they adopted me, and Elise knows because Blesk wanted her to—“
He scoffs. “Don’t do me any fav—”
“I want to tell you.”
And I do.
And so, I tell him. Everything. I try not to watch his expression as I run through the events of the past seventeen years, but I can tell he’s shocked.
He never makes a sound.
To my surprise, by the end of my story, I’m half-smiling, because it’s over, because we won.
The sun flickers above me. The trees move in the wind, and the grass is soft beneath my back, and I’m free.
After hearing my story again, in its entirety, I realise it’s almost over. We are so close to truly moving on now. And I have Blesk, my Duchess.
I chew on the inside of my lip in contemplation.
“There are a lot of things about me that are a result of that experience,” I admit to Jaxon.
“I play them off, of course, as personality idiosyncrasies, but they aren’t...
They’re scars, some of which I’ll never share with Duch.
I don’t need her feeling any more guilt.
“The first year after I got out, I got sick —a lot. I wasn’t used to all the germs people carried, and I was pretty much always on some kind of antihistamines or antibiotics. My system was shot to hell. I never felt... right, ya know? Even though I knew the world was big, it still kinda scared me.
“You’ll laugh at this,” I continue. “But, ah, I was shy once. If it wasn’t for two boisterous sisters, I might have disappeared. They forced me out of my shell, and I mean literally forced.” I laugh, reminiscing.
“When I had my first drink with Flick, it changed everything.
With that in my system, I had courage. I was funny.
Impenetrable. And... I felt closer to the boy in the basement.
I was in a bit of a daze in that cell, mate.
The drugs I'd been given warped the way I saw things.” Hesitation changes my tone, dropping it to barely a choked whisper.
“The thing I’ve never told anyone, ever, Cassidy, Flick, or my shrink, is...
I missed the basement. I missed it because it had become me, and it was where we'd shared a life. There, I got to be with her all the time, every day. And then I was alone, and it was scary. I was scared all the time.”
I stop talking, realising I’ve been dumping on him. Guess I liked sharing that. Maybe he doesn’t need to understand the barrier; he just needs to recognise it?
“So?” I look at him. “What do think?”
His cheeks inflate as he breathes out. “I didn’t expect that. I—” His brows furrow. “I’m glad you told me, you fucking psycho.”
I chuckle.
Suddenly, a silhouette blocks my view. Blesk straddles me, one foot on either side of my waist, as she peers down. Lined in silver, she looks like an angel.
Relief floods me.
“Hey there, Mr Slater. Come here often?” she asks, lifting a brow and smiling softly.
I sit up and grab her knees, pulling her down onto my lap. Her incredible arse meets my thighs, and my cock jumps inappropriately.
I shuffle her against me, and her breath catches on impact with my body. “Miss Bellamy, what’s a girl like you doing outside a place like this?”
Elise chuckles. “You two are hopeless!”
Jax jumps to his feet. “Have your menstrual cycles synced or something?”
“He’s jealous,” Blesk says.
Jax scoffs. “Kill me if I ever act like that.”
I ignore Jax and Elise, eyes on Blesk’s gentle grin, thrown by it actually, given where she just came from. I lean in and she edges backwards, laughing—teasing me.
I tut and pull her harder against me by the backside. “Do you want that distinction, Miss Bellamy?”