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“It’s so fucked up,” she said, hiding her face from me. The first place she’d gone was my coat, and that showed me the state of her resolve too. She probably wanted to be anywhere but here in my arms, but she wasn’t letting go. She gasped into my coat. “And what’s really fucked up is I knew. I knew something was off when you asked me to be your fake girlfriend. Like someone like you… who looks like you would ever…”
She didn’t finish, but those words razored through me. She was wrong about that. She was fucking wrong, and I wouldn’t let her think that.
I made Fawn look at me. Her whole body was shaking now, but I made her. “You are everything to me. You understand?” I had no words to describe it. No fucking words. “You are the most wonderful… beautiful thing in the world to me.”
I wish she knew how deep that went. How she was more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen, and I’d seen beauty. I was a fucking artist, and I’d seen it in a million different ways. So many beautiful versions, but none compared to her.
Fucking none.
It was like my words made things worse. It did when she pushed back. “What am I supposed to even do with that?” she questioned, cringing. “How do I get past that?”
I didn’t know what she meant, but her wanting to get past anything having to do with us… me. I held on to her arms. “Fawn, please.”
“How can I get past it, Ares?” she asked, blinking down tears. “How? Tell me.”
I still didn’t understand what she was asking me.
And I felt her slipping away.
It was like she was sand, and I was a broken hourglass. I brought her into me, holding her head. “What can I say? Please, baby, tell me what I can say? To fix this…”
I realized she’d asked me a question, but I was too fucked up to answer her. The possibility of her not wanting us anymore due to my fuckups was ending me.
She whimpered in my chest, and I cracked. My nostrils flared, and I saw nothing, my eyes blurry. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried.
But I did upon thinking Fawn Greenfield no longer wanted me.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Dear Fawn,
I thought it was important I reach out to you. You left so quickly, and I understand why you did. I fucking get it completely and don’t blame you at all.
Something else I wanted to tell you before you left was that your opportunity with Kurt came from me. When I say that, I mean I got word to his office about your work and that you’d be a great candidate for his internship. I told him I didn’t know you personally (which was true) and wanted to pass along work from a fellow student. I obviously ended up using that opportunity against you, and for that, you don’t know how sorry I am. Hurting you every day… using you killed me in ways I didn’t fully grasp until the day you told me you loved me. It was that day I realized nothing more could happen between us.
And how badly I’d doomed us.
Even still, I tried to hold on. I stole us, and I stole you. I tried to take something that was never fully mine and never could be. It couldn’t with the foundation I started us on. I tried to escape it. Tried to run, but I suppose that stuff always catches up, doesn’t it?
Always.
It’s ironic that I once thought you owed me something. In fact, that was probably the biggest lie of all. You never owed me anything. In actuality, it was me who owed you. You saved me in so many ways I can’t even count, and I’ve loved you for longer than I even let myself see.
I’m aware none of that matters now, but I wanted you to know that too. It’s important, so goddamn important, Fawn. I’m not just in love with you. I’m in desperate, visceral need of you and want you like I’ve never wanted anything in my whole life. You truly are everything to me, and for that, I’m sorry too. I’m sorry I thought I could have you and felt worthy of you. I ended up breaking us both in the end, and if I could sever a limb and take back what I did to you, I would.
I’d sever two limbs.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Fawn
Wolf didn’t end his letter with his name. He only had two tattoos, and he ended the letter with a sketch of the one he had on his hip. He drew it in dark ink.
My finger moved over it, feeling the bump of the ink. I didn’t know the last time I’d gotten a handwritten letter, and it came quick. I’d only been with my family in New York a couple of days. It was just Mom and me here. Anton was still traveling for work.
The period here felt like so much longer away from Wolf. He and the world of Legacy had been my entire life for so long. They’d become my family too in a way. How couldn’t they with everything we’d all been through?
“I want you to know that your opportunity with Kurt came from me…”
