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And with no other real option and, in that moment, feeling rather close with him, I hopped in and he shut the door and made his way around the hood to hop in himself.
"You need a drive? A drink? Or home?"
I laughed humorlessly at that. I needed them all. "Well, Hailstorm is a thirty minute drive away and it's home and I can have a drink... or five, there."
"Hailstorm it is," he said, throwing the car into reverse, backing out of his spot between two very close cars with an almost careless precision that made me queasy, then started up the road toward the hill that was, for all intents and purposes, home.
"You alright?" he asked a long five minutes of silence later as I stared out the window.
And then I did the damnedest thing.
I gave him the truth.
"Not really," I said, looking over at him.
He nodded at that, like he understood exactly how I was feeling. "Well, you will be," he said casually, but with so much certainty that I found myself believing him- this man who was all but a stranger to me, a complete and utter anomaly, someone I didn't even begin to understand, I believed him completely.
I would be okay.
Even if I had just pushed away the only person, I was sure, who had ever actually loved me.FIFTEENRennyI was such a fuck.
I knew that.
Hell, a part of me had probably fucking known that while I was making the damn phone call to her parents.
I don't even know what I thought my endgame was there. I had known going in that there were issues there, especially with her mother. But I had figured maybe her avoiding them had made her intensify them in her head.
I should have known better.
Her mother, for all intents and purposes, was a fucking ice queen, a stone cold bitch. I didn't like throwing the 'bitch' word around too often, but if there was ever a woman who deserved the term, it was Akari Piek.
I had anticipated her being cold and withholding toward Mina. That sounded par for the course. I hadn't exactly expected the judgment and condescension that dripped from every syllable when she spoke.
Dedrick Piek, though, I had him wrong.
I expected a workaholic. I was both right and wrong when I first met her and called her an army brat. Her father wasn't in any army, but he did a lot of contract work with different armies all around the world. His specialty being intelligence extraction.
I hadn't expected him to genuinely not give a shit about his daughter. That was a wholly unexpected, unpleasant surprise. I had figured that with a cold and withholding mother, any decent man would step up and try to fill the void. I was completely off on that. Dedrick Piek didn't want children and he didn't care if his offspring knew that.
I could sympathize with the coldness she experienced, having ice cubes for parents myself, but I had always been wanted at least. I was never seen as an inconvenience or made to feel like a chore. If anything, my fucked up parents got their kicks raising me.
And, being that my parents read into everything I did, they rarely criticized little things like how I dressed or did my hair, choosing instead to theorize on what made me do such things.
I'll never forget the fucking look she had on her face when she saw them. All her guards, they all fell away. She was vulnerable. But not in the good way like when I was inside her. It was a raw, awful kind of vulnerability that made it clear exactly how awful she felt and how much she hated me for forcing her to confront those feelings.
I saw the decision before she even did. Her mind was made up the second my hand hit her knee, trying to comfort her. She didn't want me touching her. And, quite frankly, if someone's touch suddenly disgusted you, there was no chance at saving things.
I had tried.
But she was beyond that.
I didn't even wait around to see what response she had to me telling her I loved her. It wasn't some coercion tactic on my part. I just wanted her to know.
Because it was the fucking truth.
I loved her.
I wasn't sure when it happened. Really, it could have been anytime between her showing up during mine and Duke's fight that afternoon and the night before in bed with her. It could have been the first time she let me kiss her or put my hands on her or take her without anything between us.
I had no idea.
But there was no denying it.
I hadn't recognized it right at first or was just chalking it up to being attraction or some superficial shit like that. But the warm feeling in my chest, the way just hearing her laugh made me smile from across a fucking room, or how hearing her threaten to 'put a cap in my ass' on Grand Theft Auto made me happier than any goddamn sexual experience ever had. It was the way sex wasn't just sex anymore. Even when we were fucking- dirty, rough, hot, even then it wasn't just fucking. It was deeper than that.
