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“He thought he drank it all. He never knew.” She paused before continuing. “It was just one time, but that was a good day. I didn’t feel a thing. Not even the cracked rib.”
I knit my brow, thinking about Emory Scott sucking down bourbon in math class or stumbling through the cafeteria, and how easy it must’ve been to hide it, because no one ever noticed her.
She’d needed that bourbon more than she needed air that day, and I got that.
God, I got that.
You smile and laugh, not just because your head and everything in it feels lighter, but because when you’re drunk or high, it’s like a vacation. When you’re away from the same people, the same places, the same work…you don’t think about it. It’s a break from everything that worries you or makes you anxious or keeps your world small and shallow, and everyone who wants to take a piece out of you, and when you’re high, it’s like that. It just doesn’t even matter. Suddenly, you’re seeing Machu Picchu from your front porch, and you didn’t even have to leave town.
She got drunk and loved her brother again.
What made her stronger than me was that she only did it once.
She closed her eyes as she lifted the glass to her lips, and I could tell by the longing on her
face that she was escaping again. I charged over and grabbed the glass, the liquid sloshing onto my hand as I tossed it to the side.
It crashed against the wall, the glass shattering.
Don’t. I stared down at her.
I’d rather eat my hands than see her do that to herself. If this was who she was, I’d rather this than see her become what I became—someone who needed to hurt myself day after day in order to fucking smile.
“Clean it up,” Aydin ordered.
But I remained still. I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do with her yet, but this—whatever this was going on between them—was not happening. She didn’t get to find herself with Aydin Khadir. She was coming with me.
“He didn’t save you then,” Aydin told her. “He won’t save you now.”
He watched her, and she watched me, and even though I knew she’d told me the truth last night in her bed when she said she loved me, I also knew Emmy was an oak. Her roots were firm, and love would not save the day.
“Am I going to save you?” Aydin asked her.
“No one needs to save me.” She kept her gaze on me. “I got it handled.”
“You do.” He finished, setting her foot back down on the floor, and then stood up, cleaning off his hands. “I can almost see it, can’t you?” he asked her as he gazed between Alex and me. “Them together? How good they look together? Him driving into her like he’s done a thousand times and looking down into her eyes as he does it?”
I tensed.
“All the times he was alone with her, inside of her, coming and forgetting about you,” he told Emmy. “You can see it, right?”
You son of a bitch.
“But we don’t care,” he went on. “Do we? We don’t care that he’ll fall back into her bed at the first sign of trouble.”
I flexed my jaw, the scent from the anti-bacterial wipes stinging my nostrils. My brain was fried. I didn’t know how to get what I wanted anymore without resorting to just taking it.
“Go ahead,” Aydin told me, his eyes flashing to Alex behind me. “Take her. I want to see how it was with you two. All the things she let you do to her, because that’s how easily she forgets and moves on.” Then he gestured to Em. “We’ll watch.”
But before I could act, he grabbed me and shoved me onto the bed. I fell, Emmy whimpering and jumping off the mattress as Aydin came down on me and dug a knee into my gut. I growled as he gripped my neck with one hand and backhanded me with the other.
I squeezed my eyes shut, the pain shooting through my jaw and up the side of my face, but after a moment, I slowly turned my head back to face him, ready for more.
Come on.
His eyes pierced, and he leaned down, his breath warming my lips. “Mine,” he breathed out. “All of you are mine. You’re not leaving. They’re not leaving. And when your little shits arrive, I’m going to hang them in the cellar by their ankles like dead deer.”
He hauled me up off the bed, and I stumbled back before he came in and punched me in the stomach, sending me hunched over.
