AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Ben Craft: Please don’t do this to us.
Ben Craft: How could you?
Ben Craft: You’re mine. You’ve always been mine.
I stared at the phone for a few more seconds before my stomach roiled and I jumped off of Jagger and took off for the bathroom. I threw up what little I’d eaten before we’d gone out to the lake and sat on my knees, hunched over the toilet as sobs racked my body.
Jagger came in and pulled me back into his arms, sitting up against the wall with me pressed close to his chest.
“Why?” I choked out, and his arms tightened.
“I don’t know, baby. I’m so sorry.” He paused for a second, and hesitantly said, “I think you should block his account, Grey.”
“Do it,” I said shakily, then took a deep breath and said more decisively, “Do it so they can’t do this anymore.”
He sighed softly and stood up, pulling me with him. “Come on, let’s go back out there.”
I stopped long enough to rinse my mouth out at the sink, and then let him tow me toward the couch. He pulled me onto his lap again, and I curled my head under his chin as he grabbed my phone. After a minute, I heard the soft thud of my phone hitting the cushion and felt both of his arms wrap tightly around me.
“It’s done.”
I didn’t respond. I just clutched his shirt to my face as the relentless tears continued to fall down my cheeks.
It’s over, I told myself. It’s over.
MY EYES SLOWLY blinked open and focused on the empty side of the bed beside me. Letting my hand run over the comforter until my mind caught up with me, I finally remembered I was at Jagger’s, but didn’t know when I’d gotten upstairs to his bed. I felt groggy, and my eyes were scratchy, and it was then that the events of this afternoon all came back to me. The messages, blocking Ben’s Facebook account, Jagger holding me as tears steadily rolled down my cheeks.
Quiet footsteps sounded on the stairs seconds before Jagger appeared at the top, his steps faltering when he saw that I was awake.
“Hey,” he said softly. “Did I wake you up?”
I shook my head and pushed myself up until I was sitting against the headboard. “What time is it?”
“Late. You’d been asleep for five hours the last time I looked at my phone.”
“Five hours?”
“And that was probably an hour or so ago,” he guessed.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” I looked down at his blackened hands and raised an eyebrow. “And how did I sleep through your music?”
A smile flashed across his face seconds before his lips softly fell onto mine. “I used earbuds so you wouldn’t hear it, and I didn’t wake you up because you’ve hardly slept in the last week and a half. Let me get all this off my hands. I’ll be right back.” He quickly walked into the bathroom, and I rubbed at my sore eyes.
Six hours was more than I had been getting in two nights combined, and somehow, it still didn’t feel like enough.
“You doing okay?” Jagger asked when he sat in front of me on the bed.
“With what happened?” When he nodded, I continued. “Yeah, I am . . . I guess. I’ve been constantly worrying about what would pop up on my phone the next time and when that time would be. Knowing whoever is doing this doesn’t have that way of communicating with me anymore feels nice.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that at all, but it’s over now.”
“I just . . .” I trailed off, struggling to voice the jumbled thoughts in my head. “What could anyone have against me that they’d feel the need to do something like this? I don’t understand, and I need to understand, Jagger. I feel like I’m going insane still. Knowing that it’s not actually Ben is a lot easier to say than to believe. I know he’s gone, I do. But I—I just feel like I don’t know anything anymore.”
Jagger placed one of his hands on top of both of mine, and I quickly stopped twisting my hands together to grip his. “We’ll find out who did this, I swear.”
I nodded absentmindedly, and kept my eyes on where I was now playing with his fingers. I couldn’t stop fidgeting; something was bothering me . . . something that had to do with the Facebook messages. I just couldn’t figure out what it was. Jagger was talking—saying something that I wasn’t hearing. All I could focus on was our hands and the messages and the vows.
“The vows!” I shouted suddenly, and looked up in time to see Jagger’s head jerk back from my outburst.
