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She opened the door. Micah was behind her, silent, as icy as death, as he walked her across the hall and back into her apartment.
The door closed behind them and she kept walking. She moved through the living room and into the bedroom before closing and locking the door behind her.
She moved through the bedroom and into the bathroom and closed the door there.
She looked different.
She stared into the full-length mirror.
She didn’t see the ugly duckling.
She didn’t see the woman enraged by Whore’s Dust or the desperate child who used to sit in front of her bedroom window and dream of a SEAL to rescue her.
She saw a young woman. She wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t beautiful.
She wiped at her tears, but they refused to stop falling. She was a little plain maybe, but Micah didn’t need to put a bag over her face to fuck her.
He just needed to lie to her.
Her mascara was running, though. And the tip of her nose was red.
She reached out, touched the mirror that had followed her through her childhood into adulthood. The same mirror on its heavy dark stand.
She reached out, gripped a bottle from the cabinet, and with an enraged cry, threw it into the mirror.
She watched it shatter. Glass rained around her as she heard the bedroom door crash. A second later the bathroom door slammed into the wall behind it.
“There.” She turned on him.
Shaking in rage, the tears falling from her eyes, she faced him. “There’s your damned mirror. There’s your ugly duckling. I need you just about as much as I need that fucking mirror.”
Her fists slammed into his chest as she began to sob. She struck out at him. There was nothing else to strike out at. All the pain and rage of six years rose inside her until she was screaming with it, her head buried in his chest as he picked her up, holding her close to him, and carried her to the easy chair that sat in the corner of her bedroom.
He held her. One hand against her head to hold her screams against his heart. The other wrapped around her upper body as he tucked her close to his chest and rocked her gently.
She couldn’t hold it in. She couldn’t fight it. She’d fought for six years. She hadn’t cried; she hadn’t lost control. She had made certain she wasn’t the crybaby Jansen Clay had accused her of being over and over that night.
“Risa, baby.” Micah’s hand stroked down her back. “I have you, love. Right here against my heart. I have you, Risa.”
She felt his he
art beating against her cheek, strong and sure, a heavy throb that had soothed her the only night she had allowed herself to sleep against him.
Into his chest she poured eight years of rage, grief, and pain. She poured the child she had been against his chest, and the woman who didn’t know how to be free. She held on to him with desperate hands, and she let herself be weak.
She let herself accept.
Friends would lie.
Sometimes, there was going to be pity.
She couldn’t always be strong.
And one day soon, Micah would leave.
She never saw the tears Micah shed as she sobbed against him. And she never saw the pain that burned in his soul for the woman he couldn’t have. The woman who was strong enough to cry, and strong enough to survive.
CHAPTER 19
