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Hearing her so obviously happy filled me with both joy and dread. Closing my eyes, I thought about our nights in the shelter I had built for her, the sound of the waves as they crashed against the shore, and the steady ocean breeze.
I wanted to go back.
“Sorry I was such a jerk tonight,” I told her.
“I know you are,” she replied simply.
“That guy is an asshole.”
“Who?”
“The politician.”
“He didn’t do anything wrong.”
“If he did, I’d fucking rip his arms off,” I promised.
“Bastian!” Raine snapped as she looked up at me. “You can’t say things like that!”
I rolled my eyes in the most obvious way possible. I could kill him, and she knew it. She’d seen first-hand what I could do when she was threatened.
“We’re back in the real world now,” she reminded me.
As if I needed the fucking reminder. I knew exactly where we were, and I was pretty sure I hated it. As stupid as it was, I missed the barely-comfortable-enough-to-doze-off floor of the palm frond shelter at the end of the beach.
I tightened my arms, pulling Raine securely against me.
“Bastian?”
A shudder ran through me.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I whispered against Raine’s hair. “I don’t know how to be us here.”
She wrapped an arm around my chest and held me as tightly as I was
holding her.
“I love you,” I said as my lips pressed to her neck. The sound of my voice echoed everything inside my body—full of fear and dread.
“I love you, too,” Raine replied. She moved her hand up to stroke my hair.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said again.
“We’ll figure it out,” Raine assured me. “It’s going to take some getting used to—some trial and error—but we’re going to be okay.”
I wished I could believe her, but Landon’s words continued to echo through my head.
Sometimes it just boiled inside of me.
The fucking anger.
It was directed at nothing and everything. It focused on the sights and the people around me because they were the constant reminder of what I had lost. Sometimes it was even directed at the one person who understood and accepted me for the asshole I was.
It made me hate everything and everyone around me even though I knew it didn’t really have anything to do with shit on the outside. It was like a hurricane, churning around in my gut, swirling around and around until I needed to slam my fist into something to keep myself from vomiting. The tension would creep up on me; my entire body would tighten and even begin to shake, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it except…
Just one fucking drink.
On the other side of the varnished bar top, at least a hundred bottles were lined up in front of me, just barely out of reach. Every one of them seemed to be singing to me, but the ones up on the top shelf on the right called to me the most—Kettle One, Grey Goose, Skye. I wasn't sure why I tortured myself, but I did.
