“Alright,” I sigh. “Bye.”
“Can you just,fuck, can you just stop? For one second? God, you’re so annoying.” His hand comes down hard on the door, eliminating the small opening I had just made, as I feel the length of his body rub against my back.
I stare at the hardwood, my hand still wrapped around the doorknob as I take in unsteady, quick breaths. He’s soclose, so near, that I want to scream.
My entire body is on high alert, anticipating his touch. Where his hand is planted, it forces his bicep to touch my cheek softly, almost as if he’s giving me a gentle caress.
After a long, agonizing moment of silence, Nate finally offers me an explanation. “My family… they were bad people. Horrible people, even. And if you want to know all the gory, useless information, then I’ll tell you sometime. I promise. But youhave to understand that I thought I was doing what was best. I thought I was continuing my vow to stop people just like them.”
“You thought I was horrible? Bad?” I already know the answer, so I don’t know why I’m torturing myself with the answer.
“Did you not assume the same of me?” he whispers.
Valid point. I believed a bunch of nasty things about Nate—some that I still stand behind without hesitation. I even conjured a plan to hurt him, just as he was planning to hurt me. The only difference is that my plan wasn’t meant to take a piece of him and destroy it.
Well, no piece other than his heart.
Nate must be reading my mind as I stand here in silence, because a moment later, his chin falls to rest on my shoulder and he says quietly into my ear, “I’m so sorry you lost it. I’m sorry they took it from you. I know it… I know it must hurt.”
The keyword in his apology isthey. Because it wasn’t him, not really. By the time the council got to me, according to him, he no longer wanted to hurt me and take my gift away.
But he did lead the charge, at least in the beginning, and I find that it’ll take me a long, long time to forgive that.
“You feel empty now,” Nate continues. “You feel as if a piece of yourself has been ripped from your body, and now you don’t know how to deal with that hole inside of you.”
He’s reaching into the deepest, darkest depths of my soul with every word he speaks. Nate is living inside of me, tormenting me with the thoughts I’ve been shoving away for days.
And ithurts. It’s like being burned alive or drowning from the inside out. What do I say to this? How can I manage another word?
“I can help you feel full again,” he murmurs. “And not just sexually. I can scare the darkness away and hold you so tightly that you can’t possibly fall apart.”
God, that sounds so good. It feels like a reprieve, a gift. But I’ve spent too many nights alone battling the darkness since the warehouse. Where was he then? Why is he just now trying to fix it?
“Then you should have called,” I tell him. “You said that you’d call.”
Nate sighs, a defeated and miserable sound. “I didn’t think you’d want to hear from me. I figured… It doesn’t matter now. I should have called; you’re right.”
“I can’t get a good night’s rest. I wake up in fear that I’m still locked in that warehouse, believing you’ll come and save me.” Now that I’m speaking, the words won’tstop. “I can’t get that phone call out of my head; the one in which you say you’ll destroy me. When I look at you, I feel how useless I am now. How you are still powerful and special, and I’mthis.”
“You are not useless,” Nate insists, dropping his hand from the door and running his fingertips along my good arm. “You are just as extraordinary as you were when you forced me to make your tea.”
I can’t help it—I smile.
But before I can speak, Nate continues. “And if you can’t sleep, if every time you wake up it’s to fear, then I’ll replace it with something warmer. When you come to shaking and confused, I’llput you right back into the sky to lie with your stars, and I’ll hold you until you fall asleep again.”
Mystars. He says it as if they belong to me—as if, now that I’m powerless and empty, he’s willing to share his gift with me and fill me right back up again.
There are so many moving parts to this: how to forgive him for beginning such a torturous downfall, the dreams I can’t escape, the gift that’s been living inside of me since I was fifteen years old having died so brutally. And in the midst of this whirlwind of a struggle I’m now forced to live, there’s affection.
There is a yearning I can’t escape and a large piece of me that wants what he’s promising meso badly.
Can either of us put aside the flaws we see and turn that previous hatred into something soft and beautiful? Do either of uswantthat?
“What do you want from me, Nate?” I ask softly.
His chin lifts from my shoulder, taking my good arm and spinning me gently to face him. My back hits the door with a dull thud, his chest expanding against my own with every breath.
And those eyes—honey brown and quirked up at the ends—drill into me with such need, such unseen devotion, that I can’t breathe.
