Page 34 of Breathe Like Hell

When he felt like his control was slipping, or he was too close to being actually hurt by a situation, or like he was going to expose something near his darkest center by continuing, he’d close himself off—distance himself, just until he had a handle on the situation again and could ensure it wasn’t going to hurt him irreversibly. There wasn’t often any consideration for the feelings of the person making him feel out of control.

I hoped he felt hurt by Dakota cheating on him. He deserved that shit. She cheated on me too.

And now we’d hooked up behind her back.

I was trying not to think about that, though.

That was what I’d deleted off my phone right before Dakota threw it out the window—texts with him. I didn’t want her to suspect anything, even though blatantly admitting I’d gotten rid of shit probably made her more suspicious than anything.

Hopefully Dakota would get tired of Micah’s bullshit soon, and then I could have her all to myself.

In the back of my mind, I’d started trying to form plans on how to get her away from him more often, and eventually with some level of permanence. Once Aamon was dead, I had no idea what was going to happen to this fragile triad, but I wasn’t going to sit around waiting to find out.

I didn’t have anything else to worry about other than keeping Dakota.

There were no other considerations for me to make, no other things Micah could try and hold over my head, no other parts of my life he could ruin to make me give her up.

He had those things, though. His job, his lab.

I would be happy to destroy either of those things for him if he stood in my way. Somehow.

Dakota pushed off the couch and started towards the stairs without saying a word, breaking my train of thought. Micah’s eyes tracked her across the room.

He stood up once she got to the stairs, following her up to the second floor.

I hadn’t even noticed the movie had ended.

By their footsteps, I could tell they’d gone into his bedroom together and their voices were low enough that I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. I almost wanted to go listen at the stairs, but I decided against it.

I settled back further into my seat, letting my knees fall apart, my glazed eyes staring at the television screen glowing blue through the night, the credits rolling. Some instrumental music droned on in the background.

Violent thoughts were making me restless, memories replaying in my skull.

I envisioned Dakota jumping off that cliff right in front of me, her fragile body hurtling through the air towards the rocks.

Micah doesn’t know about that, does he?

He doesn’t know about the gun, the water, the cliff, or how hard you come with a hand covering your face.

I’d jumped off that cliff myself several times, and some of them had ended in me making zero attempt to fly. The thing about angelic healing was it didn’t hurt any less to get these injuries; they simply healed faster. So me ending a two-hundred foot freefall by crashing into a dark rock, slick with seawater, felt like dying. Most of my bones broken and most of my organs ruptured or damaged beyond recognition. I’d learned that magnitude of pain was purifying.

The only difference between my fate and Dakota’s was that I would heal from it.

Physically, at least.

It wasn’t long before Micah appeared back in the living room, returning to where he’d been sitting in the armchair, breaking the mirage of lethal fantasy that’d consumed my vision in his absence.

“She’s asleep,” he said, eyes skimming over my relaxed body before gliding back to the TV.

“Alright.”

I wished he hadn’t come back down here, wished he’d just stayed upstairs with her, because as much as I’d been trying not to think about it, I couldn’t get what we’d done together out of my head. The memories yanked wickedly at my resistant brain, pulling me back into the same addictive darkness I’d been swallowed in every time Micah was in my life previously.

I rolled my neck, trying to stretch out some of the discomfort.

It made me think of when I’d first met him, in Heaven. He’d been so different from me then—and still was now, but there was more imbalance between us in the past.

He was the first and only man I’d ever been with. That wasn’t the case for him.