Page 62 of Breathe Like Hell

Well, she tried to power it on.

It was dead.

When the screen wouldn’t turn on, she slammed it shut and slumped down on the table, burying her face in her folded arms, her shoulders shaking with little cries. She was so different now than the last time I’d seen her—more sad, less angry—and I felt bad for it.

“Masters,” I murmured as I went to her and set my palm on her back, rubbing circles. Her hair was soft, cascading over her shoulders, hanging all the way to her waistband.

The room was quiet for another minute before Dakota spoke again, voice muffled in her sweater. “I’m failing all my classes,” she said, then turned her teary eyes up to meet mine.

“Were you afraid to tell me that?”

She rolled her shiny lips together and nodded, then her expression broke and she started crying harder. I held the back of her head as she pushed her sad face into my abdomen just above my belt, clinging to me now.

I sifted my fingers through her hair, lightly scratching her head.

“I don’t want you to be scared to tell me things. Alright?”

There was a very distinct feeling of regret knotting in my gut. How many times had I considered abusing my privileges to see her grades in her other classes? To look at her other exams? I’d convinced myself that she would come to me if she needed help, but I’d been wrong about that, and I hated myself for letting this happen. I could’ve stopped it.

And now I was making it worse by tormenting her. Playing fucking games.

Not a day went by where I didn’t wish this never happened the way it did. It was all I could think about sometimes. Why did she have to meet him first? Why couldn’t she have just been a student in my class, my own perfect girl? Why did she have to be tied to the most painful part of my life?

And why was I so incapable of responding rationally to the situation? I could’ve made everything simpler if I chose one of the two typical paths—leaving her or forgiving her. But I couldn’t do either of those things.

I couldn’t let Dakota go, even though the proximity hurt.

And she probably thought Mason was the one of us who grew up craving pain. She didn’t know he’d gotten it from me. By nature, all Thrausians in Heaven were solely pleasure-seeking. He used to be, too.

“Well, I don’t feel like I deserve anything from you right now, so I don’t know. I keep fucking up with everything.” Her voice was small and quiet. She still had her face pressed against my stomach.

“What you deserve isn’t relevant. I don’t deserve anything from you, either. But you know I need to take care of you.”

In my soul, I knew she deserved better than me. Even if she’d lied to me, deceived me, tried to go behind my back, continued doing it after I found out, I was just as bad. My need for control didn’t outweigh my ability to see the truth of the situation.

She leaned back, inspecting the damp spots she’d left on my shirt with her tears, the black smudges of mascara on the white fabric. Her lower lip started wobbling again.

I tilted her head back with a finger under her chin, physically stopping her from overthinking or ruminating on the stains.

“I’m going to help you with your classwork,” I started. “All of it, not just my stuff—which you are not failing, by the way.”

“I know. I didn’t want to disappoint you, so I focused on your class the most.”

Her words ached in my chest.

I wanted to tell her she’d never disappoint me, but that wasn’t the truth in every context. She already had disappointed me, more than once. There were so many chances for her to stop, and she never did. Every time I caught her looking at Mason with my arm around her shoulders under the glow of the TV, every lie that’d spilled so easily from her pretty lips when I fucked her, every quiet moment in the middle of the night with her hair spread around her head on my pillow, smelling like the shampoo at his apartment instead of the one I’d bought for her.

Pain slashed across my heart so violently then that I had to actually look away from her for a second.

It was sharp and brutal and quick, wrecking me in the space of a single breath.

I liked to pretend that if forced to choose, Dakota would choose me. It was what I said to Mason when I wanted to hurt him. But sometimes, in the most guarded parts of my brain, I was completely terrified that she wouldn’t. Especially not now.

I steeled myself, bit back the bitterness clawing at my tightened throat.

“Your other classes are important, too,” I managed to say. It was a pointless statement, but I was off-balance and couldn’t think of anything better to tell her.

“Obviously I know that.” She turned her head out of my grasp.