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“Oh, I’m your dirty little secret, huh?”

“It’s not like that,” she sighs. “It hurts me to think about you.” And it may hurt me to hear that, but at the end of the day, I did what I needed to. If she doesn’t want to understand that, then that's fine; she doesn’t have to. What she doesn’t get is that I’d rather be skinned alive than be in prison.

I’d rather lose all of my weight and muscle and shrivel into nothing but a weak man before stepping foot inside a cement room. If I could do it all over again, I’d have never killed my father. I would have let him beat me over and over just to save myself from the life I’ve lived.

“I won’t apologize if that’s what you’re searching for. I will not say I am sorry for protecting myself. You can take me as I am or not at all because that’s all that I have to give.”

“I don’t want your stupid apology because I know even if you said the words, you wouldn’t mean them! I just wanted to know where you were. I wanted to know why! We could have figured it out.”

“God, you’re fucking dense, aren’t you, Luna?”

Her eyes squint at me, and they darken with an anger that I’ve never seen her hold. I watch the rage take over her body. If I were a regular guy, I would feel bad for being an ass, but I think we’ve established I’m not a regular guy.

“Get out! Leave!” Luna yells as she points towards the door.

“No.”

“Go.”

“No.”

“I don’t want you here.”

“If you want me gone, Luna, you’re going to have to kill me. The only way I leave is in a body bag. I’ve walked out of here once, but I’m not going to do it again.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“You weren’t saying that fifteen months ago when I was buried inside of you,” I growl.

“Exactly. Fifteen months. It’s been almost a year and a half. I searched day in and day out for a sign of you. Sometimes, I felt a presence and thought you were back, but it was just a trick. I found Noah. He was nice and exactly what I needed to forget about you because you abandoned me. I’m not dense. I’m hurt. I’m a hurt girl who fell for the wrong fucking guy. Don’t you see that? I don’t want you to say sorry. I don’t want you to fix what you’ve already broken. I just want you not to act like you didn’t leave me. It wasn’t just yesterday that I saw you last.” She clears up her mind for me and lays it out into words that I might understand. “I didn’t wake up, and it was all just a dream. Everything is real, and I barely know a damn thing about you,” she adds before grabbing the pendant around her neck. “This. This was all that I had, but you were everywhere. Everywhere and then here. You’ve been back.”

“Lun-”

“No. I’m not done. You know, I would close my eyes and picture you every time Noah touched me. Every single time that he fucked me, it wasn’t magical. It wasn’t everything I ever wanted. You were. You are. You showed me what it was like to live and be free. You corrupted me, Jax. You broke me, and you weren’t here to witness me break just to build myself back together again.”

My fists are by my side, and I’m shaking. I didn’t care enough to stop and worry about what she might have gone through. I also never considered that she actually felt something for me. When she asked me to stay and offered help, I thought she was high from her orgasm. But now I know she was serious. She wasn’t high on anything. She honestly didn’t want me to leave.

I had no choice.

I chant the reminder in my head.

I didn’t have a choice.

It’s too late to dwell on any choice that I made. It’s over. It’s done.

“If you want this, Jax, you’re going to have to earn it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you can’t show up and force me to have sex with you. You can’t walk around and leave me items to terrify me. You have to be normal.”

“I can’t just be normal. I can’t take you out to dinner and bring you home to whisper sweet nothings into your ear. I can’t be the man you want. I told you, you can take me as I am or get nothing at all.” The anger in my tone is heard loud and clear. “Maybe I need to flip around this mirror and sink my cock into you as you watch; that way, you can remember who the fuck you’re speaking to.”

Luna’s eyes light with fire. She wants to deny me, but push comes to shove and I know she can’t. Her body weeps for me. There isn’t a single thing she can do to change that.

“No,” she says in a stern tone.

“No?” I mock as I walk towards her. She steps back, and we do this dance until her back is against the wall. I pin her by her waist, and she tries to break free. She doesn’t budge.