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I know what I have to do also.
In all my madness and desperation and my veins filled with that toxic potion that I drank because it was labeled love, I shake my head. “No.”
“What?”
“I won’t hold on to my dress for you. Because you don’t have to protect me anymore,” I say, looking into his eyes. “B-because I was… I was with someone else.”
Love made me do it.
That’s what I’m going to say to myself years later when I think of this night.
When I think of what I just said to him.
Love and a broken heart. That’s what made me say it.
I can’t believe I did though. I can’t believe I said that and I can’t believe he heard it.
Not only that, he understood it too.
Because as soon as I told him, his breathing got wild.
His chest expanded and swelled under his t-shirt and his shoulders became massive and even broader. And now he’s crowding me even more, eating up all the air, all the space around me with his enhanced, heavily breathing body.
“What’d you just say?”
Even though I’m trembling now and the night has gone darker because of how changed, how angry Reed has become after my confession, I forge ahead, my voice calm.
Because that’s the only way.
That’s the only way this will end.
“There was someone else. After you.”
He shifts on his feet, his torso rubbing against mine, his chest scraping against mine too.
I’m surrounded by him. Surrounded and trapped and at his mercy.
“What someone else?” he growls.
“A guy that I met.”
“Where?”
“At the bar.”
“The shitty bar that you go to.”
“Y-yes. Toby.”
He breathes out sharply at the name, his chest contracting, his stomach hollowing out. As if in revulsion. In protest.
“What about Toby?”
I’m still fisting his shirt at the hips but now I open my palms and splay them over his hard muscles. I try to absorb all his anger, his violence in my skin.
Because I know he’s going to get even angrier. When I tell him everything.
“I met him one night. Back when I started at St. Mary’s. Back then everything was… difficult. Everything hurt. Everything made me feel lonely and… You… I was still so mad at you. My anger was so fresh and…”
“And?”
God, I know this will hurt him.
I know it.
I know how possessive he can be. How dominating and authoritative. Even when he has no right to be any of those things with me.
Not anymore.
But I remind myself that this is the only way.
“And I wanted to forget you. I wanted to forget everything about you. I wanted to forget that I ever met you. That I fell in love with you. So I…”
His biceps are vibrating now.
I can feel them disturbing the still air. Still and somehow charged too.
Smelling of wildflowers and woods and geranium and sugar. And lust.
Smelling of us and our desire.
“You what?” he bites out, his eyes blazing with anger.
His features are so tight that I raise my hand and cradle his jaw, his rough, stubbled jaw, as I hurt him with my words. “I… He was nice to me. And he had these laughing brown eyes and he was… kind. He was kind, Reed.” I press my fingertips on his ticking jaw. “He was kind to me. He didn’t make me angry like you do. And he didn’t make me mad or blush or… or bad. Like you do. He didn’t…”
He didn’t do anything for me, to be honest.
He was nice and he asked me why I looked so sad. Why my eyes were puffy and why my lips looked like they never smiled. He asked me why I looked like a girl who was lost.
I never would’ve noticed him if not for Poe.
Back then I used to be sad all the time and even though Poe didn’t know the reason she always stuck by me. It was her idea to sneak out and unwind. And I was too sad to care about getting caught so I went with her.
“What happened?” Reed asks, his words sounding like blades in the air.
“I… I let him… He kiss —”
“Don’t,” he snaps, cutting me off, almost pressing his forehead against mine, making me taste his command on my tongue, my trembling lips.
And that jaw that I’m touching now after two long years, I rub it.
I try to soothe away the tightness from it. I try to soothe him because I’m not finished. Because I have to keep going for the both of us.
“He didn’t just…” I tell Reed. “He did… other things. He took me to this dark corner, away from everyone and I went with him and he —”
That’s when his hands come off the tree and he puts them on me.
He wraps one around my throat and buries the other in my hair. He messes up my neat and tidy strands as his fingers latch onto my hair. He even squeezes my throat to get a good, possessive grip around it.
