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My voice is low and scratchy when I tell her, “I’m a bad man, Lo. You really need to stay away.” I look over my shoulder and see her take a tentative step closer to me. “No.” I stop her again. “You need to know.” I sigh. “Before we make plans and I tell you all the ways you are not going back to the Bennetts’, I have to face—no, we have to face who I am.” I take a deep breath and tell her, “I am not Ryan Bennett.”
I hear her mutter, “Thank God for that.”
“Lo, I’m serious. I don’t have a father who will care about your well-being. I don’t have a mother who will sit at dinner and smile because she misses you.”
“I don’t care who your parents are,” she says barely above a whisper with hesitation in her tone.
“You should care. You should care that the man you’ve been sleeping with is a monster. You should care that I am the fucked-up son of an even more fucked-up man.”
“Jason, I know about your childhood. I saw.”
I hold up a hand to stop her, refusing to look at her. “I know what you saw, and I don’t want to talk about it. You have to know, Lo, that I’ve done bad things. I’ve hurt a lot of people.”
“But you haven’t hurt me, Jason.”
I shake my head. “I will. I came home tonight, ready for the fight. My instincts were screaming that you were going to push me, and I can’t stand here and tell you I’m so sure I wouldn’t have pushed back. Lo, when I push back, I’m gonna hate myself, and you’re going to hate me, too.”
I feel her move up behind me, and then she wraps her arms around my waist. “I’m not going to push you to the dark. I’m going to hold you in the light.”
“I hurt her, Lo,” I say with a rasp to my tone. I don’t want to go here. I don’t want to continue to give power to Missy. She has it, though, with everything that happened. Missy still has the power. My anger still has the power. As much as it kills me and it may kill what I’m building with Lo, I have to take back the power within myself. I have to fight inside to admit my shortcomings so the anger and rage don’t hold power over me anymore.
“Who?”
“My ex, Missy. I put my hands on her,” I admit, looking down at my trained hands. “I fight in the league to get out the aggression. Somehow, it wasn’t enough. She would start, and we ended up hurting each other. We built this thing together, and we destroyed it. I don’t want to destroy what we’re building. I don’t want to destroy you.”
She squeezes me. “You brought me out of the scariest of places. You don’t let me face things alone. You accept me for me, not my dead sister. You, Jason Stanley, have given me something to want to live for. The only way you will destroy me is if you walk away before we can find out where we can go with this. The only way you will destroy what we’re building is if you don’t give me a chance to help you the way you give me the strength to move on.”
“I’m a monster,” I admit, pleading with her eyes that she will take off the rose-colored glasses and see the darkness that is completely me.
“I lived in a house that haunts me, because I was afraid of the world. You came and saved me. You aren’t a monster, Jason. You just don’t see the good you have inside.”
I have no words. I have laid it all out in front of her, and she isn’t running scared. She should be, but she’s not. Somehow in her eyes, I’m not a monster. She sees the good inside me that I can’t find. No one has ever seen anything good in me . . . other than Tatiana who wasn’t mine to hold on to. Could this be my chance at something real? Can she really accept me for the damaged and dangerous man I am?
I turn around and press my lips to hers. I don’t think. I don’t fight. I don’t push her away. I take her as she is, just as she takes me.
Slowly and tenderly, I take her on my living room floor. I let the day wash away as I sink inside of her.
With her, I don’t need to fight inside. I just need to fight alongside her for whatever lies ahead.
Chapter Twenty - One
After Jason has left for work, I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling satisfied. He made sure of it. On the floor, he apologized to my body sweetly, softly with his body. In the shower, he apologized with his kisses and the way his rough hands washed me gently, tenderly before I did the same in return. In bed, he gave me more. He gave me—Lo—what I now crave: the ability to lose myself in a moment of unrestrained, out-of-control sex.
