AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Fine,” he said. It was two blocks to Park Avenue, the next northbound street. That gave him a window. He moved so he was walking in front of her, but turned back around to face her.
“Perfect,” she said darkly. “I won’t say that I hope you walk into a street sign and knock yourself unconscious, but I’m not going to do anything to prevent it, either. Just so you know.”
“You should think about what I spent the past ten years doing for a living. I could walk the entire length of Manhattan backward without hitting a thing. I believe they call me nimble.”
She stopped walking. It was too cold, too dark on that side street, surrounded by brick buildings and concrete and the shoveled-high remains of the last snowstorm, but she didn’t seem to care. So he didn’t, either.
“That is not what they call you.”
“What is this?” He had to clench his hands in his pockets to keep them to himself, and it was a battle to keep his voice pitched low. To remain—or anyway, appear—calm.
Zoe blew out a breath he could see against the frigid air, and then something swept over her. He could see it. Like a terrible quake. As if she was being shaken apart from the inside out.
But when she spoke, she whispered. And she wasn’t looking at him.
“You’re obviously disgusted,” she said, not making any sense, though there was that darkness across her face and that vulnerable cast to her proud mouth, and he couldn’t quite breathe. “Why can’t you just admit it? Why play this sick game?”
“I’m not playing any games.”
“I get it. I do. There’s a reason I don’t exactly advertise my sordid past—”
“Wait.” He bent to make sure he was looking her straight in the face. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t pretend, Hunter.” Her whisper had turned ragged. “Don’t make it worse. All you see when you look at me is what he did. What I did. The taint of it.” He was frozen solid in astonishment, and she kept talking, and he was sure she didn’t realize that tears were rolling down her cheeks as she did, ripping into him with every track they left behind. “You couldn’t keep your hands off me until you found out—”
“You were fucking violated!” he blazed at her, and she jumped, and he didn’t care. Not when it was this important that she hear him. “You think I should grab you five seconds after you tell me something like that? You think my response to what you’ve been through should be trying to get in your pants?”
“Yes.” Her voice cracked. “Yes, damn it.”
“That’s what—” He stopped and stared down at her, amazed. “Did you just say ‘yes’?”
“It was a long time ago,” she threw at him, as if she was trying to hurt him with every word. “I didn’t die. I’m right here and I’m not broken.”
And Hunter understood she was talking to herself, not to him. Not really.
“You can’t really believe—”
“I’m not going to beg you, Hunter, no matter how big that might make you feel. I shouldn’t have to prove to you that I’m the same person I was two nights ago.”
“Listen to me.” It was an order, and he waited for her to stop. To look at him. To keep looking at him. “You like to play power games, and so do I. They’re fun. But this has nothing to do with that.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” she hissed at him. “Everything is a power game. Everything.”
“I’m. Not. Him.”
He didn’t yell. He didn’t have to yell. Those three words were their own brutal wind, howling around them, then down the urban canyon into the dark night. She flinched as if it had sliced straight through her, as if he’d cut her in half.
“Don’t confuse me with that fucking degenerate again,” he told her in the same voice, brooking no argument. “We’re going to be very clear, you and me, about consent. Do you understand me? About what you want.”
She shook, but he knew it wasn’t from the cold this time. She was fragile and fierce and Zoe, staring back at him from the middle of a nightmare she’d banished all by herself, and he thought he’d never loved another person like this in all his life. And he never would.
The truth of that rang in him, a long, low note, and changed everything.
But he still waited.
“I want to feel alive,” she told him, her dark eyes too bright. Her voice was thick with that unmistakable crack in it, telling him everything. “Unbroken. Like he never ruined me in the first place.”
