AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I find it. It is the perfect song to tell him I am crazy about every special part of him.
So I select Avril Lavigne’s “I Love You” and play it.
I hear the music start, and excitement courses through my veins as he raises the volume and I can hear the lyrics start speaking to him even from where I sit on his lap.
I know he might not remember this tomorrow. I know his eyes are black, and that playing him a song won’t count as having said the words, but we’ve spent so many nights together. We train with each other, bathe together, run together, eat and feed each other, caress and talk, and I don’t think Remington has ever opened up to anyone like he has to me. I’ve had my walls up all my life, and I’ve never let anyone inside until I suddenly realized he was…in.
I breathe him and live him every day, even dream about him while lying next to him in bed.
Even if this man doesn’t recognize the emotions in his raw and untamed heart, I at least hope he will know by my song that he’s become my…everything.
Excited beyond words, I hear the song continue playing and watch his face, gnawing my lip as I study his expression. Every lyric is so perfect, the entire song is meant from me to him, including the chorus which I swear I can hear right now;
You're so beautiful
But that's not why I love you
I'm not sure you know
That the reason I love you is you
Being you
Just you
Yeah the reason I love you is all that we've been through
And that's why I love you
He listens while assessing my face, his expression intent as he scans my features. My full lips. My amber eyes. My high cheekbones.
“Play it again.” His voice sounds so asperous, I almost had to read his lips to understand what he said.
I click the button to replay, but instead of listening to the song again like I expected him to, he rolls me over and lies me on my back, then sets the headphones on my head and adjusts them to my smaller frame as the song starts.
And in the next second, I’m listening to the “I Love You” song that I just played for him.
And which Remington Tate now plays for me.
I close my eyes, my heart shuddering in my chest, what I feel for him swelling inside me until I feel full and helplessly consumed on the inside. I feel his lips on mine, the song playing in my ears as he starts kissing me in a way that is not sexual, but infinitely tender.
This is the way Remy opens up to me, and I’m tingling from the top of my head to the soles of my feet as I soak up every single thing he’s trying to tell me, with this song, with his lips, with his whisper touch, even knowing he might not remember any of this, it doesn’t make it any less real to me.”
Pictures of you
My afternoon was going perfectly well.
Remington has a day off from training and is now completely carb loading and piling up his muscles with energy—and his plate too. He refused to eat Diane’s meals and brought us all down to the hotel restaurant buffet instead. The men are eating separately, discussing “fight” stuff, and I’m having a lovely time with Diane trying to determine the ingredients of what we’re eating. A taste of … orange? Hint of cardamom?
And then my phone bleeps. I’m thrilled to see it’s a message from Mel.
Melanie: I hate to give that ahole Riley any credit, but he was right. There’s a picture on the internet of you kissing that embodiment of Gross that night!! And it’s going viral!
My world stops.
I’m flashed back to that night, where I’m up on tiptoes kissing the embodiment of Gross, and suddenly it makes perfect sense that someone—his goonies?—would capture it on camera. Of course.
If someone spent four minutes taping me at my Olympic trials, in the most humiliating moment of my life, there would also be someone ready to tape me at the second most humiliating moment of my life. Of course they captured it on camera. Maybe not the first time I failed to hit the spot. But how about the second time I had to hold it for five seconds?
My bottom drops, and I feel like I’m drowning before the storm even comes, just at the mere sight of the cloud incoming.
With frozen lungs, I lower my phone back into my purse, somehow feeling as though everything I do seems to be in slow motion. I glance at the table where the men discuss their strategy for tomorrow night, and I notice Remy is easily listening to them. One second he’s normal, relaxed and lounging back, with his legs splayed open on a pink dining chair of the hotel restaurant, and the next I see him looking intently at his phone as it vibrates.
My heart sinks to my toes, but seconds pass, and nothing happens.
I can’t read his profile, but he has gone utterly still. Then it all happens in a blink of an eye. He turns the entire table with a gigantic crash, and Coach ends up on the floor, with a thousand plates and food over him.
In the same move when Remington catapults to his feet, he shoots his cell phone across the room, where it crashes into pieces against the wall as he starts for me, and Pete scrambles to his feet and reaches into his back pocket.
“No, Pete, no!” I burst out, loathing the idea of Remy being tranquilized.
I try to stay calm but my heart pounds a thousand beats a minute. I’ve never dealt with Remington angry at me since we’ve been together, and suddenly I’m a little afraid of him, but I don’t want him to know that I am.
Trembling in my seat, I stay utterly still as he comes to stand before me, breathing like a bull, his nostrils flaring, his eyes burning black in his face, his fists trembling at his sides. But it’s the hard desperation in his gaze that sends awful chills down my arms.
It takes me about ten times the normal effort to speak. “Do you want to talk to me, Remington?” I ask, my voice raw.
I brace myself for his shout, but somehow, the cold sliver of a whisper he answers with is infinitely more threatening.
“I want to do more than talk to you.”
The hairs at the back of my neck rise in alarm. “All right, let’s talk. Excuse me, Diane,” I say in deceptive calm, and push my chair back so I can stand up, my legs wobbling.
He looks bigger than ever, and the entire restaurant is looking at him.
Diane scrambles away to the toppled table to help Coach clean up.
Remington’s hands flex and fist at his sides as he glares down at me. His jaw works as he breathes, fast and choppy, and I notice Riley has just come up behind him, next to Pete.
There’s a fierce battle inside Rem’s eyes. He’s struggling like he knows he has to control himself but can't. As if the anger is beyond him.
I try to calm my pulse while I burn with the need to calm him. I know that when I set my hands on any part of his body, he relaxes under my touch. I know he needs to receive my touch sometimes as fiercely as I need to give it to him. Except he’s never been like this, and I’m afraid that for the first time in my life, my touch won’t be welcomed by him.
The thought of the only man I have ever loved feeling betrayed by me is almost crippling.
He hasn’t even spoken, and yet I can feel his turmoil so completely surrounding me, whatever he has to tell me already hurts somewhere deep and profound inside my body. I hurt him. I hurt him, and I instantly hate me for it. My wind pipe swells in pain.
“I just went to see my sister,” I painfully breathe, a well of regret and anxiety roiling inside of me.
He reaches out with a fiercely trembling index finger and touches my mouth—the one I kissed Scorpion’s filthy cheek with—and then he leans forward to bite me, and I gasp in mingled shock and desire at the prick of his teeth I feel on my skin. “You go negotiate with scum like him? Without me knowing?” he asks in a low, turbulent voice as his thumb scrapes unsteadily over my lips.
“I went to see my sister, Remy. I couldn't care less about the scum.”
He touches my hair, and the touch is so very unexpectedly gentle, I want to die with the way it contrasts with the lighted frenzy in his eyes and the way his thumb starts desperately scraping over my lips. “Yet you kiss that f**king ass**le with the same mouth you kiss me.”
“Please just count to ten.” Helpless, I touch his sleeve.
He narrows his eyes, then rushes on to say, “One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-TEN.”
He leans over and seizes part of my shirt collar in his fist, drawing me closer to him, the distressed look in his eyes cutting me like talons. “You kiss that motherfucker with the same mouth I would kill for?”
His eyes are wild as he touches my lips again, this time with the tip of two fiercely trembling fingers, and suddenly all I can see is torment. His eyes are black. Dark and haunted. And I can’t stand that I put that darkness there, and I feel his pain, with every bone in my body I feel it.
“My lips hardly touched the tattoo.” My voice is whisper quiet as my windpipe begins closing down. “I did just what you do when you let them get a hit and give them false confidence so I could see my sis.”
He slams his chest with a loud noise. “You’re my f**king girl! You don’t get to give anyone false confidence!”
“Sir, we need you to leave the premises now.”
Remy’s head swings around as the manager comes forward, and suddenly Pete and Riley stop the poor man from getting closer, Pete swiftly extracting a checkbook as the terms cost of damages echo in the room. Remy’s narrowed eyes slide back to me, and he’s so angry and gorgeous, and such a damn handful, I just don’t know what to do with him.
