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I sighed, but I wasn’t even surprised, to be honest. Of course he wasn’t going to answer me. Why would he?
I turned around to leave again, but it wasn’t meant to be. He spoke and my feet were glued to the floor all over again, just like that.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He said the words through gritted teeth, like he was forcing them out. “But I’m still glad I said those things. I’m glad you moved on because it’s for the best. Trust me, Teddy. It’s for the best.”
Absurd.
So absurd that I was laughing my heart out even before I turned and met his eyes again.
He watched me like a man lost, like he wouldn’t even raise a hand to stop me if I tried to kill him right now.
“Move on?” I asked when my throat hurt from that awful laugh. “Are you serious right now? You think I moved on because you wish you hated me?” Did he even realize how ridiculous he sounded? “Guess what, Dominic? You’ve been a worse ass to me the whole two years we’ve known each other. You never even said hi, you always pretended I wasn’t there in any meeting we attended together, even though I was nothing but kind to you. You never even looked my way. You never cared.”
And I’d convinced myself every single day that I didn’t care, either. I thought it was fine. I thought there would never come a time when all that anger I’d apparently accumulated by lying to myself would burst right out of me, but here we were. “And I wanted to hate you, too. Believe me, I’ve been talking myself into hating you every single day. But that’s not the way it works. It just isn’t. You got into my stupid, stupid head, and no matter what I do, I can’t seem to get you out.”
With every new word that left my lips, I felt more drained. They sucked out all the energy from me, and it felt like I was floating, no longer even in my body. The way he looked at me didn’t help, either. His lips were parted, his eyes open wide, and it didn’t even look like he was breathing.
Shaking my head, I took off Sandra’s bracelet and let it fall on the floor.
I turned around and went to the bedroom, slamming the door shut behind me, so angry I was shaking from head to toe. I paced around the room for a bit until my feet started to hurt and some of the tension released from my shoulders.
Then, I slipped under the covers and closed my eyes again, assuming he wasn’t going to come sleep in here tonight. He didn’t really need to anymore. I already smelled like him because I wore his shirt, and we’d already convinced all those people that we were who we pretended to be. Half my mind was made up to skip tomorrow’s meeting completely. Why would I even go? My job here was done.
But I knew I’d change my mind the second I calmed down. This was my job, and it was important to me. More important than my feelings.
Except, a few minutes later, the door of the room opened again, and Dominic walked in, silent as a ghost. My heart thundered in my chest when I felt his weight on the other side of the bed. He was planning to sleep on this bed after all.
Like hell.
My mouth opened to tell him to get out, sleep somewhere else—on the floor, for all I cared—but he beat me to it.
“That night we met, I told you that you shouldn’t have been there.” My mouth clamped shut immediately. “I meant it.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled. “You can’t—” sleep here tonight, I wanted to say, but he wouldn’t even let me finish.
“No, I didn’t mean it in the way you think, Teddy. What I meant was that you were too good, too kind for a place like the ODP. Manhattan, even.” He let that sink in for a minute, then continued. “The world is full of bad people, and all they do is prey on the good. You deserve so much better than anything that place has to offer you. I knew it the moment I saw your smile.”
Something stabbed me in the chest. I wanted to say something, turn around to look at him, or just hold onto the anger for a bit longer, but all I could do was lie there and wait for him to say more.
“The reason why I kept you away was because I thought I was doing you a favor. Believe me, there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t regret turning my back on you that day when you came to say hi.”
Another stab, this one in my gut, and whatever invisible knife was there, it twisted, too. I remembered those moments clearly and they still stung.
“I have a lot of enemies, and I could never really afford friends. I can’t even afford acquaintances. The best I could do was watch from a distance.”
Tears pooled in my eyes, but I didn’t let them fall. Not yet. My heart hung on every word that came out of his lips, and it broke and mended with them at the same time.
“It pisses me off how nice you are to everyone because none of them deserve it. It pisses me off that you wash other people’s cups because they’re nothing but leeches. It pisses me off when you take on the work of everyone around you, and all they have to do is ask.”
“I had no idea I pissed you off so much,” I mumbled. But in the back of my mind, his words remained.
He saw me. He knew me. All this time, I thought he’d forgotten that I even existed, but he hadn’t.
“I also see how you write everything down. There are times when you stare at your computer screen for minutes, but you don’t really see anything. And then you wrinkle your nose the way only you can do, pick up a pen, and write something down in a rush. I like that.”
Oh, God. What would he say if I told him that most times I did that was when I was stopping myself from thinking about him?
“Then, there’s the way you stand up to talk on the phone sometimes, and you smile at it like you’re standing face-to-face with the person, and they can see you. You’re not paying any attention to your surroundings, so those smiles are completely genuine. I really like those days, too.”
