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She looks at me sadly, like she expected no less of me, and I can’t identify the emotion that makes me feel. I feel torn from the inside out. Like I’m the lowest scum on the face of the planet.
I don’t want her to hate me. God, I don’t like her looking at me like that.
She doesn’t say another word. Instead, she just walks around me, and I hear the click of the door behind me as she leaves.
My heart is beating a staccato rhythm within me. I feel her light leaving me. I start to run after her and drag her back in here, chain her up and never let her leave. Have her any way I can get her.
But I don’t. Instead, I smash every fucking thing in sight.
* * *
Summer
I know my mom has questions, but I can’t bring myself to answer them. I assure her I’m fine and then lock myself up in my room.
For days, I stay in my room, barely eating or sleeping, just staring up at the ceiling and replaying every moment with Dane in my mind.
The way he was so cocky and arrogant yet playful and sweet. The way he was so possessive and protective of me. The way he looked at me so adoringly yet obsessively. That should have scared me—and kind of did—yet didn’t. Somehow I know he’d never hurt me. Not physically anyway.
And then I think of that last night when he’d just snapped when he found me on the beach with Logan. I feel such a morass of emotions when I think about that night.
There’s anger and indication, but if I’m being truly honest with myself, there’s also a dark pleasure, a sick excitement that I can make him that way. That I can cause him to come undone like that. That he went that crazy over me.
It makes my heart pound just thinking of how thoroughly he claimed me. I feel the beat of my pulse in between my legs, and I feel slickness gather between my thighs when I remember his mouth on me, his lips on mine, that impossibly hard part of himself inside me, making us one being.
And then I remember who he is and why I was with him.
He’s the owner of this property. This property that he wants to demolish. My mom and I would be out on the street searching for another place to live, along with everyone else who lived in the building. The only way he wouldn’t do it is if I stayed with him for thirty days.
Nothing sexual. He wouldn’t make me do anything sexual. No loopholes he’d said.
But there was one. Me. Me being unable to say ‘no’ to him. I was the loophole.
And I just don’t know if I can get over that.
* * *
Dane
I’ve been here every day since she left me.
I own the building next to the shitty little apartment building she was so desperate to save. I sit on the balcony of the penthouse suite of it, and I watch her.
I’d moved into the building next to her the day after she left, trying to ease the ache of her distance. It helps, I suppose, but it’s not like having her living with me, lighting up my space with her golden hair, her pink lips, her innocent ways, her fucking sunshine.
For the first week, she didn’t come out of the building, and I had to fight everything in me not to barge inside and make sure she was okay. Was she eating enough? Was she taking care of herself? I was going to say to hell with it and do it anyway when she finally came out onto the beach.
She doesn’t play volleyball with her friends anymore. I see them trying to engage with her, but she smiles at them and shakes her head before she walks along the beach pensively or swims out into the ocean and bobs along, riding the waves.
They probably don’t see the brokenness, the sadness in her smile, but I do.
I fucking do, and I hate myself for it.
I know I told her I was going to demolish the building if she didn’t keep up her end of the bargain, but I can’t do it.
I can’t do that to her. She cares about the fucking thing. Well, I think it’s the people inside it she cares about more so than the building, and that makes me jealous and proud in equal measure.
Jealous that all those people have her love and devotion. Her love and devotion that I’d give my right hand for. Do they know what an angel she is? What she did for them? Are they worthy of her?
