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He nodded once.
It could be a coincidence. Had to be. I’d mentioned the smoking thing once. In passing. A coincidence. I stared at him a while longer until my eyelids fluttered, and the effort to keep my head tilted upward was too much. I laid it back down on his chest.
“I missed you,” I whispered, already half asleep.
He brushed my hair. “I’ve missed you too.”
Or maybe I dreamed that. Because I was asleep before the movie even started.
And I woke up in my bed, alone the next morning.
Elden was gone.
ELDEN
It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, leaving her. I sat there for a long fucking time, on that sofa, with her sleeping against my chest. She’d passed out in seconds. She was exhausted. And not just from working for hours on some assignment that I guessed was complicated as fuck. Not just from an interaction with her piece of shit father that had crushed her.
No, frommonthsof squashing all that shit down. Pretending she was okay, that her world hadn’t completely crumbled in the space of a few months.
She was protecting her mother, I knew that. Because that’s the kind of person Violet was. Because she didn’t want to taint the happiness her mother had finally gotten. Which was why she never told her about the abortion, about that French fuck hitting her. Why she pretended that cutting her father out of her life after learning what a monster he was wasn’t a big deal.
Swiss was keeping close fucking tabs on her. Because he, like everyone else, was waiting. For all of this to come to a head. For her to break down.
But it hadn’t come. Yeah, she was partying a lot—something I fucking hated, especially since she was every frat fucks wet dream—and she wasn’t sleeping or eating enough, but her grades were excellent. She designed her mother’s fucking restaurant on top of everything else she was already doing.
The house she lived in was clean but bursting with items belonging to each of the women who lived there. She spoke fondly of them all, Sariah being the one she was closest to. I could see Violet in the house. In the prints on the walls. In the fucking sage, the crystals, all that new age shit she believed in.
Her room was flooded with her scent, with her personality.
A room that was equally cluttered and neat, overflowing with the dichotomies of her personality. Framed prints of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, books on feminism, on alternative therapies, herbal remedies, countless hardbacks of fantasy books. There were also piles of textbooks on architecture and a large drawing board in the corner with plans for her mother’s restaurant still sitting on it.
Like her room, Violet was so multifaceted, I figured it would take a lifetime to know her completely. I was greedy, wanting to know it all in one night, skulking around her bedroom after I placed her in her bed. I knew I didn’t have a lifetime. That even this night was stolen.
But I was ravenous to take whatever I could of her. There were only so many times I would get lucky to be the one around when we got the call about Preston. She would only be in college a while longer before she went out into the world and some smart motherfucker found her, made her his.
It burned my throat to think about, filling me with so much fucking fury I had to go to her, watch the steady rise and fall of her chest to find control again.
She was it. She quieted everything for me. Staring at her perfect rosebud lips, her alabaster skin, the midnight strands of her hair splaying out on the pillowcase like she was fucking Snow White.
Here was a woman who deserved the hero.
And that definitely wasn’t me.
The hero would’ve denied her that night on the roof. The hero wouldn’t have even been there. Wouldn’t have gone crazy over a fucking teenage girl.
Yeah, that was villain shit.
I was the villain. And I needed to leave before I corrupted her further.
ChapterEight
VIOLET
I didn’t tellanyone about the altercation with my father.
Not even Sariah.
It felt wrong keeping something from my best friend, but it had rattled me. As had waking up the next morning to the scent of Elden on my pillow but the man himself nowhere to be found.
