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“Not hating me,” I repeated and chuckled. I put my hand on the side of her neck just to move my thumb back and forth across the ball of her cheek. I was comfortable with how I felt, but I wasn’t about to continue saying it or pushing her to own how she felt if she didn’t understand it herself yet.
“I haven’t done this before, J,” she said quietly.
“You’ve been in this exact position at least nineteen other times in the last six hours, Fancy Face.”
She smacked my chest. “How do you know when something is real? When it’s love?”
I about scared her right off me when I snapped my hand closed around her neck. I’d done this more than once in the last six hours too, but I squeezed way harder this time than I had any of the others. Both her hands ended up latched around that wrist when her cheeks started to turn pink and her eyes widened. But I did this so often now that she didn’t actually try to escape. I didn’t stand a chance at putting into words what she made me feel, so I really didn’t expect her to be able to understand it at the level that I’d mean it if I offered her just words. Instead, I waited until she was squirming and becoming noticeably nervous before I released her throat, and she sucked in a giant breath.
“Do I make you feel like the rush that comes with that first gasp of air?” I asked.
She slowly nodded her head. “Yeah.”
“That’s how you know, baby.”
I slipped my hand around the back of her neck to pull her mouth down to mine. She took her time with me after that, and I let her. I grabbed her hips one time, planning to roll her to take control of it myself but when she grabbed both my hands and held them against the mattress up by my head, I let her do that too.
Go figure.
I’d spent half the fucking day thinking about how we weren’t the kind of couple who made love just for every move that she made in this moment to turn me into a liar. And I didn’t have it in me to undo it. She was fucking powerful when she was fueled by emotion. Everything she did was so intentional, everywhere she touched set my skin on fire. Everything she did screamed the words that she still hadn’t been able to force herself to say.
* * *
Distant screams pulled me out of sleep, and then I realized that my body was being dragged across the floor. My brain reminded me that I was in that fucking concrete box and it was Bryson throwing me around while my daughter’s cries about a spider haunted my unconscious moments from another lifetime. The full weight of his body was on mine the next second so I started to fight back. The sound of Memphis’ voice broke through to my mind. She sounded like she was crying. She was screaming for me. Begging, even. It sparked something truly demonic inside me because if she was begging, it was because she was in trouble and desperately needed my help. The harder that I focused on what her voice was trying to say, the more I realized that she was begging me to stop. And I’d never been more confused by a single moment in my life.
When my vision cleared, fucking Utah came into focus first. Memphis was directly behind him. She had a white knuckled hold on his shoulder while she hid there with him between us.
“Don’t hurt him, Utah,” she whispered, and the second that our eyes locked, she disappeared. I was on my back, he was sitting directly on top of me, our arms were tangled around each other’s but my eyes went back to searching for Memphis before I spent any more time being concerned about this kid. Memphis was in the corner of the bedroom. She was trying to pull Trista from the floor, where Triss was cowered with her hands over her face like she’d been crying.
I looked back at Utah, fully prepared to pummel this kid until he was nothing more than pulp so I could get to the girls across the room. I didn’t end up having to say or do anything, when he and I had stared at each other for a long few seconds, he simply nodded his head before he released my arms and stood to get off my body. He even held his hand out to drag my ass up to my feet, just to add to my state of fucking confusion. I stared back at him once I was upright in front of him, but I tried to shake my head clear. I took a single step toward the girls, but Memphis was shaking her head at Utah, and he immediately swung an arm across my chest to keep me from moving. Memphis walked Trista out of the room with her arm around her shoulders while Trista continued to cry. She didn’t look at me. Not even a glance in my direction. Out of an unpleasant habit, I looked down at my hands in panic. I didn’t see any blood. They didn’t hurt like I’d spent the last few minutes punching someone.
“What’d I do?” I asked that fucking punk, because he was the only one left in here. When he only shook his head, I immediately went for the door to find the girls. Utah grabbed my arm before I made it anywhere.
“Come on, man. Just give her the rest of the night,” he said. “Let her be alone right now. She needs it. Looks like you need it.”
“Did I hurt her?”
“She was screaming. And not like she was enjoying it, New Jersey. That’s why we came in here. She was quiet by the time I actually got to you. Your hands were around her neck.”
I looked down at my hands again, and nearly threw up everywhere.
“I didn’t mean to —. I didn’t even know —.”
I couldn’t even figure out what to say to this kid.
Fuck, I couldn’t even figure out why he was still in this room with me.
“Can you tell her —?”
“She knows,” he interrupted. “If even I know that you wouldn’t intentionally hurt her, she knows it too.”
I stopped trying to figure out why my lungs had shriveled up to nothing and looked at this kid instead, painfully confused by this weird moment of camaraderie with someone I’d spent the last few days despising.
“We’ve all got our shit, New Jersey. Just — just own it. Fuck it up before it fucks you up. You know? Don’t let it ruin her life too. Figure it out for yourself so you’re not the next thing that she has to recover from.”
I couldn’t even begin to imagine how I was supposed to respond to that.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
