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I love you.
They were the three most terrifying words he could think of Leah saying. Because that meant there was an expectation to give more than he could.
He gritted his teeth. Not more than he could, more than he wanted to.
He paced the hotel room, the one he’d got after leaving the penthouse, replaying those last moments with her. Wearing his shirt, the hem barely touching the top of her thighs. Her cheeks streaked with tears, her eyes filled with the kind of pain and misery he saw in his nightmares.
It would have been so easy to lie. To keep taking from her. To preserve his relationship, not just with her but with her father, the only good influence in his life when he’d been a teenager.
He’d been faced with this in the past. That girl who looked at him with such trust. A beautiful sixteen-year-old who was, yes, round, and a little frizzy, but, he knew, had the potential to become his entire world.
He hadn’t even let himself complete the thought then. Hadn’t let himself admit how much she could mean to him. Instead, he’d turned his attention somewhere else. Somewhere safer. Yes, it would have been easy to keep her. Letting her go, keeping her from being hurt by the monster, that had been the hard thing. The right thing. Because he couldn’t give her what she needed. He didn’t have it in him. The only thing he had in him was the potential to destroy her.
Liar.
Her words rang in his ears. Scared. Coward.
She had bared herself to him, given him everything. And still he hid.
You aren’t afraid of what will get out, you’re afraid of what will get in.
And then he let himself remember, really remember, the night at his father’s house. That last night there. The terror of the girl. His own fear. The way the drug had twisted his thoughts, the way he’d been so sick after. The horror. The stark realization of what his father did. Of what he could become. Of the fact that there was good and evil in the world, and if he didn’t do something soon he would be on the side of evil.
In one night, his world had been torn to pieces. Savaged.
He’d looked outside of himself, outside of the reality he’d been presented, and he saw all the pain, all the abuse, all of the ways a person could be destroyed, corrupted and perverted and he shut it all down.
Every desire. Every emotion. For fear he would have the wrong one.
For fear all of that horror, all of that pain, would get him.
He’d tried to get rid of the feeling. Had tried by taking down his father’s organization, but it hadn’t worked. He’d saved the damn world and he hadn’t been able to save himself.
And so he’d built walls, shoved it all down deep, turned it all off. And walked away.
And then came Leah. She’d torn down the walls with her hands tied behind her back, quite literally. And he didn’t like it. It burned. It felt like his skin had been stripped off. Like old wounds had been reopened, scars carved away, leaving all of his tender flesh exposed.
He stalked to the bar and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. Expensive. High quality. But that didn’t matter. As long as it would take away his pain, for a moment. Just a moment.
He thought back to his wedding day, about how tempted he’d been to lose himself then, tempted to cover the disaster in a haze.
But he hadn’t.
He stood for a moment, regarding the bottle. Then he took a glass out from beneath the bar and filled it.
He wouldn’t find answers in the bottom of a glass of whiskey. He wouldn’t find hope or salvation there. He wouldn’t even find a meaningful salve for his pain.
But maybe, just maybe, he would find rock bottom. At least if he landed there, the only way would be up.
He smiled as he raised the glass to his lips.
* * *
There wasn’t enough candy in the world to make her day any sweeter. And seeing those stupid cherry buttons, the kind Ajax had eaten off her skin, just made her want to cry all over again. And if not cry, throw things and sit in the corner with a bar of chocolate. Or twenty.
She hated this. She hated being away from him. She hated how badly he’d hurt her. She hated that, for one blinding moment in time she’d nearly had everything, and now it was gone.
She was an idiot. She should have shut up and kept her marriage. She should have kept sleeping with him every night and said I love you over and over again in her head as she fell asleep. She shouldn’t have said anything to him.
No, she should have. Leah started opening boxes of candy and loading the big glass display jars in the window. As long as she was in New York she was going to spend some time in her flagship store. Working there was therapeutic. Working with candy was therapeutic. As was eating it.
