I get into the car, pulling my seatbelt on. “Adam, I?—”
“Shut the fuck up, Micah,” he snarls. “I don’t want to hear anything from you. Your mouth is obviously only good for one thing, and that’s not talking.” He thumps his hand hard against the dashboard, making me flinch, before he starts up the car. “I can’t…” He laughs, peeling out of the parking lot with all of the arrogance of someone who knows he won’t get into trouble for reckless driving.
“You told me to get close to him!” I wail, feeling like a small child all over again as I hug my arms against my chest. “You told me to get him to trust me. You said to do it no matter what! You gave me a thumbs up when Ilya was coming on to me!”
“You knew I didn’t mean letting him shove his tongue down your throat,” Adam says, slamming his foot on the brake as he narrowly avoids running into another car. “Or did you think you could get around this, get aroundme? You’re so damn lucky I love you.”
His words strike like lethal blows, and I can’t even absorb them as quickly as they land. Some small part of me whispers that if he really loved me, he wouldn’t treat me like this.
Then again, I brought this on myself.
I always do.
“Why’d you have to try to humiliate me, huh?” he asks, directing a scathing look in my direction even as he merges onto the highway. He pounds his hands against the steering wheel. “Fuck!”
“You told me to do it,” I whisper again, clinging to my seatbelt as tears start to spill down my cheeks.
“Yeah, and you did it by acting like a fucking whore. Do you know how much of a laughingstock this would make me if it got out?” Adam demands. “But it won’t. Because you aren’t going to tell a fucking soul.”
“I won’t. I won’t say anything!” I tell him around a small sob.
I’ve never even said anything about us dating. I know he doesn’t want anyone at work to know he’s gay, let alone that I exist at all.
“Oh, stop crying,” he says with that same disgusted tone he always takes with me when I’m like this, like I’m so pathetic that he can’t even stand to be in the same vicinity as me.
What he’ll do, exactly, I have no idea.
But I know I’m going to regret every choice I’ve ever made by the time the sun comes up.
I rest my head against the car’s window, closing my eyes.
Ilya had looked so pissed off, and I think that if Adam hadn’t been a cop, blows might’ve been exchanged. It doesn’t make sense. Ilya doesn’t know anything about me. Why would he have risked anything overme, someone he’d only just met?
It’s laughable.
Even Adam wouldn’t risk anything for me, and we’ve been together since…
Since he rescued me from the last person who liked to see me suffer.
Since he got me out of my drug dealing charges.
I shudder. I’d take all the beatings in the world if it meant avoiding seeing the source of my nightmares.
I wonder what nightmares someone like Ilya might have. I wonder, too, if he’d been trying to escape them when he’d come to that little bar.
Because if what Adam said is true, he probably has a lot of them.
I wouldn’t have expected a gangster to kiss so gently.
But it’s stupid to think about his kisses.
It’s not like I’m ever going to see him again.
THREE
MICAH
I don’t want to get out of the car.
