My voice shakes. “How can you fucking look me in my eyes and tell me you love me but keep this from me?”
“Don’t you fucking dare,” he warns me as he reaches in and grips my neck, yanking me closer into him as he structures the timbre of his voice to indicate eager aggression and dark passion.
“Don’t you dare question how much I love you, Olivia. I love you so much that seeing you in hisarms that night and watching him taking care of you, it fucking broke me. I didn’t care that you were out of it. I didn’t fucking care. And even when I found out you might have not even remembered it, I still didn’t fucking care. I watched you. You looked into his eyes. You said his fucking name. And then you kissed him. You let me fuck you, let me claim your body.Iwas supposed to be your firstandlast, Olivia, and then you kissed him. Not once, but twice.”
He lowers his lips to mine.
"I love you so much that I kept your secret for you, because you have no one else in your fucking corner. Because I swore to protect you, even if it fucking killed me. And let me tell you, Olivia. It killed me."
I feel the cracks in my heart start to quake, runningdeeper and deeper. I swear I hear Trace’s voice crack too. I can hear his emotion drip from his voice, the way he feels wrecked from what I did to him. From what he lost that weekend, too. I can feel it and I hate it. I want to make it go away. I want to strip him of his pain and fix it. But it might be too late.
He loosens his grip on my neck and lets his touch turn tender as he softens the tone of his voice “It's because I love you, that I couldn't stay, Livie. You have to know that I was just trying to protect you."
Trace runs his finger along the edge of my jaw.
“I don’t understand,” I whisper.
“I just…” he leans down to press a kiss to my forehead. “I just need you to remember, baby. I can’t help you unless you save yourself.”
"I'm sorry, Trace. I never meant to break your heart. I never wanted anyone else but you, you have to believe me." He lowers his forehead to mine, and I notice the faint tear that trembles in his eye. "Whatever else I did, I'm sorry," I add, letting my voice fade.
I’m inundated with the havoc of his words and his actions. The aggression in his words when he spoke to me before and the sincerity in his demeanor now. Clearly, there’s more to this story. There’s obviously something else that he wants to tell me, but yet, he’s still refusing. Every emotion shifts between us. We've been through it all. And maybe we can come out stronger for it. Maybe this is how we were always meant to be. A brutal passion so intense that it bonds us together, stronger and tighter than ever. Or maybe it'll be the very thing that causes us to implode.
I wrap my arms around him, needing this moment to last for as long as it can. This is all I've ever wanted. For him to come back and claim me. No matter how he did, it's what I craved more than I needed my own air.
And then a reminder invades my mind.
YOU MUST SAVE YOURSELF
His tattoo.
I press my palm against his chest, touching his bare skin. He’s so fucking smooth and I tremble as I slide my way down slowly. I trace every hard ridge of his body before gliding over to his rib cage where I know that tattoo is located. His breathing deepens and chills ignite across my body. He likes my hands on him; that’s one thing I’ve noticed. It drives him wild and it fills me with pride.
I might now know the true meaning of his words. Both spoken between us and written on his skin.Maybe he’s known that it would come to this, me wanting to remember what happened that night. But if he knows what I’m missing, that means he must have seen what had happened. That thought alone scares the hell out of me. What does he know that I don’t, and then I’m reminded…
“The notes,” I whisper, leaning down to remove them from my boots.
“What?” he asks, as I unravel the pieces of paper.
“Do you know where my phone is?” I ask, looking around as if I can even see in the dark to begin with. But I know I had to have lost it here somewhere, sometime between getting pulled in from the mirror maze and fucked into a frenzy.
Trace turns around and picks it up off the floor, finding it without issue before handing it to me. I turn on the flashlight and hold the light over the notes.
“Someone left these for me.” I say, holding them out for him to see. He leans in close. “This one,” I point to the most recent one, "Alli left for me right before leaving the cabin. That's when I found Broden and you,” I say, looking up at him to see his reaction. But he has none.
“This one," I move the other note in front, "I found in my bedside drawer yesterday before we went out to the bonfire.” Trace grabs both notes from me and holds them side by side, looking between them.
“They’re the same exact handwriting,” he says, noticing what I had.
I let the silence fall between us for a moment as he analyzes them further. But really, there’s not much to see other than the obvious.
“Does Alli spell her name with an E?” he asks and I look at him, puzzled. I shine the light over the note once more as he holds it out for me, and sure enough . . .Alliis spelled with an E at the end. Something I must have missed the first time reading it.
“No, she doesn’t,” I say. “How the hell did you even know that?”
“You forget that I’ve been stalking you for years, little reckless. I notice a lot of things,” he states and I can’t do anything more than shrug my shoulders, not really sure what to do with that information.
“Well, I don’t know what she claims to know or why she would even write that note to begin with. But before I found the second note, I remembered something. A memory from that night. It was Seren and Alli arguing outside, but Trace…” I pause for a beat to make sure he’s looking at me. “Alli told me she didn’t go to the Pines that weekend, so either my mind is playing tricks on me or she’s lying.”
