“Let me go—“
“Look at me,” he said, his grip increasing on my arms. I wrestled again and again, desperate to be free of the truth staring back at me.
“Let me go!”
“Fuck, Chloe, look at me!”
I choked on a sob as I finally met his agony-filled gaze, and my struggling waned.
“I don’t mean do you just care for him,” he said, his voice softer. “I mean, do you love him as you could love me?”
My shoulders limped, and my heart plummeted into my stomach. Tears spilled out of the corners of my eyes as I struggled to catch my next breath.
“Gavin, don’t—“
He yanked me fully into his arms, holding my waist and calming my writhing as his thumb swept across my cheek.
“Tell me to walk away.”
My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth; my jaw clenched shut.
“Dammit, Chloe, tell me,” he practically begged, emotion threading his voice. “Tell me I’m fucking crazy, that I’m losing my mind. Tell me that this, you and me, everything we feel when we’re together, isn’t worth the vacant days. Tell me this isn’t worth the pain I feel without you. Tell me these years were as agonizing for you as they were for me, but that while every day without you felt like forever, that this… here and now… this is everything.”
My knees almost gave way. I couldn’t see from the tears streaming down my face. Every word was an arrow into my heart, shredding and bleeding the muscle until there was nothing left.
How fucking dare he—how fucking darehe make me feel this way?
“Tell me, Chloe,” he almost whimpered, and I could see the tears in his eyes, pleading for me to put him out of his misery. “Break my heart,” he whispered. “Completely this time.”
I couldn’t do this.
“I have to go home,” I wept, wrenching out of his grasp.
“Chloe—“
“Don’t touch me,” I snapped as I took a few steps away. “I have to…”
I ran away from him as fast as my Converse would allow.
Away from the pain. Away from the fear. Away from reality.
I couldn’t feel my body as the tears continued to fall.
CHAPTER TWENTY - GAVIN
A PATH WAS wearing on my rug from the pacing I’d been doing since my fight with Chloe.
I kept opening my phone to her text screen and then closing it. I didn’t know what to say or where to even begin explaining for my outburst.
Fucking Styx.
I was in agony over hearing what she’d said had been her dream wedding and the person she felt in her dreams. Her words had sparked a memory in the very back of my mind—me sitting in complete darkness, holding Chloe against me, chatting in the middle of the night about secrets and dreams that we’d told no one else. I had seen her standing on that hill in the black dress where her family had left her once—given her up for the monster the oracle had said she was destined to marry.
I was that monster, and she was my wife.
My Psyche.
It had all clicked. The feeling of her, the sound of her laugh, her smell, her taste… I remembered it. And while I may not have remembered what happened when I lost her, I remembered small moments after the trials, when we were finally together, finallyhappy. Fuck, I had wanted to kiss her right then—scoop her into my arms and scream it from the top of my lungs. I could have run off with her and told her everything, demanded to the gods that they restore whatever memory had been taken from us both.
