Guilt she shouldn’t have about the situation kept her from following him inside the house as she, instead, went to pick up his umbrella and shut his car door while taking time to regroup as the rain ceased like it could tell she had weathered enough storms since the night prior. Her hand clinched the thin gold in her palm as she reminded herself of the reason she’d come with him, and that didn’t include letting him fuck with her mental or flip the script to where she second guessed whether her thirst for retribution was superfluous.
She drilled it in her head to not accept Relic’s excuses since it would negate her ill emotions that’d festered since finding out what he’d done. Kennedy struggled to ignore the fact that, in a deluded, twisted way; Relic cared about her to an extent. It was either that, or he’d mastered the art of convincing her that he did.
As soon as she trudged her drenched frame over the threshold into his home, Relic lifted his head and stared at her from where he sat on his stairs in his boxer briefs with his fingers curled around the neck of a liquor bottle. It was the first thing he’d grabbed after stripping down. The sigh Kennedy expelled was loud as he nursed straight from the bottle while she peered around, locating his car keys in the pile of clothes near her feet to lock his vehicle before doing the same to his front door.
“Take off your clothes, and don’t track water over my floor.” His gravelly voice summoned her eyes before they rolled after seeing him chug straight from the bottle again. He hissed from the heat permeating his chest and warned her, “If you tell my folks that I choked you, I have camera footage to prove you hit me first.”
“Ok, tattletale. I didn’t plan on telling anyone shit, but when did you start giving a damn about what your family thinks of what you do?”
She squinted in feigned confusion, and his sharp jaw tremored before he took another sip of liquor, hoping it’d help him overlook the prints on her neck or her bloodshot eyes. His gut lurched, knowing he’d caused both ailments. Relic observed the rest of her for signs of his past tainting his present while she peeled off her soaked clothes before staring at him with the most conflicting gaze.
“I apologize,” she muttered, swallowing her pride for the part she felt blame in. “I had no right to put my hands on you. Koda always told me that if I hit a nigga, I’d better be prepared to get hit the hell back.”
“Trust, what I did was far from hitting you back.”
“Well, you could’ve.”
Relic flared his nostrils as he envisioned the tempting option she’d dangled in his face. He peered off, pensive in thought, before glancing at her with somber eyes.
“I told you, I don’t want to hurt you, Kennedy.”
She snorted a laugh. “Too late for that.”
His brows furrowed before he examined the burns on her otherwise perfect skin and then looked elsewhere. Her presence fucked with his mental more than her skeleton in his closet ever could.
“It wasn’t intentional.” He didn’t look at her gorgeous face, but he pictured it screwing up as he justified, “If I did anything to hurt you, it wasn’t on purpose. It wasn’t a part of the plan.”
“Then, why’d you do it, Relic? Better yet, why didn’t you keep it real with me from the start?”
Her questions went beyond the scope of what’d gone down last night, and she hoped Relic would cop to it. She prayed he’d admit to it and seal their ending, releasing her from an emotionally charged game that she’d sunken too far into. If Relic kept it real with her about giving the word to start the fire that’d altered her life, she’d have no reason to feed her cravings for revenge. Kennedy could bow out gracefully and never look back if he’d just fucking fess up to his actions.
The crack in her voice constricted Relic’s throat before he studied the anguish swirling behind her teary eyes she refused to let leak. Kennedy’s hard exterior she wore daily was fracturing right before him, and he didn’t know what to make of it.
Emotions he’d sworn he didn’t possess and couldn’t give her floated to the surface, but he drowned them with a swallow of his vice. He needed to regain control of their power struggle because it’d shifted to her possession and had been there longer than he cared to admit.
“I did it because I let my past and trauma control me. Because trauma ruined me, so I ruin others.” He repeated her explanation for his actions before offering, “Secret for a secret?”
The ill-timed request caught Kennedy off guard, and she bit her lip in contemplation before stomping over to him, snatching the bottle out of his hand for a hefty swig.
“Did Zeke used to hit you?”
Relic didn’t waste time with his interrogation, and her stomach flipped at hearing a name she’d avoided for years but fucked up and blurted in the heat of their argument. It didn’t come as a surprise to her that Relic caught it.
She wiped an arm across her mouth before admitting, “I hit him mostly. I had a temper, and Zeke pissed me off a lot.”
“So, that’s the reason you didn’t trip about the rumors or haven’t run for the hills when I didn’t even expect you to come inside.”
“Yet you left the door open.”
“Hoping and expecting are two different things. Stop deflecting.”
“What the hell else do you want me to say, Relic! We used to go at it, but I’m older now, and I’ve done good at keeping my temper controlled. I let it get the better of me tonight, and putting my hands on you was inexcusable, so I apologized. I didn’t leave because, among other things, I am not afraid of you. Now, why didn’t you hit me back?”
The former of her answer,among other things, sent his mind into overdrive. He stared in her eyes, trying to read a woman who proved to him each time, she was a fireball of beautiful fucking chaos.
“I like your face too much to fuck it up, but it sounds like you would’ve preferred it. Did you mean it?” He took the bottle back as her brows furrowed from lack of clarity. “Did you mean the apology?”
“Yes. Do you believe I meant it?”
