She shrugged. “I just wasn’t very good at it. I always wanted to help people too, but I’ve never been good with people, either.”
I should’ve said nothing. I should’ve let it drift off like so many other things between us, but I didn’t. “You can’t be serious.”
Her pen stilled. “What do you mean?”
“You light up people’s lives, every day. I watched you. Everyone left happier than they did before they met you.”
Instead of accepting the compliment, she tilted her head. “What about you?”
I didn’t answer right away. I just stared at her: the lines of her face, the way she folded herself in like she was trying to disappear and be seen all at once. She smiled like none of this shit touched her and the weight of everything hadn’t triedto crush her three times already, even though I knew it was breaking her more and more every second.
And I thought about the pigeon in the bathtub. Broken-winged and waiting, probably scared, probably already aware that it was doomed. But she’d done it anyway. Carried it home, held it in her hands, poured herself into something that didn’twantto survive.
That was what she was doing now.
Only this time, it wasn’t a bird. It was me.
“I think I want things I shouldn’t want,” I said. My voice came out low. “And you make it harder to pretend I don’t.”
There it was: hung between us tight and fragile. One wrong move and it would snap.
She didn’t say anything, but I could feel her watching me like I was some wounded thing she didn’t know how to hold. I couldn’t sit in it. I stood up too fast and grabbed my jacket off the chair.
“I’m gonna check the perimeter.”
I didn’t look at her when I said it, I couldn’t. I just walked out into the rain, let it hit me, tried to let it wash the scent of her off my skin, to cleanse me of the memory of her voice, her eyes, her belief in things that didn’t deserve redemption. Because if I stayed in that room another second, I would’ve told her everything.
And if I told her everything… about how I felt about her, the lengths to which I was willing to go, about the girl I had killed in the alleyway, the weight in my chest, all the blood on my hands… she might finally stop trying to salvage me, stop trying to win me over.
I couldn’t survive that.
Chapter twenty-seven
Eden
“Restraint”
Thedoorhadshutbehind him harder than it needed to, with unnecessary force. The sound echoed in the room, reverberating in the hollow space he left behind. I stared at the door like he’d come back a few seconds later, like he didn’t just say something so raw that it still hung in the air like smoke.
But he didn’t come back. I sat in the chair where he’d been working earlier, staring at the folder he’d left open. I didn’t touch it, but I wanted to know what he was carrying. There were photos of men, notes in handwriting that were too precise to be careless. So he was planning something, and I knew better than to ask what. I looked from the napkin in my hand, to the rain-slick world outside, then back at the empty motel bed.
Maybe I was stupid, doing what I always did: holding broken things too tightly, thinking I could love them into healing. Halo didn’t need love, though, not the easy kind. He needed someone who could stay, someone who wouldn’t look away when it got dark.
God help me, I was trying to be that person for him. Even when he ran and closed the door like he’d rather drown outsidethan admit what he was feeling. I didn’t go after him; I had learned that you couldn’t chase someone like him. I could only wait and be here when he came back.
Ten minutes passed, maybe fifteen, and then I heard the sound of his wet footsteps outside, followed by the soft protest of the door opening.
He came in and went straight to the bathroom to retrieve a towel, drying his hair with a rough tousle. I didn’t move from my place in the chair, expecting him to say that I shouldn’t be looking at his notes, but he didn’t. He just moved over to the window, leaning against it and staring out like a stupidly handsome gargoyle. He acted like if he looked away for just a moment, something would sneak past. I wondered if he was more concerned about something getting in or me getting out. I stood and approached him, trying to keep my bare feet quiet on the carpeted floor. At my first step, Halo turned his face just enough to look at me with a sidelong glance.
“What?” he asked, voice gruff.
I swallowed back the fear I had, that trepidation. Not fear of him hurting me, it was another kind of fear. The kind that came from caring too much about someone who might not let you. Because I was afraid he would run again.
I couldn’t stay in this standoff anymore, not after the way he’d looked at me before he left. It felt like he was handing me pieces of himself, even if he didn’t know it. I knew there was some part of him that cared about me; there had to be after what he said and the way he looked at me.
“What are you afraid of?” I asked.
I took a leap of faith, taking a step forward and turning him towards me. He resisted at first, the gentle tug of my hand on his shoulder no more than an inconvenience. He didn’t have to turn, but he eventually did.
