“Was that your plan, then? Were you hoping your little games would make me confess? Or were you hoping I’d come clean to your brother, and he would deal with it for you? Everything seemed to center around him, so was that what you wanted? You wanted Cole to deal with the problem so that you didn’t have to, and instead of telling him yourself, you decided to have a little fun with me in the process, playing with my feelings for you.”
I roll my eyes and scoff. “Again, with my freaking brother. Why is he all you and everyone else care about? If that was what I wanted, I would have told him myself. YouknowI told him that I was seeing someone. Why would I have done that if I was doing what you seem to think I was doing? Your logic makes no fucking sense.”
“I don’t know, Gracie,” he says, his voice eerily quiet as his body seems frozen. “I want to believe that isn’t what you wanted, but I have no idea who you are right now. I may have lied to youthroughout, but that was only because I wanted you so much, whereas you did it to hurt me.”
“I did,” I admit. “But then my feelings changed, and it became more me trying to get you to tell me the truth yourself than anything else. I don’t want to hurt you, Noah, but you must see that you hurt me, and you deserved everything I did. I was willing to forgive you if you came clean to me yourself, but you didn’t. Not until you kidnapped me and promised to keep me here until I came around.”
“You didn’t do it to hurt me? You want to be with me?”
I sigh, hating that this is what we’ve become, but unwilling to lie. “I want you to acknowledge how fucked up this all is, and how you’re in the wrong. That being said, I never told you that I don’t want you, Noah. I do, but a relationship between us won’t work if we can’t trust each other.”
His expression shutters, making him completely unrecognizable as he stares at me. Panic slices through me the longer he stays like that, and I know he's having an internal debate with himself.
Something washes over his face momentarily before it disappears in the same second, but I know what I saw.
Pain.
I have no idea what’s going on in his head right now, but I do know that no matter how much I want to hate him in this moment, no matter how angry or enraged I am, I don’t actually want to hurt him.
He seems to snap out of it, and I almost sigh in relief when he approaches me, but rather than releasing me from the bed like I hoped he would, he quickly covers me with a blanket instead before walking to the other side of the room.
I watch as he grabs his phone from the dresser, my eyes widening as he holds it up to take a picture of me, my mouth dropping open in surprise.
What the hell is he doing?
“See, the thing is, Gracie… I don’t believe you. I want to. Fuck, I really, really want to. But I’m going to need you to prove it to me.”
He starts backing towards the door and I call out his name.
He ignores me, not bothering to even look in my direction, his attention fixated on his phone.
“Noah! What are you going to do?” I shout, but he just backs into the hallway before looking up, his eyes locking with mine.
There’s something dark swirling behind his eyes, and I don’t think I’m going to like whatever it is he has planned.
“We need to talk about this,” I call out, but he grabs the door and slams it shut, leaving me tied to the bed and alone once more.
FORTY-EIGHT
NOAH
Gracie’s soft breaths are the only sounds in the house, and I watch as she sleeps peacefully in the bed.
She’s such a deep sleeper that she didn’t even wake when I uncuffed her from the bed and dressed her in a pair of shorts and one of my shirts.
I wouldn’t want our visitor to see her naked, after all.
I want to believe her words, but there’s a part of me that can’t quite comprehend them.
I know that I don’t deserve her, and it’s fucking with my head.
She flat out told me that she still wanted me even after all of the lies, and I’d be a hypocrite to hold what she did against her, but there’s a small voice in the back of my mind telling me that she’s still lying.
There’s something broken within me, some deep-seated part of me that knows she deserves so much more than me and that she’ll leave eventually.
The only people who’ve ever stuck around are the guys and her, but that’s because I’ve only ever shown them a single part of myself.
No one has ever seen me in my entirety.
