“You know it’s not you, don’t you?”
I blinked. Embry was closer, his chest to mine,bothhands on my face. Thumbs on my cheekbones. Fingertips on my scalp while I clutched his wrist. His legs still straddled mine, strong and muscular, even with the faint tremors wracking his entire frame.
He’s scared.
I hated that so fucking much. “You don’t have to explain yourself. Not for me.”
More spiky emotions vibrated through him. “What if I’m doing it forme? What if I don’t understand this as well as I think I do?”
“I don’t know, Em. I’m not clever like you.”
He didn’t like it when I called myself stupid. It made him throw books at me and dissect my fucked-up brain for hours and hours over a half-ounce bag of banging weed.
But he didn’t kill me with intellect and kindness now. Hestaredat me.
At my face and the gruesome scar that traversed it.
At mylips.
Don’t get a boner.
Some days that was a tougher ask than others.
Right now, it was easy, because his next words slayed me all over again. “You know, I was with someone once, when I was fifteen, and it wasn’t like this. I wasn’t scared of it.”
“Boy or girl?”
A tiny smile graced his lips. “Boy. I never told him what I told you that night. He thought I just happened to like fucking on the beach.”
“What happened to you and him?”
Embry’s humour faded. “He realised he didn’t know me at all. How would you feel if the nice kid you’d lost your V card to beat someone to death in front of you?”
“Wouldn’t mind it at all if they had good reason.”
“That why we’re friends, Mateo? Because you understand the darkest parts of me?”
Maybe. I’d never thought too hard about anything save the fact that I’d been head-over-heels in love with him from the seismic moment we’d met. “Take it Romeo didn’t visit you inside then?”
Embry shook his head. “No one did, except my cousin Joe. But I never told him why I did what I did, so he never hid the fact he thought I’d lost my fucking mind.”
“I like Cousin Joe.”
“Really?” Embry let his hands slide from my face. “You don’t like anyone.”
“I like you.”
“Do you trust me?”
Embry said our conversations were non-linear. I’d never understood exactly what he meant, but that question felt out of whack even for him. “Why are you asking me that?”
He bowed his head, taking a moment before he’d meet my gaze.
When he did, his bluer than blue eyes were haunted. “I feel like I dropped a bomb on you that night, and the aftershocks won’t ever end. I hate that you’re careful with me, and I fuckinghatethat a moment I’d been wanting forever was so messed up.”
There they were, the words he hadn’t said in the long months that had passed since that night. Words I hadn’t said either. Why he was saying them today, I had no idea. Did it even matter when the truth was, I hated all those things too? “I don’t want you to regret what we did.”
Embry’s gaze latched onto me. “I don’t.”
