“There was someone else. After you.”
He shifts on his feet, his torso rubbing against mine, his chest scraping against mine too.
I’m surrounded by him. Surrounded and trapped and at his mercy.
“What someone else?” he growls.
“A guy that I met.”
“Where?”
“At the bar.”
“The shitty bar that you go to.”
“Y-yes. Toby.”
He breathes out sharply at the name, his chest contracting, his stomach hollowing out. As if in revulsion. In protest.
“What about Toby?”
I’m still fisting his shirt at the hips but now I open my palms and splay them over his hard muscles. I try to absorb all his anger, his violence in my skin.
Because I know he’s going to get even angrier. When I tell him everything.
“I met him one night. Back when I started at St. Mary’s. Back then everything was… difficult. Everything hurt. Everything made me feel lonely and… You… I was still so mad at you. My anger was so fresh and…”
“And?”
God, I know this will hurt him.
I know it.
I know how possessive he can be. How dominating and authoritative. Even when he has no right to be any of those things with me.
Not anymore.
But I remind myself that this is the only way.
“And I wanted to forget you. I wanted to forget everything about you. I wanted to forget that I ever met you. That I fell in love with you. So I…”
His biceps are vibrating now.
I can feel them disturbing the still air. Still and somehow charged too.
Smelling of wildflowers and woods and geranium and sugar. And lust.
Smelling of us and our desire.
“You what?” he bites out, his eyes blazing with anger.
His features are so tight that I raise my hand and cradle his jaw, his rough, stubbled jaw, as I hurt him with my words. “I… He was nice to me. And he had these laughing brown eyes and he was… kind. He was kind, Reed.” I press my fingertips on his ticking jaw. “He was kind to me. He didn’t make me angry like you do. And he didn’t make me mad or blush or… or bad. Like you do. He didn’t…”
He didn’t do anything for me, to be honest.
He was nice and he asked me why I looked so sad. Why my eyes were puffy and why my lips looked like they never smiled. He asked me why I looked like a girl who was lost.
I never would’ve noticed him if not for Poe.
