Her eyes flash up to mine, sharp and miserable. “You don’t get to order me around anymore,” she says, and it’s the closest she’s come to sounding like herself. Exactly what I intended. “Last night was—” She cuts it off, throat working. “It’s over.”
I hold her gaze and let the silence stretch until her breathing evens out a fraction. “Over doesn’t mean erased,” I say calmly. “If you want to pretend it didn’t happen, there will be consequences.”
Her chin lifts, stubborn even while her eyes shine. “Stop talking like you know me,” she snaps. “You don’t. You just—” She breaks off, swallowing hard. The next words come out almost too quiet to hear. “You bought one night.”
“You sold one night,” I say, turning it around on her.
She flinches.
“The difference is that I knew what I was getting myself into.” I don’t bother to soften it. “You feel like this because you weren’t prepared for what happened last night, and you’ve fought me every step of the way since.”
“I’m fine,” she says, and her breath hitches at the end. “I don’t have time for whatever this is.”
“’Whatever this is’ is vital.” I lean back in my chair, watching her try to hold it together… and failing miserably. “You were affected physically and mentally. Physically, you’ll recover quickly. Mentally will take more time. It takes time when everything you thought you knew has chang—”
Her eyes flash, wet and furious, and she snatches the fork like she wants to stab something with it. “Don’t,” she says, voice breaking on the single syllable. “Don’t say that. I did what I had to do. For my dad. That’s it.”
“And the longer you deny it,” I continue calmly, “the longer it’s going to take to recover.”
“Don’t act like you care,” she spits out. “You don’t get to sit there and—” Her voice cracks, and she hates it. I see it in the way she swallows hard and looks away. “This isn’t normal.Youaren’t normal.”
I ignore the pain those words bring—memories of those words being thrown at me when I was younger and confused. Confused about my own needs and urges. It’s been a long time since I felt like that, but instead of letting her words anger me and hurt me, I use them to remind me of what it was like to be in her place.
“You want me to be a monster so you can hate me. You want to blame me for all of this, Erica,” I tell her. “But the truth is,if you didn’t want what happened last night, it wouldn’t have happened.”
She’s shaking her head. “You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not,” I say firmly. “When I walked into this room yesterday, I intended to put you in a car and send you home.”
“Why didn’t you?” she cries out, furiously.
“Because you didn’t want me to.” I keep my voice calm against her broken one. “Everything I did was in reaction to you.”
Erica presses her hands to her ears, her head still shaking as tears flow out of her eyes.
“Stop,” she chokes out. “Don’t say that. I can’t—” Her chest heaves, and she makes a sound that’s half sob, half furious exhale. “I didn’t want this. I didn’t want you. I didn’t want any of it.”
I stand up and walk around the table. I wrap my hands around her forearms and pull her hands away from her ears, turning her to face me as I crouch next to her.
Her hands tremble in mine. Her eyes are wet and wild; chin lifted in defiance even as her lower lip shakes. I keep my expression neutral. “Breathe. In. Out. I lead her through it and wait until she takes a jagged inhale, then another. “Look at me, Erica.”
She tries to jerk away on instinct, but she’s weak from exhaustion and pain and adrenaline, and it only makes her wince.
I loosen immediately, shifting my grip down to her wrists. “You’re panicking,” I say, each word measured. “You’re trying to rewrite last night into something you can survive without changing your world. I get it.” My thumbs press into her pulse lightly.
“If you want to pretend what happened last night isn’t your new reality, that’s your choice. But it still happened, and you still need to recover. You need to eat. You need to drink. You need your aches and bruises taken care of. And you’re not leaving here until you do. That’smyresponsibility.”
She swallows, and though it takes a minute, she finally nods. But I don’t let go of her wrists just yet.
“And when you’re healed up and back to normal physically, but everything’s still all messed up inside…” I dip my head to catch her eyes again when they drop. “You may not believe me. You don’t even have to like me. But you do have to stop trying to carry it alone. This is not about ‘I told you so.’ When it hits you later—and it will—you come to me. Becausethat’smy responsibility, too, and you’re denying me that. I don’t take it lightly.”
I hold her gaze another beat, then let go of her wrists slowly.
I stand and slide her chair in a fraction with my palm on the backrest, not touching her. I pick up the fork and set it in her hand because she’s still frozen.
“Now eat.”
Chapter Thirteen
