Or maybe I do. Maybe some part of me has become so attuned to his body, that I can register his footsteps in the darkness, feel the displacement of air, and taste the particular quality of silence that follows him everywhere like a shadow.
His hands cradle my face, and he wipes away the tears with the pads of his thumbs.
When I open my eyes, all I see in their winter-gray depths is an impossible softness I didn’t know he was capable of.
“What did you mean,” he says quietly. “when you said you’re not who I think you are?”
His voice vibrates through me, and turns my bones into water.
“It doesn’t matter.” My voice cracks.
“Yes it does,” he says. “You’re crying.”
“People cry sometimes. I cry sometimes.”
“Not like this.”
He leans in close, and I realize that he’s on his knees while I’m hugging mine to my chest.
“Who hurt you, Bella?” His voice is low and heavy.
The words burn me from head to toe, and light me up together with his touch.
“No one hurt me,” I lie. “Not even you.”
That last part is the truth. Or at least I think it is. But it’s not, is it? He’s already hurting me—not physically, but with his mind. It’s just like how he’s already been fucking me in my head before he ever laid a single finger on me.
I take a deep breath, and try to jut my chin out, but I can’t. Not anymore. So, I glance away and mumble.
“You don’t want me. You just want to reclaim and fix the past.”
His brow furrows. But he doesn’t speak. Why won’t he speak? I want him to speak and prove me right.
So, I continue to talk, and this time, I reach for that bitter jealous core inside until the words come pouring out like a flood.
“You kept her clothes,” I whisper through clenched teeth. “You kept them foryears. And no matter how much you claim you don’t want this necklace back, I see the way you stare at it. I’m nothing to you. Just a means to an end. You don’t seemewhen you look at me. You see a way to rewrite an ending.”
“Stop it.”
His hand tightens slightly on my face, and I look back into his eyes. Under the light of the stars, those gray eyes are silver.
“Do you really think so little of me?”
“I think,” I say carefully, “that your heart belongs to Gia. That your heart has always belonged to Gia because you were stolen from her. And as long as your heart belongs to her, it’ll never belong to me. And I shouldn’t want it because itcan’tbelong to me.”
Something moves behind his eyes. “And why shouldn’t my heart belong to you?”
Because I was the reason you lost Gia. I was the reason Luca went to work for the D’Ambrosios.
“Bella…” he insists, and the last barrier around my heart falls away.
“Because I was the reason Gia died in the first place. I set everything in motion.”
“What do you mean you set everything in motion?”
“When I was sixteen.” I close my eyes. “My parents divorced. It was messy and brutal. My mother walked away and never looked back. My father Elio stayed home and drank himself sick every night.”
I trail off. The memory is a scar I stopped touching years ago because touching it made it bleed, but I’m bleeding now anyway.
