“No. Next time I see him, it’ll be to apologize, thank him for stopping me, and give him this.” He pulled open the center console, and there sat my grandfather’s Patek Philippe watch.
I snatched it up. “I’ll give it to him. You can’t be trusted.”
“That’s fair,” Tyler said, and I glanced over to see him looking resigned.
A few minutes later, we pulled into a dusty parking lot. Of course the hotel was a tiny roadside place, but that’s what I got for telling him to book the closest thing he could find. At least it was clean inside, and looked like it’d had a somewhat recent renovation—no shag carpeting or roaches in sight. The only problem was that there was only one bed.
I shook my head. No, actually, it wasn’t. Tyler could sleep on the fucking floor. There, problem solved.
I paced to the bathroom and turned on the shower, dropping the clothes we’d grabbed at a local Walmart on the counter. Steam filled the room as I stripped out of my ruined dress. I turned, saw a zombie in the mirror, and gave myself a jumpscare.
Oh, Jesus, it was me. I looked like shit. Pale, gaunt, covered in scratches and bruises, bags under my bloodshot eyes.
A knock sounded from the door, and I was grateful I’d locked it.
“Do you need help with anything?” Tyler asked.
I opened my mouth to tell him to go fuck himself, but thought better of it. Let him have a taste of his own silent treatment instead.
The shower was calling my name, and I threw back the curtain and stepped into it, sighing when the heat hit me. The only thing better than taking your bra off at the end of a long day was a hot shower when you were dirty and exhausted. I closed my eyes and sank to the floor, letting the water run over me. Everything hurt, not just physically, but also emotionally. The last time I’d been this drained was the day after Runa’s accident.
I closed my eyes, resting my head against the tile. The only saving grace was that I was so tired my brain was starting to turn fuzzy, thoughts slipping away because it required too much effort to hold on to them.
For the next twenty minutes, I was on autopilot, groggily climbing to my feet and washing my hair and body with the cheap hotel products. Drying off. Getting into clean clothes and wrapping the towel around my hair. Plodding back out into the room. Grumbling something unintelligible when Tyler asked if I was okay.
I was in the middle of towel-drying my hair when he reemerged after his shower, his own towel slung low around his waist, hair slicked back, water droplets coursing down over his heavy muscles.
He saw me looking, dropped his gaze, and fell to his knees. I blinked a couple of times to make sure I was really seeing what I thought I was. I’d pulled the blackout curtains shut, and only a single, soft lamp illuminated the room, its light dancing over Tyler’s crouched form.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Whatever you want,” he answered.
I sighed. “Look, it has been a very long, very traumatic day for both of us, and I am begging you to stop with the games. If you’re not ready to talk about what happened, that’s fine. I understand that you probably need time to process or have your existential crisis in peace. Just, please, can we not do whatever this is?”
He stayed where he was. Same position, head down, hands resting on his knees.
“Tyler,” I said, careful to keep the rage out of my voice because this man just found out that his dead mother had told him a massive lie that effectively set him down a dark path that could have endedverybadly if my little brother hadn’t called the cops and potentially saved all our asses from whatever nuclear-level catastrophe Tyler might have unleashed.
“This isn’t a game,” he said. “I’ve done nothing but bully and threaten you. I won’t apologize again, because I don’t think you should forgive me. But I want to offer myself up for punishment instead.”
“Punishment.”
It wasn’t a question, but he nodded. “Whatever you think I deserve, I’ll accept.”
This fucking asshole. Hadn’t he messed with me enough?
I put my hands on my hips and turned fully toward him. “So if I told you I wanted you to kiss the floor, you’d—oh my god, no! Don’t actually kiss that, ew, are you serious?”
He froze with his mouth an inch away from the carpet, leaning forward like a knight paying homage—which, I mean, yes, thank you, finally the kind of recognition I deserved.
“Where is this coming from?” I asked.
He stayed right where he was while he answered, muscles starting to pop from the strain of holding himself in place. “All this time, I’ve been pushing you, intentionally pissing you off because Ididwant any reaction I could get. Good, or bad. But mostly, I think I wanted bad. I wanted you to be mean to me because it made it easier to lie to myself, made it easier to convince myself that I hated you when the truth is, I think I’ve been obsessed with you since the moment we met.”
I didn’t say anything to that, was too mesmerized by the fact that he wasstillholding himself in place, right where I’d told him to stop. Maybe I should have relented and ordered him up, but I wanted to test this, see how serious he was, see how long he could last. Also? Ididwant him to suffer.
I started counting seconds in my head.
