Dylan
Ilean backbefore I kiss her cheek. Those honey eyes of hers blink at my welcome, seeming to lack guile. Good job I know her better than that.
Edera Velenosa. My Poison Ivy.
‘That can’t be all you’ve brought me here to say.’ The soft brogue of her accent gets me in the chest every time.Like home. I haven’t heard from her in over half a year, and what she has said has been nothing but bullshit, so why do her soft words have me feeling like this? Like the blood in my veins is lava, every inch of my skin prickling with heat. What is it I’m feeling—rage? Relief? And why the fuck does she look the same, so soft and sweet? Beautiful and real.
‘Couldn’t you have put it in a letter?’ Her tone is cool, her eyes cold. ‘Paid your lawyer to pass on your best regards?’
Her words dial up my rage; fuck her and her cool attitude. Just fuck her. She doesn’t fool me; she’s running scared and deflecting. Fuck herandfuck this shit, if I’m supposed to care.
Stick with the program, asshole. Don’t let her suck you in again.
‘Maybe I just wanted to see your sweet face.’
I fill the words with anything but sweetness as I step away. I want to be over her. I want to say that, when my gaze drew over her face after so many months parted, I’d felt nothing but distaste.Our parting. What a joke. We no more parted than we were cleaved. There was nothing clean or surgical about her leaving.
She hacked. She sawed. We broke.
Seeing her again, I was sure I’d be able to keep my heart as stone cold as my face. That I was over her. That what I wanted now was only revenge.
Yeah, I want to say those things, but that’d make me as bad as she is. But maybe not nearly as bad as I plan to be.
‘Dylan.’ Her voice is tired like she has a right to be sick of my shit when, clearly, it’s the other way around. ‘Why am I here?’
‘Plain old blackmail?’ Ivy raises a brow like she’s implying it’s a dumb move. It’s not, because she’s standing here, isn’t she? She can try to hold her superior attitude, but she knows I’ve won. And if she hadn’t shown, I would have posted another piece of video porn. ‘You want your divorce, and while I have a fuck tonne to say about that, I want to hear why. I want to hear your side of tawdry, my adulterous little wife.’
She flinches, her eyes sliding away, and I get a sick sense of satisfaction from her pain. I’m currently the kid who captures butterflies just to pull off their wings. I know what I’m doing will slice away her dark-haired prettiness and leave her in pain. And yeah, I’m a sick fuck because I want her to hurt—I want to be the one tocauseher that hurt—and not so I can soothe her or make it better in any way. No, I want to wreck her. Take her apart bit by bit until she understands the truth of what it is to be wiped out. Obliterated.
To her shoes, she says, ‘We’ve been through this already. I can’t take back what I did.’ Her head rises slowly, and in the honey of her eyes lives the truth. It was always there. I was just too fucked up and broken to see it. And though I see now, what I don’t see is why. ‘Dylan, you can’t doubt what you saw.’
I choose not to take her words as a taunt—as I no doubt did before—and see them today for exactly what they are. Acts of evasiveness. Fuck that, again, because what I saw broke my fucking heart. I turn away from her coolness at the memory and rake my fingers through my hair. A picture paints a thousand words, and what I’d walked into that morning spelled nothing but misery. I know the truth of it now, but that fucking picture. That’s indelible. Permanent. And a lot like hate.
I stare out at the garden. I never stay in this house, not since she left. It sits empty, and the truth about the dog is I pay a fortune for someone to stay here with him. I can’t be here, and I can’t be with him, but I sure as shit wasn’t going to let her take him. She gets nothing. Nothing but what I’m about to serve her.
Good thing we were never together long enough to have kids.
I take a deep quelling breath, my shoulders rising and falling with it, and then turn back to face her. ‘Cut the shit, Ivy.’
‘Tell me what you want from me.’
‘So fucking reasonable. Been polishin’ your chakras, babe?’
‘If you brought me here to fight—’
‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ She flinches while I sneer. ‘I brought you here to end this thing.’
‘We could’ve done this on paper. I sent you the documents.’
‘And perjure us both,’ I return. Her face is a picture; surely, she had to know this day was coming. ‘Where’s the fun in that? See, we both know the truth now, baby. We both know you lied.’
Chapter Eight
Ivy
He says nothing else; he doesn’t need to because there’s nothing else to say.
I can’t offer him an explanation. A reason. I can only stand in front of him and be judged. I want to say I feel the weight of his censure and disgust, but all I feel is his triumph. A triumph short lived, and possibly unsatisfactory for him. He stares at me for a moment longer, the weight of his gaze almost suffocating, before he turns on his heel and storms from the room.
