“Bullshit.”
The word cut between us, and I saw it hit deeper than her anger before her expression hardened again.
I opened the passenger door with one hand, keeping my hold on her wrist with the other.
“Get in.”
“No.”
I stepped closer, letting the space between us shrink until her anger had nowhere to go except straight into me.
“You can either get in the car willingly, and cooperate,” I whispered with a calm tone that emphasized the underlying danger, “or you can keep struggling and make this a public spectacle in front of the whole university. If you choose thelatter, I promise you, I'll fuck your tight, pretty pussy raw as everyone hears you moan at the moment you come on my cock.”
For a second, she only stared at me, as if she was trying to understand how the man she had once trusted with everything had become someone standing in front of her now, holding on to her as if letting go was no longer an option.
“Do you hear yourself?” she asked, her voice no longer raised, which somehow made it cut deeper. “Do you actually hear what you’re saying to me?”
“I do.”
“That’s kidnapping, Hayden. “You don’t get to take me somewhere I don’t want to go because you don’t like my answers.”
A humorless breath left me. “Then stop giving me answers that sound like lies.”
Her expression shifted for a second, not enough for anyone else to catch, but enough for me.
“I’m not lying,” she said, though the words lost some of their force before they reached me. “I’m trying to live my life without you tearing it apart again.”
Again. The word stayed between us.
My grip tightened before I could stop it. “You left.”
“And you lied,” she shot back, anger breaking through whatever control she had left. “You lied to me about everything that mattered.”
“I told you—”
“You told me after,” she cut in, her voice rising. “After I had already seen it with my own eyes. After I had already stood there feeling stupid for believing I was the only one who mattered to you.”
The words hit harder than anything she had said so far, because they were not only anger. They were the truth.
Her breathing was uneven now, her wrist still trapped in my hand while the space between us filled with everything we had never said.
“I trusted you,” she continued. “Do you understand that? I gave you everything. I believed you. I handed you the parts of me I was supposed to protect, and I didn’t stop to think what it would cost if you turned out to be exactly who you were.”
My jaw tightened. “And who was I?”
Her eyes didn’t soften. “A man who had another life I didn’t belong to.”
The silence pressed between us.
“And now you think you can just show up,” she went on, her voice trembling despite the control she was trying to keep, “drag me into your car after everything, treat my refusal like it means nothing, and act entitled to a place in my life after what you did to me?”
Her words hit harder than her attempts to pull away, because this was what she had been holding back: the hurt beneath the anger.
“You can’t do this, Hayden,” she whispered, and this time there was no sharpness left, only a rawness that made my chest ache. “You can’t come back and decide I still belong to you.”
For the first time since I grabbed her, something inside me shifted. It was not enough to make me let go, but enough to make me understand. She wasn’t fighting to win. She was fighting to survive what I had already done to her once.
My grip didn’t loosen, but my voice changed when I spoke again.
