“You want to know why now?” I screamed, the sound tearing out of my throat. I pushed away from the counter with enough force to make him stumble back a step. His ribs caught the movement, tightening his face before he swallowed the pain. “You want me to explain myself while you stand there calling me Clarke like my first name might burn your tongue off? Fine. I have always been affected.”
His face changed, something flickering behind the fury, but I didn’t give him room to answer.
“I was affected every time you walked into a room and looked at me like I was something you scraped off your shoe.” My voice cracked, wet and ragged. “I was affected every time you laughed with some girl where I could see it and made damn sure I knew it was supposed to hurt. I was affected when you stopped touching me, stopped texting me, stopped looking at me like I was anything except a mistake you regretted making.”
I trembled now, my entire body shaking beneath the force of the confession. “I have always been affected, Easton. You just loved pretending I wasn’t because it made your revenge cleaner.”
He came forward so fast the air whipped between us, and my back struck the counter again with a jolt. “Do not put this on me.”
“I am putting your part on you.”
“My part?” His laugh was vicious and broken. He raked his good hand through his hair, leaving it wild. “You mean the part where I got tired of being your midnight secret?”
“You were never just a secret.”
“You made sure I was.”
“You don’t fully understand why I had rules.”
His eyes flashed, wild and desperate. “Rules I never followed and you never cared about with me.”
The words hit wrong, sharp and sideways, and my mouth snapped shut for half a second before anger forced it open again. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you threw rules at me like they were walls, and I spent a year learning every crack in them because you wanted me to.” His chest rose and fell rapidly, his voice cutting harder now, every word a hammer strike. “No names, no lights, no staying, no feelings, no morning, no anything that looked like it might matter. Then you let me say your name. You let me touch and see what you told every other man was off-limits. You let me keep the lamp on and acted pissed when you didn’t hate it.”
He leaned closer, his breath hot against my face. “I moaned your name over and over again. You fell asleep with my hand on your stomach, Clarke. You held onto me in your sleep. You wore my shirt around your apartment all damn day and thought I wouldn’t hear about it from Bliss.” His voice dropped into a seething whisper. “So don’t stand here and tell me I never followed the rules like I was the only one breaking them.”
Heat tore through my face in a scalding wave of humiliation. “I wanted no rules with you!”
His expression locked, all the fury freezing into something stunned and deathly still.
I heard what I had said only after I said it.
The whole apartment seemed to snap still around us. Easton’s voice went low and dangerous. “Say that again.”
I shook my head, wrapping my arms around myself. “No.”
“You don’t get to throw that at me and run.”
“I wanted no rules with you because you took control so I could breathe.” The words exploded out of me, furious, humiliating, and too loud. I threw my hands out, gesturing wildly at him and the space between us. “You arrogant, infuriating, beautiful asshole, you took the decision out of my head when I handed it to you, and for once, I didn’t have to watch every second for the moment a man turned my yes against me. I didn’t have to brace for the grab, or the joke, or the thing I would have to survive after.”
My voice broke. “With you, I could stop fucking thinking, and that terrified me more than any man who ever hurt me.”
Easton stared at me like I had slapped him. Then his face hardened so brutally, his features twisting with fresh, deeper rage, that I almost wished I had.
“Oh, that’s rich,” he sneered, the sound ugly. “Pretending I ever did anything you cared about enough to look deeper at it.”
I shoved him with both hands, one full-bodied, desperate push. “All I did was get deeper, East.”
His nostrils flared at the name, a raw, physical reaction.
I didn’t stop. I couldn’t. My hands curled into fists at my sides, my entire body trembling with the need to hit, hold, or scream.
“You want to talk about trust? Fuck, trusting you terrified me. Wanting you terrified me. Letting you touch me in ways I told myself nobody got to touch me again terrified me. And now you want to make sure I regret that every second of the day because you hurt, so I have to hurt with you.”
“You trusted me?” His face twisted, his voice snapping clean through the room. He stepped back and flung his arms wide in furious, mocking disbelief. “Really? That’s how yourepay trust?” He barked out a laugh that held no humor, only poison. “You are a shittier person than I thought.”
The sentence cracked something bright and violent inside me.
