Page 110 of Breathe Like Hell

Ironic, considering how I let Mason hurt me the way he did.

But he didn’t live in a trailer, and he couldn’t get me pregnant. So no matter what, there would be no child for me to accidentally pass the cycle down to.

The sound of the electronic doorbell snapped me out of my thoughts, and I pressed my lips together in a quick smile at the mother as she dragged her children towards the bathroom.

Then I grabbed a disinfectant wipe and busied myself cleaning all the counters. Anything to distract my brain.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

MASON

I stood outside Dakota’s class building with a bouquet of flowers in my fist. Yes, flowers.

She was going to forgive me, and everything was going to be fine. Micah had thrown me off—that was why it’d all gone wrong. He affected me in ways I didn’t have words to explain. I could still hear his voice in my head, feel his hands on my body, smell Dakota’s scent on the pillow under my face.

I don’t want to look at you.

It wasn’t easy for me to see him at all after all these years, as much as I tried to pretend otherwise. I hated every molecule of his body, every fiber of his soul, but my hatred was messy. It was hatred rooted in hurt, not anger.

I could fight him, argue with him, maybe even fuck him without too much agony, but that didn’t change the facts. He’d ripped my entire life away in a matter of seconds when he’d left me, and that wound had never really healed. I just guarded it better now.

And the problem with guarded wounds was that the people who’d created them in the first place usually knew how to reach them anyway. The one person who I needed to protect myself from the most was the same one who I’d given the map of my soul to. He knew where every bruise was, knew just how hard to push.

But he wasn’t here now.

Dakota was here.

And I had no plans of repeating what’d happened the last time I’d been standing in this very spot, when I’d trapped her in my car and forced her to admit Micah was one of her professors. I thought of the fear in her eyes, the lack of neon in my lungs, the panic blacking out my thoughts.

My weight crushing her hand against the door handle.

Then I thought about her head under the water in the bath, my hand keeping her there, all the venomous words she’d thrown at me afterwards.

I’d never wanted to actually kill her until she said that.

You would choose Micah over me.

I fucking wonder why.

It was the worst knowledge she could’ve possibly shackled me with, and I’d had to fight against it every second afterwards. Had to fight the urge to do anything necessary to keep her for myself.

But she was right; it wasn’t fair of me to say that to her then. Not when she was already so unstable, not when we were fighting like that, not when I was being the absolute worst version of myself. Maybe she hadn’t meant it. Maybe I could change her mind. Maybe she wasn’t fully slipping out of my grasp yet.

I had to cling to those hopes, because if I didn’t…

There would truly be nothing left for me on this Earth. I knew with absolute certainty that if Dakota left me for him, I wouldn’t survive. I barely survived him leaving me. She would be the final nail in my waterlogged coffin, the final push off the edge of oblivion.

If I lost both of them to each other, there was no force that could keep me here. I’d succumb to the death that’d been chasing me my entire life, that cruel fate I could never outrun.

The door next to me punched open and I turned my head, eyes tracking the slow trickle of students leaving the building. Eventually, Dakota emerged. She was putting her earbuds in her ears, oblivious to the fact that I was watching her.

“Dakota,” I said as I stepped off the wall and laid my palm on her shoulder.

She jumped and spun around frantically.

Her eyes flicked down to the flowers as I offered them to her, then back up to my face. She looked like she was terrified but trying to hide it. I didn’t like that. I liked her scared, but not like this. Scared of something I was doing to her, scared of her own fucked up desires, but not scared of me, just standing close to her.

“Why are you here?”