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Even if it seems like that’s the only thing I’m good at.

Bennett nods, but his face still bleeds pain. “I slept with someone else,” he says, bitter and angry. I nod.

“I know.”

“Just the same as you,” he sneers. He’s drunk and hurting. I can feel the turmoil, the knowledge that a part of him wants me to hurt, too, but he’s still Bennett. Kind even when he shouldn’t be. Good, right down to his soul.

“You’re not,” I say. “You’re so much better than me.”

We stand in charged silence for a long while.

“I don’t want to do this anymore.” His words are a wrangled sob, blubbery as he wipes at his eyes. “But I don’t know how to be without you. I’ve tried. But . . . Goddamn it, Paloma, loving you hurts.”

I know. I want to cry. I know. I’m sorry.

I should let him go. I should use this moment, here and now, to release him from the pain we both feel. That’s what a good person would do.

Instead, I drive him home—and then to my door when he begs me not to leave him there. I tuck him into my too-small bed as he grasps me tight around the middle.

“I know you’re asleep,” I whisper. He doesn’t stir. “And you probably won’t remember this in the morning. But . . . when I was fourteen, a man told me he would take care of me. I just had to give him . . . something I didn’t want to give. And I was too scared of everything to stop it, even if I wanted it to stop. And then, when I met you? I was so ashamed of who I’d been before.”

I lean in and kiss his forehead, watching his lips kick like he can feel me in his sleep.

“I love you. I’ll always love you, Bennett. I just wish I was someone else, better and more deserving of your kind of love.”

I sleep in my car that night, so that I don’t have to watch him leave in the morning.

Chapter 64

THEN: Junior Year, Sometime Spring Semester

Paloma

“—aren’t you, baby?”

Whatever the guy has said to me is barely an echo in my head. Instead, I let the beat of the music roll through my relaxed limbs as I splay myself back on the bed.

His name is lost on me by now, my brain swimming as he strips himself down to nothing and climbs over me. I wince a little at the tight hold he takes on my throat, but he doesn’t notice. And if he does, well, maybe he likes it.

I smirk, eyes glimmering with the alcohol spreading in my system.

Tonight, I’m doing something worse than usual. And I wonder if it will be the thing that breaks me.

Aren’t you already broken enough? Cracked and splayed on the floor. Forgotten.

Worthless.

My eyes flicker to the door again, wondering if he’ll show. If he’ll break the door down and scoop me up and away from this fucking nightmare. As if he even knows where I am.

A fantasy—with him as your knight in shining armor? How pathetic, Polly.

The voice in my head is louder tonight. Angry. Bitter. It’s accompanied by the image of Bennett, smiling and drunk and happy, hands around the hips of a girl I’ve seen before. Pretty, brunette, smart. Put together.

Not broken.

I roll my hips, tightening my knees around his waist.

He’s barely done a thing to me, but the moan leaves my throat unbidden. I watch the happy smile overtake his face as he slides hard into me—hard enough that my stomach lurches. It’s not that he’s big, it’s that I’m not prepared and dehydrated and—