“No, you’re not. But that night you were.” I breathe heavily. “For me.”
Another tic of his jaw. “Yeah.”
I bite my lip before saying, “It’s strange, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“That I become a bad girl for you and you become a good guy for me.”
His lips twist with a humorless smile again. “Yeah. Although it wasn’t really worth it.”
“What wasn’t?”
“Becoming a good guy.”
I frown. “Why not?”
“Because it sucked. Being the good guy.” His grip on my wrist shifts as he continues, “Especially when you have a monster boner in your pants refusing to let up. For days.”
“For d-days?”
“Yeah, what the fuck did you think would happen, Fae? When you give me a lap dance and beg me to bang your brains out.”
“I didn’t beg,” I protest and also lie.
Because I did.
He chuckles again because he knows I’m lying and continues, “And when my Mustang smelled like you.”
“It did?”
“Yeah, for weeks after that. Even though you drowned it in the lake for your revenge. Even though I had to change the seats, I’d still smell you. I’d get a whiff of your candy smell and just like that I’d get a motherfucking boner the size of your pretty little arm in the middle of the day.”
I press my lips then, to stop my laughter from spilling out.
This is not a laughing matter. None of this is, but I can’t help it and he obviously notices, obviously, and growls, “You think this is funny, Fae?”
Dutifully, I shake my head. “No.”
“If your brother knew I was taking a hit of his sister’s scent every time I drove my car, he would’ve drowned it in the lake himself. He would’ve hunted me down and this time instead of using my body as a punching bag, he would’ve killed me.”
“But you could’ve handled him, right?”
He gives me a lopsided smile. “Fuck yes.”
“Now I’m happy,” I blurt out.
“What?”
I swallow, debating whether I should tell him but already knowing that I will.
Already knowing that I’ve drunk the potion now and it’s making me crazy. So much so that I arch my spine and move against him. His hard body shudders and I revel in it.
I revel that I made him do that.
“That you suffered,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Yes. When I was crying in my pillow at night and in classes and during lunch and practically all the time, I’m glad you were suffering too. I’m glad that when you were haunting me, I was haunting you too.”
Maybe that’s what I want.
I want to haunt him, his dreams, his thoughts, his empty chest like he’s haunted me.
Maybe I want to be his demon like he is mine.
A demon that needs to be exorcized.
Maybe I want to be his Fae in all the ways he is my Roman, even though I don’t want him to be.
“You want to hear all the ways you’ve haunted me, Fae? All the little ways you’ve crept up on me over the past two years?”
I nod. “Yes.”
“Let me tell you about that then,” he says, finally letting my hands go, and so I touch him back.
While he puts his hands on the tree, making a cage of bones and muscles, I put mine on his waist. I touch him, his strength, his heat even though he’s always cold on the inside, after two long years and my eyelids flutter.
My fingers jerk with life.
“Let me tell you about that night, when I saw you sneaking out to your studio. I’d just driven down from New York after a long fucking day in that shithole office to go to another shithole office and I was tired as fuck. But I couldn’t sleep. So I decided to drive around, and there were a million places I could’ve gone to but I chose that highway for a reason. I chose to cross over from Bardstown to St. Mary’s for a fucking reason. I chose it for you.”
He licks his lips, shifting his body against mine, and I’m so hypnotized by his words, by him, that I shift too. “Because I knew that’s where you lived. I knew that beyond that brick fence, you might be sleeping in one of those cinderblock buildings. But you weren’t, were you? You were sneaking out. After everything that I did — not that I did a lot — but after how I wanted to keep you safe, you were running around town at midnight. It pissed me the fuck off, Fae, I’m not gonna lie. It made me furious. It made me want to pick you up off the road, put you in my Mustang and drive you to an isolated, unknown place just to put the fear of God in you. Just to teach you all the dangers lurking in the night.”
He is the danger.
Him.
I’ve always known. I’ve just not cared and even now, a current goes through me at his furious words.
I fist his t-shirt, his muscles rippling under my knuckles. “But I’ve been doing it for two years now. It’s perfectly safe, Reed, and —”
“I know,” he says with clenched teeth, cutting me off. “I fucking know. Why do you think I showed up at that shitty bar the next night? My sister didn’t just tell me about your fucking cupcake shop and she doesn’t just tell you things either. She tells me things too, and for the past two years, she hasn’t shut up about you. Every time she talks to you, every time she sees you, she can’t stop talking about you. And I pretend that she’s bugging the fuck out of me. I stomp and I kick things and I tell her to shut the fuck up. All the while hoping that she won’t.”
My breaths are all jumbled now.
I’m breathing so fast that they’re stumbling, falling all over each other. “I-I didn’t… I didn’t think you’d… I didn’t know.”
I did haunt him then. I did.
He lowers himself even more then, pushes his chest into mine. “Yeah, you didn’t. You didn’t know that even now, my Mustang smells like you. Even now when I get inside it, the first breath I take is you.”
Before I can say anything to that, he does something so… primitive and primal that all I can do is let him.
He smells me.
With his hands still planted on the tree by my head, he dips his face and takes a whiff off my forehead. But that’s not all. He grazes the side of my face with his nose as he smells me there too.
And he growls.
Like he really is an animal, a predator, and I bite my lip really, really hard.
So hard that I think I taste blood.
But it’s okay.
It’s fine because everything else inside me is bleeding too. Everything else inside me is bleeding lust.
Thick and tangy and coppery and so, so syrupy and delicious.
“Geranium,” he rasps against my skin. “Yeah?”
“Yes.”
He nuzzles his nose on my jaw. “And sugar.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Rare body oil.”
I tilt my head back even more, giving him access to my neck, to my scent as I hold on to him like he’ll save my life, when in reality, he’s the one drowning me.
He’s drowning me in desire, and wordlessly I nod as he rubs his nose on the column of my throat.
“Because you like them. Still.”
“Still.”
He looks up at me then, bowed over me with his strong, big body. “You wanna know how you haunt me, Fae? This is how.” He shows it to me again by taking a whiff of my skin and I arch into him. “This is what you do to me. This is what you did to me two years ago. You made me an addict, a junkie who’s looking for his next fix. Who’s been looking for it all this time. Because two years ago, I had a taste of a drug. I had a taste of my Fae and she’s been in my system ever since. She’s been running in my veins, my bloodstream and I’ve got no way to purge her. I’ve got no way to get rid of her. And I’ve got no way to get more of her either. So I’m stuck. I’m stuck with this need. This ache. I’m stuck with you. I’m nothing but haunted, Fae. I�
��m nothing but this ache. I’m nothing but pain.”
I look into his bright eyes, bright with haunting, bright with pain as he said and I whisper, “Me too.”
He licks his lips. “What?”
“I’m pain too.”
Like him I’m nothing but pain. I’m nothing but haunted. I’m nothing but his.
Still.
After all this time, I’m still his. And I don’t want to be.
I don’t want to be his.
Somehow I already know what he’s going to say next.
“You remember what I told you?” he asks. “That night.”
I dig my nails into his hips. “Hold on to my dress.”
“Yeah.” He licks his lips again as if he’s already tasting me on them. “Can you do that for me again? Can you hold on to your dress for me? Don’t let me see her.”
Can I?
Can I hide from him again? Can I hide what’s between my legs from him again?
I did that once.
I listened to him. I obeyed him. And look where we are now.
I let him protect me, my body, but he didn’t protect my heart.
He broke it instead and I’ve been in pain ever since. He’s been in pain too.
We’ve both been haunted and caged in so many ways because of what happened, what we did to each other. It’s time we end this.
It’s time we break away from each other for good and move on. And somehow I already know what we have to do in order to do that.
I know what I have to do also.
In all my madness and desperation and my veins filled with that toxic potion that I drank because it was labeled love, I shake my head. “No.”
“What?”
“I won’t hold on to my dress for you. Because you don’t have to protect me anymore,” I say, looking into his eyes. “B-because I was… I was with someone else.”
Love made me do it.
That’s what I’m going to say to myself years later when I think of this night.
When I think of what I just said to him.
Love and a broken heart. That’s what made me say it.
I can’t believe I did though. I can’t believe I said that and I can’t believe he heard it.
Not only that, he understood it too.
Because as soon as I told him, his breathing got wild.
His chest expanded and swelled under his t-shirt and his shoulders became massive and even broader. And now he’s crowding me even more, eating up all the air, all the space around me with his enhanced, heavily breathing body.
“What’d you just say?”
Even though I’m trembling now and the night has gone darker because of how changed, how angry Reed has become after my confession, I forge ahead, my voice calm.
Because that’s the only way.
That’s the only way this will end.
“There was someone else. After you.”
He shifts on his feet, his torso rubbing against mine, his chest scraping against mine too.
I’m surrounded by him. Surrounded and trapped and at his mercy.
“What someone else?” he growls.
“A guy that I met.”
“Where?”
“At the bar.”
“The shitty bar that you go to.”
“Y-yes. Toby.”
He breathes out sharply at the name, his chest contracting, his stomach hollowing out. As if in revulsion. In protest.
“What about Toby?”
I’m still fisting his shirt at the hips but now I open my palms and splay them over his hard muscles. I try to absorb all his anger, his violence in my skin.
Because I know he’s going to get even angrier. When I tell him everything.
“I met him one night. Back when I started at St. Mary’s. Back then everything was… difficult. Everything hurt. Everything made me feel lonely and… You… I was still so mad at you. My anger was so fresh and…”
“And?”
God, I know this will hurt him.
I know it.
I know how possessive he can be. How dominating and authoritative. Even when he has no right to be any of those things with me.
Not anymore.
But I remind myself that this is the only way.
“And I wanted to forget you. I wanted to forget everything about you. I wanted to forget that I ever met you. That I fell in love with you. So I…”
His biceps are vibrating now.
I can feel them disturbing the still air. Still and somehow charged too.
Smelling of wildflowers and woods and geranium and sugar. And lust.
Smelling of us and our desire.
“You what?” he bites out, his eyes blazing with anger.
His features are so tight that I raise my hand and cradle his jaw, his rough, stubbled jaw, as I hurt him with my words. “I… He was nice to me. And he had these laughing brown eyes and he was… kind. He was kind, Reed.” I press my fingertips on his ticking jaw. “He was kind to me. He didn’t make me angry like you do. And he didn’t make me mad or blush or… or bad. Like you do. He didn’t…”
He didn’t do anything for me, to be honest.
He was nice and he asked me why I looked so sad. Why my eyes were puffy and why my lips looked like they never smiled. He asked me why I looked like a girl who was lost.
I never would’ve noticed him if not for Poe.
Back then I used to be sad all the time and even though Poe didn’t know the reason she always stuck by me. It was her idea to sneak out and unwind. And I was too sad to care about getting caught so I went with her.
“What happened?” Reed asks, his words sounding like blades in the air.
“I… I let him… He kiss —”
“Don’t,” he snaps, cutting me off, almost pressing his forehead against mine, making me taste his command on my tongue, my trembling lips.
And that jaw that I’m touching now after two long years, I rub it.
I try to soothe away the tightness from it. I try to soothe him because I’m not finished. Because I have to keep going for the both of us.
“He didn’t just…” I tell Reed. “He did… other things. He took me to this dark corner, away from everyone and I went with him and he —”
That’s when his hands come off the tree and he puts them on me.
He wraps one around my throat and buries the other in my hair. He messes up my neat and tidy strands as his fingers latch onto my hair. He even squeezes my throat to get a good, possessive grip around it.
When he’s satisfied with how he’s trapped me and how my lips have parted at his dominating hold, he says, “Are you trying to hurt me?”
“No,” I whisper.
“Is this your fucked-up way of giving me pain? Of teaching me a lesson for breaking your heart. For throwing away your love.”
“No, Reed. Listen —”
“Then what the fuck are you doing?” he snaps so loudly that I flinch.
He grips my neck so tightly that I go up on my tiptoes to give him more access. To give him more of me to squeeze and grope and grab.
“I’m trying to tell you that you don’t have to protect me anymore. That I’m not some innocent flower that you met in the woods two years ago. I’m not. I haven’t been that girl in a long time, Reed, okay? You don’t have to tell me to hold on to my dress or to keep my legs shut when you’re around.”
His thumb presses down on my pulse. “I don’t, huh? I don’t have to protect you. I can do whatever I want with you then?”
“Yes. That’s what I’m saying. And where do you get off trying to protect me anyway? You’re the guy who hurt me. You’re the reason I’m like this. All broken.” My hands creep up to his hair then and I grip his longish strands. I grip them and a breath puffs out of me because they feel the same as they did two years ago. Rich and soft and cozy, and tugging on them, I continue, “And I’m the reason you’re haunted.
And I want this to end.”
“To end,” he says roughly.
“Yes. I want this to end, Reed. I don’t want to be broken anymore. I don’t want you to be haunted. We need to move on. We need to forget about each other. We need to forget that we ever met.” I look into his eyes that have turned even harsher now. “I need to forget that I ever met you. That I ever fell in love with you. I need to forget you, Reed. I want to. And I want this to be the last time.”
“Last time what?”
“That we see each other. I don’t want… I don’t want you to come here anymore. To pick me up or to drive me around. I’m safe, Reed. So I don’t want you to be my chauffeur anymore. Besides, the audition video is done. So I don’t need you anymore.”
It got done last week. So this is it.
This has to be.
“You don’t need me anymore,” he repeats.
“No.” I shake my head, feeling all achy and sad. “So promise me.”
“Promise you.”
I nod, my neck in his grip, my head feeling heavy. “Promise me this is the last time. And maybe one day…”
“One day what?”
“One day I can meet someone and I can fall in love with him. I want to fall for someone. A different guy. A good guy. A guy who doesn’t hurt me like you do.”
The muscle on his cheek tics and tics. “You want to fall for someone?”
My heart sinks.
It goes all the way, down and down, to the bottom of my stomach. I don’t even think that I can hear it anymore. I don’t even think I feel it.
As if my heart is hiding.
It’s running away from me at the thought of falling for someone else.
But my heart is stupid. It has always been.
“Yes,” I whisper.
He goes still then. At my response.
As still as my own chest. Like his heart ran away too at the thought of me falling for someone else.
But that’s not true, is it?
He doesn’t have a heart to begin with. His chest is a wasteland where no heart, no flower will ever grow and I was foolish to ever think otherwise.
I still am.
Because his stillness makes me want to cry.
Makes me want to take back my words and fall at his feet. It makes me want to tell him that I will never ever fall for anyone else.
A Gorgeous Villain Page 27
