“I need to use the bathroom,” I murmured, glancing away, my heart a manic pulse inside my head.
“Hey,” he murmured, taking a hold of my wrist as his eyes narrowed on mine. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” I extracted my hand, moving away. “I’m fine.”
I left the room without looking back, locking the bathroom door behind me, and dragging my hands through my hair.
Fuck.
When my gaze collided with the mirrored glass that ran the width of the wall above the vanity, there was no avoiding my reflection.
Hair tousled, eyes bright and gleaming, cheeks flushed pink… and wearing the expression of someone who knew they were well and truly fucked, and not just literally.
The girl staring back at me in the mirror was in love with Leon Bradshaw.
The girl on this side of the glass. She was too.
And we were both so scared of where that love would lead us. What it would do to us. What we’d become as a result of it.
A different scene reflected back at me; a woman on her knees begging the man she loved to stay. It was an image I’d never forget. It was just one fucking snapshot. And yet it was so hard to see past it.
The knob jiggled behind me, and I whirled round, swiping my hair behind my ears as I inhaled a deep breath and unlocked the door.
The person on the other side was a foot shorter and decidedly more female than the one I’d expected.
Ashley’s eyes narrowed as they trailed over my face, then peered around me. Satisfaction flashed in her gaze when she found the room empty. Her gloss-coated lips twitched up into a tight smirk as she folded her arms across her chest and shouldered past me.
“You missed a lot when you were down in Florida, Elsa,” she muttered as she made her way to the vanity and set her black purse down on top of it.
I turned and settled against the doorjamb as she opened her purse and rooted inside before taking out a tube of gloss. Dabbing at her lips, she glanced at me through the glass.
“I didn’t go to college,” she said, smacking her lips together.
I smoothed mine into a flat line. “I didn’t ask.”
Her freshly applied gloss gleamed as a saccharine smile stretched her face. “I’ve been right here the whole time. Working in my mom’s nail salon. I’m a nail technician.” She held up her hand and wiggled her fingers.
“Why don’t you just cut straight to the good part? We both know you didn’t barge in here to tell me about your shitty nails.”
She tipped up a shoulder. “Just thought I’d warn you before you get hurt. I’ve been keeping Leon company this past year. Since we were fifteen, actually. It’s always my bed he ends up in.” She plopped the gloss back into her purse and spun to face me. “Just a friendly heads-up. I’d hate for you to get your heart broken.”
I fought to stop my fists from clenching, sliding them across my chest and under my arms instead. “That’s sweet, Ashley,” I muttered, “but there’s no need to worry about my heart. I’m only fucking him.”
The words trailed like slime, sticking to the walls of my throat, almost refusing to come up. I’d cheapened him, me… us… with one stupid sentence. And I hated myself for it.
Her blue eyes widened, then narrowed to slits. “He’s using you.”
“And what? You think I want to marry the guy?” I wagged my head, hating every word falling from my lips yet powerless to stop them. “Maybe I’m the one using him. The real question, though… is why does he even need me when you’re so readily available?”
Her lips opened and closed, before she straightened and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m not a ball and chain around his ankle. I let him play. That’s why he always comes back. Just think on that.”
She flounced out of the room before I could offer a retort, and for the first time, I wasn’t sure I had one. Somewhere deep down, I knew I shouldn’t let her words poison my mind, shouldn’t let them distort the way I viewed Leon, everything he’d shown me about the person he really was, but they triggered a fear so deep-rooted, I couldn’t stop them from sinking into me like barbed tentacles.
I couldn’t be the woman who allowed the man she loved to roam to keep him.
I couldn’t share his love, his affection, his body.
I couldn’t beg at his feet for scraps of attention or wait in the wings for a moment of his time when another, more exciting, plaything came along.
I didn’t work like that. I’d never work like that.
My feet carried me from the bathroom, down the hall and down the stairs, past Riley in the cluttered kitchen. She called my name, and I ignored her, pushing through the mass of bodies with my chest caving and my stomach sinking. Tears burned behind my eyes as I rounded the corner toward the gate.
Footsteps sounded behind me and a firm hand closed around my upper arm as I slipped into the shadows at the side of the house, my escape just out of reach.
Leon pulled me round and fastened his free hand around my other bicep, easing me closer. “What’s going on, Lissa?” His chest puffed up and down, like he’d been running. Like he’d chased after me.
“Nothing,” I said, looking away. “My mom’s home tomorrow. I need to head home.”
His brows lowered. “Riley just said you didn’t bring your car.”
Shit. My teeth snagged my bottom lip, and I brushed my fingertips across my forehead.
Leon’s heavy sigh echoed around the secluded corner of the yard. He released my arms to fit his hands against his hips. “You promised you wouldn’t fucking run, Lissa.”
My heart pinched. “That was the other night.”
He was silent for a few seconds. “What if I meant longer? What if I never fucking want you to run?”
Every word he spoke felt like a hammer to my soul. “What do you actually want from me, Leon?”
He bridged the distance between us, dipping to snag my down-turned gaze as his hands closed around my face. “You, Lissa. I want you.”
My head came up, his face misty beneath the veil of tears begging to fall. “Just me?” I whispered, and my voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.
He exhaled, his breath rushing over my face. “Just you, baby.” His thumbs swept across my cheeks. “Only fucking you.”
“What about Ashley?” The words poured from me like an oil spill in the middle of the ocean… catastrophic, disastrous, unstoppable.
He frowned. “Ashley? What about her? Did she say something to you?”
I scoffed, my head shaking. “Nothing I didn’t already know.”
“You know better than to listen to fucking Ashley. She’s a twisted fuck who likes to spread misery.”
“But you’re happy to fuck her,” I countered, meeting his eyes with a hard stare.
His lids shuttered briefly, head dipping as he sighed. “I’ve fucked her, yeah, because I was a horny teenager, and she was convenient. That makes me sound like an asshole, I know, but I never led her to believe it was anything more, and she never meant anything to me.”
“Not like Riley.” The whispered words barely travelled through the thick air buzzing between us. They felt taboo falling from my lips. Poisoned words that should never have seen the light of day.
Leon’s brows pulled together. “What does Riley have to do with any of this?”
“You’ve always wanted Riley. Everyone else is just second best; a substitute.”
“Lissa,” he interrupted, shaking his head. “I don’t want Riley. I haven’t wanted Riley for a long time.”
“Don’t fucking lie to me and say she means nothing to you, either.” I spat the words, my eyes flashing as I blinked to ward off the moisture.
“I won’t,” Leon murmured, his hands stroking up and down my arms. “I have a lot of love for Riley. She’s one of my oldest friends, one of the best people I know. I’ll always love her.”
He paused, and my heart twisted. How could I adore my best friend and agree with everything Leon was saying, but hate
the way the guy standing in front of me felt about her? Self-loathing burned a path straight to my wounded heart.
I turned to leave. He let me go three steps before his voice locked my feet in place.
“I love her, Lissa, but I’m not in love with her.” I felt him draw closer, felt the heat from his body before he molded it to mine and smoothed his hands down my arms. “I’ve never been in love with her.” He pressed impossibly closer, those strong arms coming around me and linking at my waist like iron clamps. His breath floated over my cheek. “Wanna know how I know that, Snow Queen?”
My throat squeezed, heart smashing into my chest, his words robbing me of the ability to think.
Leon was a storm I hadn’t seen coming. He’d dropped on top of me without warning and obliterated the shield around my heart. He’d left me standing in a daze, looking around at the destruction left behind in his wake.
I was defenseless, stripped bare, turning a full circle amongst the wreckage—a blockade of debris too high to scale. Trapped.
But were you truly trapped if you didn’t want to escape?
I turned in his arms… and he stood right there in the ruins with me.
The emotion shining in his eyes was impossible to question, impossible to deny. There was nothing for me to do but trust it.
Trust him.
God, I fucking wanted to. I wanted to. Because I knew him. This Leon.
My Leon.
And if I stopped looking for reasons to doubt him, for one goddamn second, I might realize there weren’t any.
His knees dipped, palms closing around my face as he brought his eyes level with mine. “Believe me when I say this, Lissa,” he said, his gaze dark and determined. “You’re no substitute. You’re my first choice. Every fucking time. No one else has ever come close.”
I let his words sink into me, over me, through me. I let myself hear them, really hear them, and then I let myself believe them. He might not mean them in ten years, five years… two, even, but he meant them now… and that’s all any of us was ever guaranteed.
I swallowed over the knot in my throat and reached up to wrap my fingers around his wrists, clinging on tight. “Okay,” I breathed, nodding up at him through watery eyes. “Okay.”
I was in danger of becoming a fool for this man. I was in even greater danger of not giving a fuck about it.
He bent down and pressed his lips to mine, softly, reverently, then pulled back, his irises glowing brightly in the moonlight.
“I love you, Lissa,” he murmured, a lopsided half-smile breaking out over his face. “I’m so fucking in love with you. And I’ve never felt anything like it.”
The world around me faded; narrowed to the man before me and the beautifully chaotic words that cracked my heart open and fused it back together again. Stronger somehow—fuller, better than before. More.
His forehead touched mine. “That’s how I know.”
I ran my fingers up and linked them through his, and then I lifted on my toes and claimed his mouth.
I’d only ever allowed myself to see love as something that turned us into the weakest version of ourselves; that forced us to relinquish power and control to someone else.
And in some ways, love was a weakness.
But being loved by him… I’d never felt stronger.
THIRTY
LISS
“Will I see you at Danny’s tonight?” Leon asked, his breath ghosting over my cheek, fingers drawing my hair back over my shoulder where he pressed a soft kiss, and then another. A shudder drifted through me, and I closed my eyes as I pulled in a steadying breath. After leaving the party, I’d stayed the night at Leon’s place. We’d spent the last twelve hours together, and still, I couldn’t seem to make myself get out of his truck.
“Not if I see you first,” I murmured on a breathy exhale, because he’d expect nothing less.
His warm chuckle heated my skin before his teeth nipped at it. He drew back, eyes dancing as they settled on my face. He arched a brow. “We’ll see, Snow Queen.”
I shook my head wryly as I looked back at him across the center console of his truck as we sat parked a few houses down from mine. My heart almost overflowed with the depth of what I felt for him, and it was so dangerously easy to get lost in the promise of his eyes as they held mine. My heart pumped faster, lips parted, mouth forming the words that flew up my throat—they were there, they were right fucking there, waiting.
I loved him. I knew I did. There was no denying it. And if I said the words, I’d mean them. Every single one. But then they’d be out there, and there’d be no taking them back. I dropped my head with a tight frown and swallowed them back, reaching for the handle.
Leon grasped my shoulder and tugged me round. His big palms encased my face before he dragged my head to his and brought his mouth down on mine. He kissed me with a passion I could feel to the tips of my toes and the roots of my scalp. I was dizzy and breathless by the time he eased back, and I sat, dazed, for long seconds before scrambling the mixed-up parts of my brain together and pushing open the door. I took three unsteady steps away from the truck before he called, “Hey, Snow Queen.”
I pivoted to the sound of his voice, my eyes lighting on the sight of him leaning over the roof of his truck. The late-morning breeze lifted his hair, his eyes like twin beams of sunlight warming me from the inside out, and I had to focus to stay upright.
“Yeah?” I swallowed.
“I’m happy to wait, sweetheart.” Quiet understanding colored his warm, blue eyes as they glowed with emotion. “I want you to say it when you can’t fucking hold it back, and there’s not a single doubt in your head.” My heart pole-vaulted, bouncing like it was trying to spring out of my damn throat. “You hear me, Lissa?”
If there was any part of me still clinging on to the notion that I might have been able to hold some small part of myself back… it was gone. Just like that. And so was I, my fingers falling free from the cliff without resistance. The ground below rushed toward me at a dizzying pace, the wind sweeping over my cheeks and whipping through my hair as I plunged from the edge.
Except it didn’t feel like I was falling.
It felt like I was flying.
It bolstered me, fortified me, and a flush of conviction steeled my bones.
I had no doubts. And I wanted him to know it. I’d never wanted to fucking say three words more than I did right now.
“Pretty Boy?” I murmured, holding his eyes.
His lids flickered, widening briefly. “Yeah?”
I bit my lip and grinned. “I’ll see you at Danny’s tonight.”
His mouth formed a smirk, eyes dancing like he knew I was a fucking tease.
He’d find out soon enough, but I couldn’t make it that easy. He wouldn’t want me to.
I blew him a kiss and spun on my heel, floating down the sidewalk in a bubble of elation and last night’s clothes.
My mom’s car was in the driveway, which meant they were home already. Hopefully, since my car was still here, they’d assume I was upstairs sleeping. If I snuck back in without drawing any attention to myself, I might make it to my bedroom without them seeing me. The last thing I wanted was for them to catch me mid-walk of shame and then face an interrogation. I was technically an adult, but mothers and aunts were nosy fuckers, and I wasn’t much up for sharing.
Gripping the door handle, I leaned my weight down on it gingerly. The latch barely made a sound as it released, and I tip-toed through the door and across the short hall. My foot was on the bottom step when my aunt’s voice carried through from the open kitchen doorway, making me pause.
“She needs to know, Mel. You can’t make this decision for her. She’s nineteen now.”
“What if she hates me?”
The complete despair in my mother’s voice was like a bucket of ice-cold water to my system. Dread iced my veins, freezing me in position. And instantly, I knew. I knew they were talking about me. And I knew whatever it was, I wouldn’t want to hear i
t. The tone of my mom’s voice was enough to have me wanting to bolt, to start my brain screaming, begging me to just fucking run. But I couldn’t make myself move. I stood rooted to the spot, every muscle locked in place, preventing my escape, because running wasn’t the answer. Instead, I stood and listened as the ground beneath my feet rocked and swayed, giving way.
“She won’t hate you, Mel. She could never hate you. It’ll be hard for her to get to grips with, of course, but she’ll know none of this is your fault.”
“I’ll never forgive myself if Liss or Bella has it. If I’ve passed on this horrible disease to my babies.”
My butt collided with the bottom step as comprehension dawned.
“Don’t think like that. We could never have predicted this. Dad died young, before he would have shown any symptoms. There’s nothing we could have done, Melinda. No one is at fault. It’s just… it’s…”
“One of them will have it,” my mom choked, her tortured voice riddled with rounds of endless pain.
“They might not.”
“It’s a fifty-fifty chance. One in two.”
“It doesn’t necessarily work like that. Let’s just try to focus our energy on staying positive.”
“Positive?” She said the word as if she had no concept of its meaning, and not in the sense that she’d forgotten, in the sense that in its usual context, it had no bearing whatsoever on this situation. “Are you going to get the test?”
“I… don’t know.”
I was moving, my feet travelling soundlessly across the floor without permission, some unseen force propelling me forward. My instinct was still to run, to avoid pain before it could hurt me, but this time, I kept moving closer to it. And then I was at the kitchen door, staring at two sisters, one light blonde, one dark blonde, their heads bent together, almost touching, hands clasped tight atop the kitchen table that bore witness to their heartbreak.
“I might have it?” It was my voice, but it sounded distant, far away—eerily emotionless and echoing in the silent room.
They both jumped, heads spinning.
“Oh, Liss, honey.”
Unthinkable: (Unstoppable - Book 2) (The Unstoppable Series) Page 21
