Cruel Kisses (It's Just High School #2) - Thandiwe Mpofu Page 0,115

a fucking long time, but he’s Julian and I’m me. Name a more toxic, unwanted relationship than us?

I pull back and cup his jaw, tears welling up in my eyes, blurring my vision.

“I love you,” I whisper, the words heavy yet so damn true as they fall off my tongue. “Julian, I love you.”

This man, he has saved my life. He has broken me before, but he put me together again with so much tenderness, care, and affection that I’ve never known in my life.

I feel his cock swell inside me as he stares at me.

“Say it again,” he demands, his hold around me tighter now.

“I love you.” Tears fall down my cheeks as I say it again, this time the words coming out easier, fitting right where they should.

His stare grows darker. He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t look relieved. Instead he looks like I’m making a declaration of sorts, an oath, a fucking promise that will tie us together for the rest of our lives.

“Fuck, Mia,” he whispers, cupping my cheek. “I fucking love the hell out of you.”

Unadulterated, unfiltered, untainted happiness slams into me and for the first time in my life, my world feels right. And when he takes us to our room and lays me down on our bed for round two—is it three—we love the fuck out of each other is what we do.

26

Have you ever heard people who have survived near death experiences talk about how they think they saw the end come hurtling toward them, ready to take them? It’s like that one person who once swore they could see lightning coming down to strike them, but everyone else declared them as crazy?

Yeah well, I didn’t think it all started that way, not at all. I felt the danger hovering over me like a dark cloud from the night I found Mia but when I’m with her, everything just falls away.

She becomes the center of my world in a way that made me uncomfortable on some days. I didn’t know how to feel about that, but since she told me she loved me, it’s been full steam ahead.

There was no question, no doubt, nothing at all other than the rawest, truest parts of ourselves, discovering each other, with the world completely shut off from us.

Mia and I travel through Europe for the next two weeks. Neither one of us has a phone with us, choosing instead to stay away from the internet and its pure fucking bliss. The freedom of not being online is liberating and I know it makes her lighter. She likes that.

Waking up each morning with her in my arms, her sexy body snuggled to my back, our legs tangled together, her arms around me. She snored lightly in her sleep and the fact that she wasn’t having any nightmares anymore was also pretty fucking amazing.

Of course, I did that shit to indulge her. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the Louvre, or the damn Colosseum, or the many fountains in Italy she wanted to visit—all of this, both of us have seen before—but she wanted to do it so bad.

Maybe it was all for her to soothe over her stinging ballet rejection or maybe she just wanted to torture me, but I held her hand, took her damn pictures, grumbled my way through and got to fuck her, no holds barred each night, sometimes twice.

But then there are these few times when she looks like she’s a thousand miles away, a worried look on her face that makes me so tense, I want it gone from her face.

She jumps when my phone rings after switching it on, asking who it is—something she’s never done.

Then there’s the little paranoia she has of looking over her shoulder like we’re being followed. She wasn’t wrong though. We were being followed, but from a distance.

Before leaving for our first stop, Croatia, I called dad and he sent in security detail to watch over us from a respectable distance, including Max.

I didn’t tell Mia, of course, she was already a bit anxious as it was. All I wanted was to keep her safe, happy and relaxed before we inevitably have to go back to our lives and handle shit that needs handling, like dismantling that damn marriage contract between me and the girl my brother might possibly still be in love with.

“Do you think I should get in contact with Nicky?” she questions, glancing at me from her lounger. We’re on a beautiful beach