It’s not sharp enough to sting, though I wish it would. I really, really wish it would.
“Why are you following me, asswipe?” I hiss, releasing him and dancing stealthily away. He spins on the balls of his heels, his face contorted into a sexy as sin scowl. Really, it shouldn’t be fair that he can look that fucking gorgeous, even when he’s furious.
“Do you have to ask stupid questions?” he demands. I take a moment to eye his athleticwear, and my heart—which has steadily returned to a semi-normal tempo—speeds up once more with a damning vengeance. Fuck, Tate is a literal god, pun intended. The white shirt he wears conforms to his muscles, and with every move he makes, his biceps flex. He wears a pair of loose basketball shorts, despite the chilly weather. I’ve never been particularly attracted to a man’s legs before, but there’s no denying that Tate has great ones. Thick, with corded muscles and a prominent vein running down the side.
Suddenly, I’m exhausted, my body utterly spent. I can’t deal with Tate today and his constant mood-changes and his hot and cold attitude that never fails to send my thoughts into a tailspin.
“Just go.” There’s no hiding the enervation that has crept into my voice. All I want is to sleep the day away and forget everything that transpired the night before. Because pain? Emotional pain? It sucks.
Tate folds his arms over his chest and levels me with a cocky smirk. Normally, that smirk would both infuriate me and arouse me, but today, it only makes me even more tired.
“I’m not leaving,” he states firmly.
“I want you to go.” His gorgeous face, shadowed by the steadily rising sun, is suddenly too much for me. Everything about Tate is too much.
“Nope.” He pops the P, irritating me, and I throw my hands up in the air, rounding on him.
“I said that I want you to go,” I hiss, punctuating each word with a finger shoved at his sculpted chest. His cocksure smile remains firmly in place as he grabs the offending finger between his hands.
“And I said no.”
We glare at each other, a contest of wills. His dark, smoky eyes lock with my own, each of us begging the other to bend and snap. But I’ll be damned if I give into him again. Maybe the old me would’ve, but the new me is stronger than ever before. The pain of my brothers’ and Rebecca’s betrayal caused as much. There’s steel on my skin now, impenetrable armor that no one can destroy.
And that’s why I never lost myself to the darker urges of my sin—of pain. Because pain can be healing. It allows you to grow and evolve, becoming something even greater than you were before. A lot of people only focus on one aspect of it, unable—or unwilling—to see the internal growth a person experiences. Pain nourishes something inside of you, something I can’t name, and allows it to blossom into something beautiful.
Pain is beautiful.
If you allow it to be.
“I’m not dealing with you today,” I huff at last, my throat clogged with a myriad of emotions. So, so many emotions that it’s impossible for me to tell them apart. Pain bleeds into love, and that love transforms into blistering anger. They all churn in my stomach like a nest of live and angry snakes, hissing and slithering.
When I turn away from Tate, preparing to take off down the path once more, he grabs my arm and wrenches me to a stop.
“You don’t get to always walk away from me!” he bellows, and beneath his anger, I sense something else—fear. Fear and desperation, each one so potent that I choke on it.
“I never walk away from you.” I spin to face him, and he immediately releases my arm. “You’re always the one who shoves me away. As if you can’t stand to look at me. As if you can’t stand to be near me. As if you can’t stand me.” I’m panting, my chest heaving with each inhale and exhale. “Why do you keep pulling me back to you when we both know you’re only going to push me away again?”
The same panic I heard in his voice appears in his dark eyes. They flit across my face rapidly, almost as if he’s searching my expression for something. But what that something is, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.
“Just let me go, Tate,” I whisper, venturing a step closer. “Tell me you don’t love me