of his cock came into contact with the sensitive bundle of nerves between her legs. She wanted to get away from him, but she wanted to stay close to him forever at the same time.
“I’m not your monument,” she said, “I’m not some wispy, white-clad virgin you can put up on a pedestal and worship. I’m not your patron saint of suffering. I’m not some kind of magical, mystical being. I’m just me. I’m a little bit broken, or maybe a lot. I’m not very nice. I’m a terrible friend. Kind of desperately screwed up. I can’t even fix my own life, Gage.” She closed her eyes, swallowing hard. “It would make me kind of mad if you thought I had fixed yours, when I hadn’t managed to put mine in working order.”
“I didn’t say I was fixed,” he said, his voice gruff. “I said I was changed. Before that accident happened I was headed straight to hell and I was bound and determined to take everyone around me along for the ride. I didn’t care who I hurt. Worse, I don’t even think I thought for one second that I might hurt someone, or that it would matter if I did.” He paused, then when he spoke again, his voice was thick. “I remember that night.”
“I don’t really want to talk about it.”
He slid his hands down her shoulders, past her elbows, down to her wrists. He wrapped his fingers around them, then lifted her arms up overhead, pinning them against the soft pillow. “We’re going to talk about it.”
She closed her eyes, turning her face away from him. Talking about it was always going to be hard. But talking about it like this when there were no walls between them, no clothes between them. Not even any space between them. That seemed impossible. “There’s nothing to talk about. I remember it too.”
“You hit a tree,” he said. “Your side of the car hit a tree. I stopped and I looked inside. And I saw this little girl... You were hurt. You were hurt so bad. And you were crying. I remembered that you weren’t supposed to move anybody after an accident.” She could feel the heaviness of those words, feel how much they cost him to speak. “You have no idea how much strength it took to call 911 instead of just opening the car up and grabbing hold of you. But I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to risk hurting you more. At least I knew that much. We waited for the paramedics to arrive, and we lied. We told him that we didn’t know what had happened. That we had just come upon the accident. It was such an easy thing to do. To lie about that experience. And then, my father found your mother and offered her money to keep the details quiet. I couldn’t forget you, Rebecca. I never did. It’s not absolution I’m seeking. It’s just a way to get that image out of my mind. You crying like that. Hurt like that. Because of me. I just didn’t want to be a man that could do that again. Not anymore. I wanted to change. I couldn’t stomach turning into a man like my father, who was so callous about all these things that it was about minimizing scandal and not about taking responsibility.”
“But you didn’t take responsibility,” she said, her tone gentle.
“No,” he said, “I ran. Because I figured I wasn’t really a good enough man to do anything else.”
“I don’t remember you,” she said, tracing his upper lip with the edge of her thumb. “I don’t remember much about that night at all. I remember just before we hit the tree. And everything after that is blank. Everything except waking up in the hospital. And then after that, I was just in pain. My leg, my skin. Every part of me hurt.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, his throat tight.
“I know. But I don’t want to know all of this about you. I want to know the other things. I want to fill in the rest.”
“Why?”
She laughed uneasily. “Because I can tell you, sure as anything, that the reason I’m sleeping with you isn’t because of what happened that night. It’s something else. It’s the way that you came back. It’s the way that you looked when you came back from seeing Sierra that night in the hospital. The way you look at me. There’s not another man in town who wanted me.”