arm around her waist, I hold her back. She fights and screams, but I lift her up then put her down on her feet away from the burning dress, Quickly stepping away from her, I watch her as she breaks.
“How could you?” she demands, her voice broken, tears streaming down her face, devastation and shock in her eyes.
I reach out and run my thumb across her left cheek. She shudders and I step closer to her, leaning in, I lick the tears on her right cheek, she shivers, stepping closer to me, wanting comfort, hungry for sex, desperate for an orgasm to dull her pain.
“You keep offering these lips to anyone, thinking it doesn’t have consequences,” I murmur. Fuck, I want to strip her bare and fuck her raw. I can see the need in her eyes. “Remember that.”
I guess we’re going to live under this roof aching and angry, the same way we’ve been living apart for the last three years.
Always unsatisfied and lonely.
I press a kiss to her forehead, then whisper, “You should’ve stayed in your broken lane than sell my family for kisses no one but me can satiate you with.
And with that, I leave her grieving the loss of a dress that she’ll never get back just like the hope I’ll never have when it comes to her.
25
MIA
The thing about breaking is that you never really see it coming. You never expect it to happen with a sudden viciousness, even though the warning signs are practically everywhere, screaming at you, demanding your attention so you take precautions.
They’re there in the way your heart pounds when you sense danger behind you, watching you, assessing you to see what you’re made of.
They’re present when you’re trying to pick up the ruins of your heart with the scraps of burnt tulle, your dreams and everything you’ve been working toward for years, now nothing but ash blowing away with the wind, sinking in the sand like it never existed.
That night Julian left me on the beach, every single part of me broken and spent, I cried. I’ve never cried the way I did that night, and he did nothing, walking away from me like I mean nothing to him.
I cried for my life that was tearing like an old, worn out cloth.
I cried for my mother who I’ve been hiding from, unable to face, let alone talk to.
I cried for the tutu that my grandmother handmade for my mother, intended to be passed down to me when the time was right.
I cry for my failures and disappointments of not being my mother’s perfect child.
I cried for my father’s painful abandonment.
I just…cried, for hours on that beach.
I sat there, with dried tears on my cheeks. The shuddering and trembling of my body only stopped when the sun started rising. It was only when I stood up and dusted the sand off me that I saw him, watching me from the open door, sitting on my bed.
He never left.
Holding my stare, he watches me approach. It looks like he was there all this time, waiting for me.
He was waiting for me.
I can’t get over that. When he sees me coming though, he drops the zippo he used last night on my bed, then leaves, but not without glancing at me with hate still in his eyes.
I’ve never hated anyone the way I hate him right now. And myself. I hate myself.
I hated myself for caring. For thinking that he cared about me enough that he’d never think of hurting me the way he did. Or the way he hurled the truth I wasn’t ready to face in my face, forcing me to face it head on.
I hate that I had begun to think that maybe he had forgotten about what happened three years ago, and that his recent silence was code that he believed I wasn’t involved with anything to do with Shane and his car blowing up.
I hate myself for thinking I could even trust him or Liam.
Sometimes when things go south, it’s our fault, because we choose to blind ourselves to the harsh reality that’s always been right in front of us.
Julian has never given me a reason to be safe around him, yet I was. He never said anything other than the promise to destroy me and he’s doing just that.
Why then am I heartbroken and acting like he just destroyed more of my damn soul when I never gave him any part of me other than a single