I fought against the impact those words had, almost pushing me off my feet. But I had to fight.
Not for me.
For him.
“See, I think you’ve got some image of me, some little fucking made-up version of Rosie in your mind. The sweet girl who lost the genetic lottery and was raised by wolves. The little princess who you’ve now noticed needs saving and have taken the job of doing so.” I pointed my gun to the body on the floor. “In case you haven’t noticed, princesses don’t murder men right in front of the police officer they just happen to….” I caught myself before I said “they just happen to love.” Then I continued, like the stutter in my speech and the hole in my shield hadn’t been revealed. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a wolf too. And I’m not ashamed of that. I’ve never been ashamed of who I am. Until you look at me like that. And despite how much I love my family, how I’ve learned to love myself, this little evil, fucked-up part of me hates all of that. Everything that makes me me, because that’s exactly what stops you wanting me. And that fills me with so much self-loathing I can’t even breathe around it. Around you.”
His face contorted in pain at my words. Real pain, like I’d taken the broken edges of myself, made them tangible and sliced through his chest with them.
“Rosie. I—”
I held up my hand, both to silence him and to physically stop his advance. I needed the distance between us right then, nothing else holding me together but the empty ear that pressed against me with our separation.
“No,” I snapped. “I’m not done.” And I wasn’t. I was on a roll. It happened now and then when I was really excited or really pissed off. Or, as I was quickly discovering, when I was really fucking heartbroken.
“This Rosie, you’ve made her by taking the real me, warts and all, and smashing me into little pieces. And you’ve scooped up the things you like about me, the things that are convenient about me, glued them all together and made a little mosaic of me. The broken pieces that are unused are the things that are inconvenient to you. Things that don’t work for you. My little transgressions, both by purpose of identity and accident of biology.” I sucked in a painful breath. “You see, those things that you’ve left out of your little mosaic, left to be swept up and discarded? Those are the integral things that make me me. And despite what I want from you, despite the fact that I want—” I stuttered on the word I almost said. Everything. I wanted everything. I straightened my shoulders. “Despite the fact that I want something different than the situation we find ourselves in, I won’t break myself in order to make that happen. I won’t let you break me to do that either.”
It was a lie, that last part. He’d already broken me. At five years old, I was split in two with the love for exactly who I was and that ugly and secret yearning to be anybody else as long as it was someone Luke could see.
Luke waited a long time after I’d spoken the last word. Presumably for me to decide I wanted to say something else. Not that I could; I’d yanked out every single word from its hiding place in those soft parts of me and flung them at him like bullets.
The chamber was empty.
I watched him and came to the conclusion that he wasn’t just waiting. He was inspecting my words like he might the statement of a criminal, testing them for inauthenticity, to see if he could find the lie.
“You think I want to break you?” he said finally, voice clear and even, eyes granite.
I fought to mimic the blank look on his face. “No, I don’t think you want to.”
He continued to stare, mulling over my harsh words with lack of elaboration. “You may be right, Rosie,” he murmured, the coolness gone from his voice as vulnerability snaked in. “Despite me wanting to rip off my own arm before I let hurt come to you, before I hurt you myself. You’re right and you’re wrong. It’s not the things that are… inconvenient”—he frowned using my word, as if it tasted bitter—“about you that I want to discard. It’s the things about myself. Those things I want to rip out but can’t, because they’re like fucking barnacles clinging to the inside of me. I can’t fucking get them off.”
He stared at me, his gaze juxtaposing the desperation in his voice. “But I’m not the only one who wants to leave broken pieces at my feet. You’re making your own mosaic too, babe, no matter which way you look at it. You’re focusing on all the things that are part of you keeping us apart. But you’ve made your own version of me, out of the broken pieces you’ve chipped off. The ones that are too shiny, too much of a mirror to show you a little piece of reality. The reality that you’ve been using excuses and your love of your family to forsake your happiness.”
I stared at him. For a long time. Under normal circumstances, it would’ve been a long time; when I was dirtied, inside and out, beaten, and smelling the pungent aroma of death that circled around the room, originating from the body on the floor, it was a lifetime.
Maybe more than one of them.
Maybe it was all the lifetimes I could’ve had, that we could’ve had if we’d made different decisions, if we were different people.
But no matter how many times I changed my hair color or my wardrobe, I was always going to be the same person.
So was Luke.
And our decisions, like his to pull that trigger minutes before, they were as lasting as a scar. They were there in the flesh of our past, were obscuring the growth of something new for the future. Obscuring it altogether.
“My happiness?” I repeated. “And what would you know about that?”
Luke watched me, his face struggling with different emotions. By the way he held his chin, I knew he was frustrated, even beyond that, at the fact that we were standing there having that conversation while I was hurt. We were having that conversation before he could help me.
He couldn’t.
His face also showed something else. Tenderness, but something intense as well, a full glimpse at what he’d only hinted at through the years.
His feelings for me.
Perhaps his love for me.
The thing I’d wanted him to show my entire life. To acknowledge. You always think you want your dreams and fantasies to come true, but then when they enter the realm of reality, they’re tainted, blackened, and tarred by that reality.
It didn’t matter. I realized that. We could both want each other, but we couldn’t have each other.
He stepped forward, though he couldn’t completely, considering there was a dead body between us and all.
He frowned down at it for a beat, then stepped over it, without even blinking, so he could frame my battered and bloodied face in his hands.
“I’ll admit that I don’t know much about your happiness,” he rasped. “About being the reason for it. For making it. But I’m gonna learn, babe. I want to learn. I’ve wanted to learn my whole fuckin’ life, Rosie. I was just too fucked up.”
“I’m fucked up too,” I whispered.
He eyed me. “So let’s be fucked up together.” It was an invitation, that look, those words, the fact that he’d stepped over the body he’d created to get to me instead of stepping away from it to call it in.
It was that pivotal moment.