“I’m nothing but a guilt fuck to you.”
“You have never been a guilt fuck to me.” Letting go of her chin, I get right up in her face. She seems so small and fragile with my great shadow overwhelming her light. “Answer my goddamn question. Do I still make you feel?”
“Yes, you still make me feel,” she admits reluctantly, refusing to break eye contact because that’s how fucking brave she is. “But it’s the worst kind now. It’s hurt and betrayal; it’s lies and confusion.”
“I still feel you too, Luna,” I tell her, impressing my words on her so forcefully she has no choice but to accept them. “I feel you so deep and so hard that sometimes, when you breathe, it’s my fucking oxygen that you’re stealing.” I watch her eyes widen as she takes a step back, stumbling in the face of my own revelation. “Shall I continue?”
“Why didn’t you tell me what happened six months ago?” She takes another step back, and then another, as if she’s scared of my answer.
“Because I chose to make amends instead. Because I chose to hunt down every single man who took you and hurt you, and kill them as slowly and painfully as possible. I had no fucking idea how deep my sadism ran until I had those men in a room with my knife.” I follow her step for step until I have her pinned up against the side of the house. “Because I made that shit right.” I say, repeating my life mantra for the second time today, as if it’s somehow going to fix everything between us.
“But you didn’t,” she says sadly. “I needed the truth. I needed it to heal, and you withheld that from me.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” It feels like someone just shot me again. I’m in blinding agony thinking I may have contributed to her pain.
“Maybe if I’d known about the Russians, about what they did to Dante’s daughter, about why you were hunting them, about why they targeted me, I could have come to terms with everything. I could have moved on instead of being stuck in some hellish purgatory screaming ‘why me?’ at the walls every day.”
She’s crying now, but she’s refusing to wipe her tears away. She’s making me drown in her anguish, and I am. By fucking Christ, I am.
“Do you want to know what they did to me, Joseph? Do you want to know every dirty, sordid detail? Would it help you to understand how hard it’s been for me? To fully grasp the peace you denied me?”
“No.” I turn away, shaking my head furiously, not wanting to hear a single word, but she keeps on talking anyway. I forced my veracity on her and now I need to listen to hers.
“They tied me down to a dirty mattress in a basement, Joseph. They pissed on me; they threw their drinks on me. When they got bored, they took turns fucking me, over and over again, to see who could make me bleed first. Truth or dare,” she sobs, her face collapsing under the weight of the memory. “Truth or fucking dare. Do you want to know what my version of that game was? Do you want to know which one they made me play? My truth was them choking and beating me until I passed out. My dare was seeing how many of their cocks I could take at the same time.”
“No!” I roar, as all my walls come crashing down. Every emotion I keep locked away inside is yelling out for attention. “No!”
“Yes, yes, yes!” she screams back, forcing me once again to accept her pain. Still, I throw my hands above my head, ramming the crooks of my elbows against my ears to block her out. “Do you feel me now, Joseph?” I hear her demanding. “Are you going to keep on deluding yourself, or is every part of you finally realizing what I am?”
Broken.
Unlovable.
The same fucking things I see when I look in the mirror.
I drop my arms and swing back around. “You think any of this makes you less of a woman to me?”
“Yes!”
“Never!” I take her face between my hands, ignoring the torture that’s splitting apart my shoulder and crash my lips down onto hers. I drive my tongue so deep into her mouth it’s as if I’m exorcising her demons. I drink her tainted sweetness like it’s an elixir. I feel her arms form a chain around my neck, her soft breasts pressing tight against the most damaged part of both of us, and I know I’m close to losing my mind for her. “Give me your pain,” I say harshly, breaking away. “Give me your fucking pain, Anna. Every nightmare. Every moment of doubt. Every scar… I want them all, and then I’ll heal them with my truth. I won’t stop healing them, because you are my truth, Anna. Your flaws are so fucking flawless. Forgive me, and I will make this so right you’ll wonder why you ever gave the past so much power in the first place.”
This time when I take her mouth, I temper my pace and violence, savoring the taste of her more than my possession.
“I thought I’d lost you in the car,” she says, clinging to my neck as we go down together. “I thought you’d died in my arms.”
“You will never lose me, Anna.” I take her jaw between my hands again. “You can never strip the light of her shadow, not unless you choose to let the darkness in. But you burn too bright and too brilliant to allow it, sweetheart. For as long as you want me to, I will walk this earth with you, protecting you—”
“I can’t give you what you want,” she confesses, her face breaking all over again. “Sex… I’m so scared. I may never be able to—”
“Then I’ll wait. I’ll wait a thousand lifetimes,” I tell her, meaning every word. “I will love this body whole again, but only if you allow it… Will you allow it, Anna?”
She nods, eyes wide and frightened, but trusting. So fucking trusting, that I want to take that fragility and build a fortress around it, and then hire a couple of fire-breathing dragons to patrol the airspace for eternity.
I follow the curves of her jaw with my fingertips, gathering up her loose tears on the way, smoothing strands of gold from her face. And then I kiss her one more time. As soft and gentle as a man like me can manage, which is still forceful enough to make her moan into my mouth. She’s the twister I’ve been waiting on, Cash. I’m so fucking sure of it.
It’s basic.
Deep-rooted.
Her rightness just sealed the fucking deal.
27
Anna
I can sense the stillness in a moment again. How could I have existed without it for so long? The notes are longer, thicker, and less staccato. All the bad stuff can’t touch me in here.
My body’s not used to it, though. My muscles keep twitching with inactivity, and my brain’s like an overexcited child. Yet, here I am. Lying in a white bathtub, in a dead devil’s lair somewhere in the middle of Colombia, watching the steam rise and the water turn from clear to opaque—recognizing that I’ve been running scared for too long, and that maybe I need to accept it and appreciate the silence, and then roll in it like catnip for a while.
My last thought makes me smile. I don't care about the chaos awaiting me outside these walls, or the list of my wrongs to make right that are daunting and endless. I only have this stillness, this moment, his words…
My God, his words.
How can a man as damaged and dangerous as him spin lines like Shakespeare? I believed in every cadence. I rebuilt from them; I forgave him. He reached inside of my chest, took a firm hold of what was left of me, and then sculpted it in his image.