The honest fucking truth, and she hoped he recognized it.
“I know that!” He flung his hands in the air, his own voice breaking. “Do you honestly think I don’t know that?”
The air seemed simultaneously too thin and too thick to breathe, and she wanted to fling open the car door and run. Instead, she stayed and faced him dead-on.
“Right. Of course.” Her lip, now bitten red and raw, stung as she gave him a mean little smile. “Except for one problem: if you knew that, if you trusted me, you would have said something.”
He clawed at the seat belt as if it were strangling him, finally stabbing at the release to fling it free. The violence of the motion didn’t seem to satisfy him, though, and his chest heaved with labored breaths.
“I was scared.” It was a blunt, rough statement, unvarnished enough that her desolate sneer faded despite her best efforts. “When we met in person, I was cautious about sharing something so damaging, and I think that’s understandable, even though you may not agree. Then I knew I could trust you, but I didn’t—”
Jaw clenched with frustration, he seemed to search for words.
“I didn’t trust that I’d say the right thing when I explained. I didn’t trust that I’d be enough to make you stay, once you knew I’d been hiding something so important all this time. From that first date.” His brows had drawn together, a mute plea for understanding. “I love you, and I was terrified you’d leave me.”
Her sudden inhalation removed all the remaining oxygen from the car. Dizzy and sick, she stared at him.
I was scared.
I love you, and I was terrified you’d leave me.
Even desolate and enraged, she couldn’t dismiss the naked honesty in the admission. Couldn’t pretend to herself that he was playing her, misleading her, wheedling for her forgiveness through strategic, manipulative vulnerability.
At long last, he was letting her see him without any barriers, any artifice, any deception between them.
And it was too late. Too goddamn late.
Outside the car, children shrieked in a game of keep-away from across the park’s expansive grassy field. The sound was distant, almost inaudible over the ringing in her ears, the subtle creak of her seat as she sagged into it all at once.
Her voice wasn’t angry or disdainful anymore, but still thick. Still despairing. “For months, you’ve known much more about me than I realized, and you kept that information from me. It’s a horrible violation of trust. You realize that, right?”
It was disorienting. Sickening.
Every conversation they’d had, every moment of their relationship, she’d now have to revisit and question. When had he lied? When had he simply not told her the truth? When had he used his knowledge as BAWN to further his own purposes as Marcus?
He’d definitely pumped her for information about Marcus as BAWN, she knew that for certain. And then—and then he’d cut off contact on the Lavineas server. Just like that.
“When BAWN s-stopped”—she inhaled through her nose, exhaled a hitching breath through her mouth—“when you stopped writing me on the server, I told myself I’d done something wrong, or you’d finally seen me and realized I wasn’t anyone you c-could want. You were m-my—”
Her sob shook her shoulders, and he bowed his head.
She sniffed back more tears. “Y-you were my best friend, and you just . . . left. With no good explanation, only some dumb excuse that was obviously untrue. You lied to me as Marcus, but you lied to me as BAWN too. You a-abandoned me.”
Tipping her head back, she stared at the gray fabric of her car’s ceiling and waited until she could speak intelligibly again. “You hurt me, lied, and violated my trust because you were scared.”
“I’m so sorry.” He sounded agonized. Helpless in the face of her despair.
“Your public persona.” Fretfully, she rubbed her forehead. “You said you’ve wanted to drop it for years, but you haven’t. For the same reason, I assume. Because it’s too hard, and you could lose everything, and you’re scared. Too scared to pick your next role, because you’d have to decide which version of you would show up on set.”
The statement didn’t require an answer, and he didn’t give her one.
Instead, after a deep breath, he squared his shoulders. “Can you forgive me?”
The question was gruff, his eyes glassy as he met hers.
She opened her mouth, then pinched it shut. Once. Twice.
When she continued staring at the ceiling, silent, he spoke again. “You don’t owe it to me. I know that. My love doesn’t buy me absolution, and I didn’t say it to sway you. I said it because you should know. No matter what happens between us now, you should know that you’re loved. Even if you don’t forgive me.”
Her cheeks were already tight with salt, and she was crying again. Still.
He loved her. She believed that. And in some ways—in many ways—he really was such a good man. So good, she’d almost believed they could make it work, against all odds.
But she knew the answer to his question, because she knew herself.
She didn’t want to say it, but she would. She had to.
“No,” she finally said. “I can’t forgive you.”
He made a raw, wounded sound, and that only made the tears come faster.
Rolling her head to the side, she finally looked at him again. He was a blur through her flooded eyes, his expression indistinct, and maybe that was for the best.
She knuckled away the wetness from her chin. “I want to go home.”
His love for her didn’t buy him forgiveness, and hers didn’t mean she’d offer it. Which meant this would be their last time alone together. Ever.
When he reached for her hand, though, she didn’t pull away.
Her fingers were trembling and cold, and so were his. He pressed a tender kiss into her palm, then carefully placed her hand back into her lap.
He clicked his seat belt and put the car in drive. “When we get back to Berkeley, I’ll pack my things.”
Her breath hitched again, hard.
But she didn’t argue.
Gods of the Gates: A Howl from Below (Book 2)
E. Wade
“Build a pyre,” Dido told her sister, Anna, as the wind snapped the sails of Aeneas’s fleet and speeded him away and away and away. “Upon it, place all the possessions of our life together. Our bridal bed. The clothing he once wore. All the weapons he abandoned.”
As he abandoned me.
Once, she too was a weapon. A sword, shiny and sharp and lethal. The Berber king Iarbas had found her so, when she’d arrived in North Africa and begged from him a small plot of land, a place of refuge before she resumed her travels.
“Only such land as can be encompassed by an ox hide,” she’d pled sweetly.
His agreement had come after the amused, tolerant laughter of his men. His wise advisers.
Silly woman. Silly request.
First, she honed her blade until a fingertip’s pressure could quarter a man where he stood. Then she took that smelly hide and cut it into such fine, thin strips that she could encircle a substantial fertile hill.
There she’d settled, she and her subjects, before expanding her rule outward and outward again.