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I want to walk to the back of the house and tell Mitch that there’s an intruder on his property.
I’m about to pry my frozen fingers off the counter behind me when the front door opens. The front door isopen? We didn’t evenlockit? My eyes stretch wide and the blood runs from my face until Tate steps inside the entryway, fingers on the handle to close the door behind him. When he sees me his expression changes from warmth to shock to incensed concern. He looks angry as he rushes to me, leaving the door open, and he encases his fists around my elbows.
“River,” he says. His brow is clenched, and his eyes are running all over my face. I feel weak. I’m glad he’s gripping me so tightly because, if he wasn’t, I think that I would be on the floor. “Tell me what happened.”
My hands are shaking as I lift them to hold onto his forearms. I look down at them and my nails have turned purple. I’m icy cold as I think of what is happening. I know this reaction. My body knows this reaction more than my brain can comprehend right now, and all I can think about is the fact that I need to get as far away from here as possible.
“I need to go,” I whisper. He doesn’t hesitate. We don’t check behind us to make sure that no one is watching as he pulls me from the kitchen, I slip into my shoes, and then he hauls us from the front door to his truck. I start shivering hard, and I’m not sure if it’s because the temperature has dropped to frost level or because I know that someone is lurking out here in the dark. I don’t look around me to see. I don’t want to ever see it again.
What if I’m literally going crazy? There is no logical reason why I would have seen what I know I just saw. It doesn’t make sense. It justdoesn’tmake sense.
He unlocks the car and swiftly opens the passenger door, helping me lift up onto the step and practically pushing me inside. He strides to the driver’s side and hunches in, locking it as soon as the doors are all shut.
He turns to me and grabs my face in both of his hands. They are so comforting and warm that it almost makes me cry. His fingers wind into the hair at the base of my skull and he rubs his thumbs firmly up my cheeks. It confuses me at first because his touch is so much rougher than it usually is, but then I realise that he isn’t comforting me: he’s trying to re-circulate my blood flow.
“Your lips are white,” he murmurs disturbed. His face is twisted in pain as he starts pushing his thumbs into the padded halves of my bottom lip, pressing until I feel his warmth begin to seep inside of me.
“Tell me,” he says again, and this time I want to obey.
“That day,” I say, and I’m startled by my own voice. It comes out louder than I thought that it would and it reverberates around the car, making the silence even more penetrating. “You have to tell me what you thought was going to happen.”
Tate blinks at me, as if confused, and I can see his mind trying to reach the place that mine is currently at. He isn’t sure which day I’m talking about. There have been a lot of days, but only one day would merit this reaction.
As soon as he realises what I’m talking about his body tenses and stills. He isn’t sure where I’m going with this and, to be honest, neither am I. But something doesn’t feel right. Something has been amiss in our stories for too long, and I need to rectify itnowor I’m going to go insane.
“The last day that we were in school together before Christmas?” he asks. His voice is low and quiet, unsure. I nodand he runs his hand down his face, then through his hair. “Um,” he says heavily, “I thought… I thought we were going to meet up after the final bell. I was outside whilst you were in your classes, and I kept looking up at the windows to see you.” He swallows and undulates his shoulders, his eyes diverted out of the window. He looks like he doesn’t want to continue so I scoot closer to him and drop my hand to his thigh, which is widely spread and hardened under his jeans. I spot a slice in the denim above his knee and slip my hand into it. I’m instantly met with the searing heat of his skin, so extremely juxtaposed to the wintry tips of my fingers, and he makes a quiet groan. He rolls his head to face me and then he wraps one of his hands around the side of my throat.
“Do I have to continue?” he pleads, and I squeeze my hand around his naked thigh to encourage him. He groans again and this time pulls me by my neck so that he can reach my lips. He kisses me and a pained sound releases from his chest. He slants my mouth open so that he can kiss me more intimately, and he runs his other hand down my back, until he’s gripping me forcefully from behind. I trail my unoccupied fingers up to his belt and he pulls my face back so that he can look down, a grunt of desire escaping him.
“Continue,” I order and his distressed eyes flick back to mine. He removes both of his hands from my body and lifts his arms back so that he can grip the headrest behind him. The hot scent of his warm skin and cologne rushes over me.
“You weren’t waiting for me where I asked you to, and then when I found you, you were so angry at me. You… hated me and you didn’t want to see me again.” His tone is slightly bitter, but I catch the glints of confusion and betrayal in his eyes, so I run the hand that I have inside his jeans as high up his thigh as the denim will allow. “Fuck,” he grits out.
He closes his eyes and his hands drop to his belt, slapping the tongue of leather through the metal buckle. His fingers hurriedly push his top button through the loop and the zip down his fly, and then he presses his hand in between the denim and his underwear. He palms himself with anguished strokes over the stretched cotton.
“Why are you asking me this?” he asks, his eyes still squeezed shut. As I watch his hand I momentarily forget everything else that has happened in the past five minutes, but then I feel the silent chill again and my body stiffens anxiously.
“The note,” I say. “You forgot about the note you wrote me.”And without the note, none of this terrible stuff would ever have happened.I have to know the truth. What were his intentions if they weren’t for things to end up exactly as they did?
He opens his eyes and there is a new expression etched on his face. Defiance.
He lifts his arms up again so that he can grip the headrest the same way he did earlier. If he didn’t, I’m not sure what his hands would be capable of right now.
“I never wrote you a note, River,” he says, eyes staring intently into mine.
I feel the twist of a knife pressing in my gut. “Yes you did,” I refute. “You did give me a note-”
“Yes,” he replies, his voice straining with tension and a cacophony of emotion boiling beneath the surface. “I didgiveyou a note, but I neverwroteyou a note. Itypedyou a note.” He cocks his head, more confused than ever. Join the club Tate.
I press my temples roughly and then jolt my head straight. “You wrote me a noteandyou typed me a note,” I say, agitated now. “The day that I’m talking about… that’s the day that you wrote me a note.” The minute details between these discrepancies is making my blood congeal.
He shakes his head, seeming less perplexed now but much more concerned. “River, there was no handwritten note. We had a plan that day. Why would I write you when we already knew what we were doing?”
A horribly logical thought. I brush it off, adamant in my refusal to be manipulated. “I literally showed it to you outside when I saw you, before I…”Before I screamed horrible things at you. Before I clawed you, pushed you, shoved you. Before I absolutely lost it.
He turns a full ninety degrees in his seat and his eyes are molten. “I thought that you wrote that.”
I throw my head back against the headrest and it smacks hard. Tate immediately cups the back of my skull and laces his fingers into my hair so that I can’t do that again. His jaw is entirely rigid.
