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I shake away the memory before it can fully play out in my head, a living nightmare I’m always trying to escape.

We’re too close now, both breathing hard, like we ran here. Or that I chased her down.

What the fuck am I doing? Almost four years apart should have made a difference. And yet, here I am, right back in the same cycle, over and over. Chained to her in some way—and unable to break that tether, no matter how hard I try.

I need to leave. It doesn’t matter that not one of my questions has been answered and I’m nowhere near ready to let go of her now that I’m touching her again—but I know pain like the feel of ice beneath my skates, so intimately feeling it is like muscle memory. Hurting is the easy part. Wanting her just as much as I did at twelve, fifteen, seventeen—that’s much harder. There is no world where I can force myself not to care about her.

“What are you doing here, Lily?”

Chapter 11

Lily

Toren Kane swears the first time he saw me was in the sprawling well-kept gardens of my father’s estate.

“I plucked a Lily right from the LaBlanc gardens,” he would tease, when he was younger and more lighthearted.

But that’s not how I remember it.

I remember a house—old and abandoned, left to rot on the distant edge of our property where I wasn’t necessarily allowed to go (but did anyway), and a boy cradling a black eye. He was crying, and it made something in my chest hurt.

Now I feel that chest pain again, somehow renewed—mixed with something more vibrant. Anger that I don’t know what to do with. Frustration I have no use for. And what’s worse is that he’s in my space making me feel like this, ruining my things just by being here and smirking and talking to me like . . . like he’s a different person, and yet the same.

I knew Toren as a quiet too-skinny kid in ruined Vans and a hoodie pulled up over greasy long hair. I knew Toren as an angry teenager, who learned to fuel it into hockey and whose rage never touched the four walls of my bedroom.

So, this feels wrong, and yet familiar.

At least I feel something other than the numbness.

“I already answered you. I go to school here now.” My words are harsh, pointed, and it feels good. A release valve opening on an overpumped tire. I stand and step toward him. “Now, you should go. You already said you were leaving. Go.”

“Happily.” His eyes flash. “But you’re the one holding on to me, doll.”

I pull back, realizing only then my fingers are latched onto his shirt, tugging at him.

“Well, you’re the one who followed me here and keeps getting into my business.” I cross my arms tighter this time, like it might keep their wandering unprovoked at bay. “Maybe you’re the one still holding on to something.”

“Do you want to fucking play, LaBlanc?” he says, stepping into my space, walking me back until my back hits a wall and caging me in with his arms. My last name on his lips feels like hatred, but more potent. He didn’t call me that before. Always Lily or something shorter.

He’s so close I can feel his jeans, coarse against my bare thighs, though no other part is touching me. I can see the scar in his brow, the cut on his lip, the sharp point of his incisor as he tilts his face slightly toward my left side.

Toren leans closer as I freeze further, running his nose across the long line of my throat and up to my ear—and I swear I feel the light press of teeth to my earlobe, but it’s my right ear.

Toren’s lips move against it, like he’s whispering something into my deaf ear, which feels cruel and frustrating all at once. It feels like I’m six years old and no one has noticed that I’m struggling to understand them because I can’t always hear what they say.

Feeling the pressure in my eyes, I shove at him hard, though he doesn’t budge. Instead, he switches to my left side, hands grasping my biceps.

“C’mon, Lily—” he whispers there. “I thought we liked to play this game.”

We played this game as kids, to see if I could hear him or figure out his words. But it was nothing more than a farce for him to kiss and touch me, for me to feel him so close, relaxed.

We just wanted the closeness.

Now, it feels like a mockery of it. And despite my body’s reaction—as if Toren Kane himself trained my every muscle to respond to him—I can’t do this right now.

Everything feels raw, a frayed nerve he’s playing over to soothe his own anger and frustration and pain. I want to feel something but not this. Not like this.

“Stop,” I say, hands pushing on his chest. He pulls back, eyes darker than they were. He’s more affected than he’ll ever admit to. “This isn’t— That’s not what this is.”