AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I raise my eyebrows. “I can’t stop men from talking, June. My brother thought I could. But if I went around cutting every tongue that said something I didn’t like, I’d have an army of mutes and a mountain of tongues and neither one would do me a damn bit of good. Not that it stopped him from pleading with me anyway.”
She nods, shaken but understanding. “W-when was this? How long ago?”
“The first time he formally approached me about returning was five years ago.”
She sucks in her breath. “That was… around the time we met.”
Before or after—that’s the question swimming around in her eyes. But she doesn’t allow herself to ask me. Instead, she wraps her arms around her body like that’s the last thing keeping her intact.
“Angela, she… she said certain things. About her pimp.” She sniffles, then catches herself and stiffens her chin proudly. “That he was charming. And she thought he cared about her. At the beginning, at least.” She stops for a moment to settle her shaking voice. “It reminded me of Adrian. That, and… and the ring she described.”
“June,” I say, placing a hand on her shoulder, “you need to breathe.”
She looks up at me as though maybe I have the lifeline she needs. “I made excuses for him for so long,” she says through the half-formed sobs. “Whenever he said something cruel, or got a little aggressive with me, I explained it away. Sometimes,Ieven comfortedhimafter the fact. He was always sorry in the mornings. He was always sorry when he was sober.” She shakes her head in self-disgust. “I never thought of myself as a fool.”
“You’re not a fool, June.”
She laughs humorlessly. “Of course I am. I look back at every sincere moment I thought we had, and now, it just feels like… it feels like he used me.”
I want to reach out. I want to touch her. But it feels wrong to do that now, when she’s trying to unravel her past with him. All this shit is melting together. There are no more boundaries to keep the world in order. It’s just a blood-soaked fucking mess from start to finish.
“He was real to me,” she murmurs. “But was I real to him? Was I anything to him?”
“I know he cared about you,” I tell her, because as much as I want her to hate Adrian, I don’t want her to feel like he never loved her. “He tried to get sober for you, June. He didn’t succeed, but he tried, again and again. It wasn’t for anyone else that he made the attempt.”
I can see her trying to cling to those words, but they might have come too late.
“His sobriety attempts never lasted though,” she says. “I suppose that says it all, doesn’t it? I wasn’t enough.”
“Don’t do that to yourself. Don’t blame yourself for his weaknesses.”
“I can’t really trust myself anymore,” she whispers softly, as if she’s talking to herself. “I thought what we had was real. I thought he really loved me.”
“Not everyone’s version of love looks the same.”
She locks her eyes on me, desperation mingling with sadness. It’s like she’s experiencing his death all over again. My heart—what’s left of it—breaks right along with hers. “You know what’s insane?”
“Tell me.”
“I feel like I’m making the same mistakes all over again. Because,” she says, and then stops short, as if that’s the only thing she wanted to say. She swallows hard and takes a breath that leaves her shoulders shaking. “Because lately, I’ve realized that… that I have feelings for you.”
I’m not expecting that. I’m not sure what she’s expecting, either. But to my surprise, when she meets my eyes, it’s not even expectation I see there. Just… resignation. Disappointment, perhaps. Masochism, almost certainly.
“And you wanna know what thereallycrazy part is?” she says, glancing away from me self-consciously. “I actually thought for a moment there that you might have feelings for me, too.”
Jesus Christ.My entire body feels like a fucking live wire, and for the first time in my life, I have no idea what to do about it.
“But like I said, I can’t trust my own judgment anymore,” she says. “I’m only saying this because I’m so, so tired of pretending. Why even bother? The truth is pretty damn obvious. I stopped fighting you because I started to care about you. I resigned myself to living here because I wanted to be close to you. And when you mentioned the wedding…” She looks down at the ring on her finger. It glints back at both of us like it’s alive, like it knows what’s happening between us. “I was actually excited. Because even though you told me it was fake, somehow, I managed to convince myself that maybe a small part of it was real.”
What the fuck is this feeling I’m having? Nerves? Is this what nerves feel like? Is this how it is to be human, to be vulnerable, to be alive?
If so, I despise it.
“I was willing to go along with everything, the pretense, the fake wedding, all of it, because I’d convinced myself that you cared about me. But—if that’s not true, if I’m just a pawn in your game… please tell me,” she begs. “Please let me go.”
It takes me a dozen painful, thudding heartbeats to realize she’s waiting for an answer. She’s waiting for me to confirm or deny.
Do I have feelings for her, or don’t I?
