AllFreeNovel
Share Us
No.
No. He wouldn’t.
He was Lee.
“Lee.”
I became aware of the way he was looking at me. The same way he always did. Not as if I was broken. Not as if I were a treat he couldn’t wait to devour or destroy. Just with the kind of patience I’d never known otherwise, the exact kind I never understood even as I desperately craved that calming vibe.
That was why I came here. That’s why I crawled into his bed in the middle of the night. Because there was something about this man that brought me the kind of peace I hadn’t known since before. I needed it so severely that I didn’t once stop to think that he was a man.
Thick, and broad, and huge.
That bulge in his boxer briefs was terrifying in its own right, and the bright light shining in through the bathroom door gave me the impression he wasn’t even hard.
The mere thought of it had every drop of saliva in my mouth drying up.
I swallowed hard, then tried to pull myself together. To prove to him that he didn’t scare me. That he couldn’t hurt me.
You couldn’t hurt someone who was already dead.
Flipping on the light beside the bed, I grabbed the pack of cigarettes off the bedside table and put on the mask that I’d learned to wear in the year since I’d last seen him.
“The least you can do is let me have a cigarette first.”
If he noticed my gesture toward the weapon in his pants, he didn’t show it. He rose to his full height—which did nothing to calm the fear that lived in the back of my head—and frowned.
“The Kelly O’Connor I know doesn’t smoke.”
I wanted to snap back at him, to tell him he didn’t know shit. To tell him that before-Kelly might not have, but nobody knew after-Kelly. After-Kelly did whatever the fuck she wanted.
And I was still trying to figure out exactly what that was.
“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do,” I said with a shrug, then pulled that cigarette out of the pack and stuck the tip between my lips.
I didn’t think of picking up my lighter when I grabbed the pack. To be honest, I had yet to actually light one of the damn things.
Lee’s face pinched and he made to move toward me but stopped when he saw my unconscious response. I didn’t even realize I had reacted—curled in on myself like I expected to get hit—not until he pulled to a stop.
It became clear in his reaction, though. The leg he’d moved to step forward swung back. His shoulders stiffened, his chest seemed to cave in. That pinched look he wore pinched further; so much so, I might have found it comical had I not been so scared for my life.
From Lee.
The man who had been every single thing I had needed before he broke my fucking heart.
Knowing that didn’t make his presence any easier. Didn’t make my fear go away.
“You were supposed to call your parents.” His voice was quieter with this new accusation, but it didn’t make it less painful. He moved again, this time taking a single step to the side. That step had his body blocking part of the light from the bathroom, and the light behind me shone on him in a whole new way. Where he’d been gripping his leg earlier was blazing red. He had a matching welt on his side, and also one on his chest.
You did that, a voice whispered in my head. But another one answered, He deserved it.
My lower lip trembled enough, the cigarette tumbled free when I turned my head to look away. “I forgot.”
He didn’t call me on my lie, and it made me want to scream at him. To cry out that this wasn’t fair. He didn’t get to come into my life and treat me like this. Like I was someone who mattered.
Like he might somehow still care.
He’d proven that he didn’t anymore.
