Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 62569 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 250(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62569 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 313(@200wpm)___ 250(@250wpm)___ 209(@300wpm)
I didn’t think it through.
Or maybe I did.
Maybe I wanted the torture.
Or maybe the idea of being anywhere but by her side was more painful than being by her side knowing she wished it were someone else.
“Okay.”
I lay down on the bed next to her. “Promise me.”
“What?”
“You’ll protect me and the baby. My life is yours, so is this baby’s.”
“As mine is yours.”
“Will I be a good mom, you think?”
I smiled up at the ceiling. “The baby will probably know how to talk before it can walk, so yeah—”
She rolled toward me. “Mean.” She flicked my nose. “Sorry I fell asleep on our wedding night.”
“You’re tired, sad, and pregnant. What else would you do?” I shot her a quick glance and looked back up at the ceiling.
Her hand slid around my neck, slowly tilting my head toward hers. “I’ll be loyal. I swear it.”
“I know.” That was the problem. She was too damn loyal, to his memory, to my choice to take the brunt of everything.
Loyalty be damned, I just wanted to kiss the word out of her body and purge it from her soul.
Her eyes locked in on my mouth. “Remember when you rejected me?”
“Vividly. Why?”
“Do you have the will power now?”
“Absolutely,” I lied. “Why?”
“Because you’ve been trying really hard not to look down,” she teased.
I cracked a smile. “I’m not perfect, and your body is mine. It’s not wrong to stare at what belongs to me, right?”
“Then can I stare at what belongs to me?”
Yeah, because that was a good idea, to show her a fully erect man in bed with her just waiting to pounce. “If you want, but I highly doubt it’s a good idea.”
“Why?”
“You scare easily.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Do not.”
“You slept with the lights on for five years after watching the entire Scream series and then blamed me for turning it on in the first place—which I didn’t.”
“You were older. It was more believable,” she pointed out.
I rolled my eyes. “You scream when you see horseflies.”
“They bite.”
“So do I. My point is made.” I started to move when she grabbed me by the arm and then crawled on top of me, straddling me completely. “What are you doing?”
“I’ll regret this.”
My heart sank. “Me? You’ll regret me?”
“No, I worded that wrong. What I’m saying is that I know you aren’t getting anything out of this, and while I can’t move on because it feels like betrayal, I can at least give you a wedding night, right? I can do this for us. And then we just live as really good roommates.”
“I take it back, you’re scarier than me, I don’t like this story at all.” I started to move away from her, lifting her body off me. “I’m not a pity fuck, Raven.”
Her face fell. “I didn’t mean—”
“Come to me.” I sat up and rubbed my hands down my face. “Come to me when the ghost of him is gone, when nothing stands between us but skin, when we’re emotionally bankrupt and completely stripped of everything that makes us human, when it’s just us against the world. Come to me then. Not now, when it’s convenient, when I’m convenient. I may be a monster, I may be a De Lange, but one thing I have left is a tiny ounce of pride. Let me keep it, Raven. God, let me keep it.”
I left.
I grabbed a pillow and the bottle of whiskey and went to the balcony to cool off.
She didn’t see how weak I was.
Or that my hands shook.
Or that she’d hurt me in unimaginable ways. How could she know that my ex’s very last action was to tie me up and take advantage of me only to say I would have been no different than the same De Lange whores we used to sell on the market.
Just as tarnished.
A means to an end.
A body to use.
A soul that was lost long ago.
If Raven was lost in her grief, then I was lost in my inability to gain back what had been taken from me and the shame that went with it.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
Choose not to feel.
And if you must, pick rage, it hurts so much less than love.
20
“The One where you hate who you’ve become and you choose it anyway.”
Raven
“He’s good with kids.” Serena was sitting next to me at my dad’s house. We were supposed to be opening wedding gifts then heading back to campus, but my dad decided it would be more fun to not just open gifts but also throw a random cornhole tournament.
Any excuse to play games without violence, though most of their tame games ended up with bets, bullets, and bruises.
I watched Ace grab Spiderman and spin him around, at this point since they were all in super hero costumes it was just easier to call them by their hero names.