Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 75968 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75968 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
He defeated my insecurity once again, and I felt foolish for letting it bother me in the first place. “Was this one of the secrets you mentioned earlier?”
He cocked his head slightly when he absorbed the question. “No. The purpose of a secret is to conceal shame. I have no shame in paying for sex.”
Then, I didn’t know what secret he wanted to protect. He killed people all the time, so I assumed it had nothing to do with that. He didn’t seem like a thief or a cheat, so that didn’t make sense either. I was curious but didn’t ask. “It’s hard to imagine a scenario where you would feel shame.” Perhaps it was something he’d done a long time ago, before he became a man, when he was still a boy trying to find his way in the world.
His eyes finally left mine, looking at nothing in particular, staring at the wallpaper on the wall. The quiet was amplified by all the tile and porcelain, reflected by his brilliant blue eyes. His gaze eventually came back to me. “I’ve only shared this with one person—Luca. But I should share it with you too, because you deserve to know the man you love and decide if you still want to love him.”
“If love was a choice, I would have left a long time ago.” I had no control when it came to Bastien. From the moment we met, I was sucked into his magnetism like he was a black hole that could grab hold of something as transparent as light. “Whatever you say won’t change anything, babe.”
He stared with vacant eyes, looking at my face like I was a painting rather than a person. His closed fist was against his temple as he rested his face against it for support. The shine in his eyes was gone, like a cloud had moved over his sun. “I killed my father.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected him to say—but it wasn’t that. From what he’d shared about his father, he sounded like an asshole, but he must have done something really sinister for his own son to kill him. I didn’t press for more information, treading carefully around this subject because I could see how sensitive it was.
“We hadn’t spoken in two years. I told him I was ashamed to call him my father, and then he pretended I didn’t exist for the final years I lived in the house. I received shit marks in my final years of school, so university was out of the question. I moved out at eighteen and didn’t hear from anyone but my mother. No call. No text. Nothing. Then my father came by my apartment when I was twenty…and it happened.”
“Why?”
He took his time choosing an answer to that. His eyes were guarded like they were bulletproof. “Because his love was conditional. It had to be earned on his terms and under his regime. If I wasn’t a soldier in his army, then I was the enemy. He said some things he could never take back—and I did something I could never take back.” He didn’t give me specifics, like even after all this time, it was still hard to talk about. “It wasn’t premeditated, but it wasn’t self-defense either. I snapped.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Didn’t know how to handle something so delicate. “Does your mother know?”
He gave a slight shake of his head. “No. If she did, she would never speak to me again. There are times I want to come clean because she deserves to know who killed her husband, but I know it would kill her. And I mean that literally—she would swallow a whole bottle of pills to make the pain stop.”
She was better off not knowing, in my opinion. “Does your brother know?”
He nodded.
“And he’s never told her?”
“For the same reason. He knows she couldn’t take it.”
I struggled to find the words to say, to comfort him when I didn’t have the story or the facts. “I’m sorry that you had to go through all of that.”
“He’s a lot sorrier than I am since he’s dead.” He looked away, grabbed his glass, and took another drink.
“Whatever the reason you did it, I love you just the same.” His father’s love had been conditional, but mine wasn’t. If it were, I would have left the second our lives became tumultuous. I’d be dating some guy who ran a restaurant or something. A normal life with normal expectations.
His stare landed on my face with invisible heft and stayed there, rooted in place for what felt like forever. “I know you do.”
7
BASTIEN
Thirteen Years Ago
I sat at the table in my apartment, rain hitting the windows as the droplets caught on the wind. It was a warm winter day, and we were getting rain instead of several more feet of white snow. I sat there with my laptop, my apartment a mess because I’d had a party over the weekend, and I still hadn’t cleaned. Some of the guys were shooting up and snorting cocaine. I joined them, but I wasn’t addicted like they were.