“I can fuck whomever I want,” I tell him. “You don’t want me, remember? You called us a mistake. So if I want to have sex with every man in Vegas now, I can.”
“Over my dead fucking body,” he states, his fingers around my arm tightening. Without warning, he hauls me up against him, looking down at me with such cool anger that he makes my inside churn with arousal.
Wait, that’s not the appropriate response, is it?
“Kneel,” he says.
Fire flashes in my eyes. “Fuck off.”
His eyes narrow and he yanks open his passenger door, then shoves me inside.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I insist, as he slams the car door in my face.
Rafe drives like a bat of hell back to my place. He must not have thought to call and let Sin know he had me and he could go home, because Sin is still standing in my parking lot when Rafe gets me back to my apartment building.
I don’t get out of the car. I mean to, but I’m tired and overloaded with too many feelings, but the most prominent right now is stubbornness. I’m not ordinarily overrun with stubbornness at all, I’m normally a reasonable being, but right now, I’m so mad at Rafe for ruining us, for breaking my heart, for cheating us both out of something so good, I just want to punish him. I consider telling him all the nasty things I’m going to let other men do to me, just to put those pictures in his head, to let him know how it feels to be tormented by memories.
Unaware of my spiteful thoughts, Rafe walks back from dismissing Sin and opens the passenger side door. “Come on,” he says, his tone even. “Let’s get you inside.”
“I’ll go when I’m good and ready,” I tell him.
“You’ll go now,” he assures me, reaching in and grabbing me by the arm, guiding me out of the car. I try to jerk my arm away, but it’s futile. He’s much stronger than I am, and he only rewards my struggle with dry amusement. “Are you done?”
I ignore him and start walking toward my apartment.
When we get outside the door, I fumble around in my purse looking for the keys, but I can’t find them. It’s not even a big purse, but I feel from side to side, then the middle. It feels like my brain is floating in alcohol. It has been a long time since I was this hammered. I should remember, in the future, that shots are not my friend.
I should also remember that Rafe is not my friend. He’s a heartbreaker, and I knew it right from the start.
“I’m not going to remember any of that,” I mutter, finally locating my keys and beginning the difficult work of trying to fit the right one into the lock.
“What’s that?” Rafe asks.
“Don’t talk to me,” I tell him.
Since I’m still struggling with the keys, he says, “Give me the damn things.”
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“No,” I snap, hugging them against my chest. “I don’t need your help. I can do it myself.”
“You’re so drunk, you probably see three of me,” he states, snatching the keys out of my hand.
I don’t want him opening my door. It’s irrational, but it makes me angry as he takes the key and easily fits it into the same lock I missed four times.
My insides feel heavy again, and it takes a second for me to remember why. It takes a second for the memories of him in Sin’s back yard to come floating to the surface, but then they make it, and the word mistake plays on a loop in my head.
“I loved you, you know,” I tell him. “Not in the romantic way, weirdly, but as a person. Just… I thought you were the best person. Even your flaws. I even thought your flaws were great, because they were yours. I didn’t think you were perfect, I wasn’t naïve about it, I just thought… I just thought you were wonderful.”
“You were wrong,” he says soberly.
“Yeah. Maybe I was.”
I don’t know where I expect this extended break-up to go, but Rafe pushes me back against the wall, kneels down, and tugs my shoes off my feet. It’s a nice thing to do, and not something I expect him to do, but it’s nice.
It’s also the worst, because that nugget will get stuck in my brain. The image of Rafe kneeling to take care of me while I’m drunk nearly to the point of incapacitation. We broke up today, and here he is making sure I got home safe.
No, here he is making sure no one else fucks me. I’m being too generous with him. I’m giving him too much damn credit. Dammit, Virginia, quit that shit!