But now, the symphony of this one made me want to cry.
Pressure mounted behind my eyes, a constriction fisting inside my chest as my head filled with starry memories and self-loathing thoughts and the honey-eyed reason for it all.
My quiet breathing quaked in my lungs, and I picked my hand up to rub out the tightness over my heart. My focus snapped down when the heel of my palm touched something other than my bare skin, finding a crisp white shirt that wasn’t there before draped over my body, neatly buttoned up to my collarbone.
That weighted tangle in my chest intensified as I folded the lapel of the shirt between my fingers, not sure if I should scream at the fabric and rip it off or bury my face in the woodsy smell of it knowing his scent would make the ache in my chest go away.
A heavy sigh answered from behind me.
I didn’t turn around.
The last image I had of him cemented my muscles and kept me from moving. James was a beautiful man, but even his beauty could be weaponized when he was spewing bullets off of his sharp tongue. I still felt them, lodged inside the gaping wound I’d been walking around with for five long years.
And now he’d brought me back to the scene of the shooting and dressed me up in warmth to pretend it was all okay.
But it wasn’t even close.
“The backdoor is locked from the outside, and my cuffs are around the front door handles."
His husky voice had been completely hollowed out. No inflection. No feeling. No color. Just words.
The familiar emptiness filled me though, spilling into my stomach and pushing up against that ache in my chest. My breathing came even harder because of it, digging deeper circles with my fingers over my breastbone to try and soothe the hurt.
That ache was made up of so many things, a fire-hot fusion of rage and grief and pain and guilt.
The guilt was fucking with me the most. I shouldn’t have felt guilty for running from him. James was a ruthless bastard who said a terrible thing. I was an impulsive mental case who ran away from him because of it.
I didn’t ask him to chase me. I never ran to be chased. The distance my legs took me was always inspired by the selfish desire of never coming back.
But James was a predator by design. He hunted me down every single time I ran.
And now he’d locked me up just like old times.
He and I were right back where we were a week ago, trapped in a room together where the air was thicker than blood. I scooched up to sit on my butt, knuckles folded against the rug over the hardwood floor.
Finally, I swung my head in his direction—only to find his attention elsewhere.
He wasn’t actually looking at anything, really.
His long fingers were steepled in front of his lips, elbows resting on his knees as he sat motionless in a chair next to the fireplace. He’d put some clothes on himself too, gray sweatpants and a fitted white t-shirt. His ink black hair was still handsomely tousled from either my fingers or his, and his eyes…
They were a sunset embedded in turmoil.
His golden irises had stolen heat from the fire, burning the deepest shade of yellow I’d seen yet. They were bronze almost, various hues of amber flickering in their depths with an intensity that made me forget what words were.
They must have been the thing making the tip of my tongue feel so heavy, but my brain wouldn’t help with the formation or liftoff. Guilt was a pesky motherfucker trying to wreak havoc on my heart for making him look so goddamn rattled.
Like I’d unraveled his entire existence by being so perfectly candid about who I was.
A broken girl who listened to her pain whenever it told her to run away and hope for death.
If my mouth was working, I would’ve told him he should have left me in that creek and this would have been over for both of us. I’d be dead eventually, and he’d be out one brat that made this last week of his life a living hell.
It would have been a win-win for us both.
But right now, James didn’t look like he’d been on the cusp of a win tonight. He actually looked like he’d never lost so catastrophically in his whole life, and it made my screwy heart throb in all sorts of funny ways.
Still refusing to meet my eye, he rose from his chair and went back into the kitchen. I stayed where I was on the floor, crossing my legs over one another, listening to the occasional thump of movement or thwack of a cupboard closing shut behind me.