He swallows, the muscle in his jaw standing out with tension. He plucks my hand from his chest and pushes it away. “Why do you want to know about my family?” he asks.
“Because I want to know everything about you,” I say, trying to hide the hurt from my voice. “And I want you to be the one who tells me. Don’t shut me out, Devlin.”
He clenches his jaw, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. “How am I supposed to believe you love me, Crystal?” he asks, his voice low and edged with bitterness.
“You?” I ask, drawing back. “How am I supposed to believe it, after everything you did?”
“Exactly,” he says, sitting up and staring down at me. “After everything I did to you, how can you love me? If you just need me to fuck you like I did in the car that day, I can understand that. I can make you cum, screaming my name, every Friday night. But let’s stop pretending this is more than that to you.”
“Devlin.” I sit up and wrap my arms around him, even though he’s still tense, his muscles straining with anger under my touch. He turns his face away, but I know this boy now. I can see the pain under that anger.
“Look at me,” I whisper. I take his chin and turn his face to me, like he’s done so many times to me. “I don’t know where you got the idea that I just want you for sex. As much as I love your penis, it’s not why I’m with you.”
My attempt at a joke falls flat. Devlin pulls my arms off him and turns away, sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to me and his head in his hands. He’s so fucking beautiful, a god of a man, with every inch of his glorious body on display, all those muscles in all the right places. I do know where he got that idea. Because he looks how he does, and he has money, and a name, and every girl in this town wants him. Probably a hundred different girls are all over him at every party, thinking that’s what he wants. And now he thinks it’s what all girls want from him. He said as much on the lawn one night, that he couldn’t give me money, and if I didn’t want sex, he had nothing else to offer me. But he’s wrong.
“Devlin,” I say, crawling over and wrapping my arms around him. “You have everything I could ever want. Just let me have it. I want to know you, inside and out. But I can’t do that if you won’t talk to me.”
“Telling you about my fucked up family is somehow going to make you love me?”
“I already love you,” I say, stroking his smooth, bronzed skin. “Please talk to me.”
He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “Yeah,” he says. “My dad cheated on my mom. There. Are you happy?”
“Are you?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “Now you think my dad’s an asshole, and you probably think that I’ll cheat on you.”
“So, convince me otherwise,” I say, lifting his arm and pulling it around me. I snuggle into his side, resting my head against his shoulder.
Devlin pauses. “No,” he says, shaking his head. “If you believe that, then you believe it. If you trust me, then you trust me.”
“Then why don’t you trust me with your family secrets?”
“I trust you,” he says, turning and laying me down on the bed. He lies beside me, so we’re facing each other. “And they’re not secrets. The whole town knows. If you really want to know, ask anybody.” He pauses, running the back of his knuckles up my arm, sending chills dancing through me. His gaze is intense and heated as he watches goosebumps rise under his touch.
“I don’t want to ask anybody,” I whisper. “I want to ask you.”
“Okay,” he says slowly. “My grandfather arranged my parents’ marriage, and they weren’t happy. If you want to know all the drama, you can ask. But I love that when you look at me, you don’t see the entire fucked up family saga of my name dragging around behind me. That’s not me, Crystal. This is me.”
I understand his words so much it hurts. With him, I can just be myself, not the Dolce daughter, and I love that. I also love that he feels the same about me. His family history is just that—history. I want his future. I wrap my arms around his neck and press a kiss to his lips. “Okay,” I say. “Don’t tell me, then. It doesn’t matter. What matters is right here.”
Devlin’s hand falls on my waist, pulling me to him. “Agreed,” he says.
“Just tell me one thing,” I say, pulling back. “How come you never told me you had a sister?”
“She’s not my sister.”
“Your… Stepsister?”
“And cousin,” he says with a grimace. “It is Arkansas, after all.”
“You don’t like her,” I say, noticing the change in his tone since we started talking about Mabel.
“It’s not that,” he says. “She hates all of us. I think the divorce fucked her up more than all of us—or in a different way, anyway.”
“That bad?” I ask, thinking about the impending situation in my house. Knowing my parents, though, they’ll just run away from it, pretend it doesn’t exist, and stay married forever.
Devlin shrugs. “A never-ending clusterfuck that took up most of my childhood. Mabel’s got Darling blood, but she doesn’t want to be a Darling. She hates what we do at school. She doesn’t play into any of it. I’d bet money that the day she graduates, she’ll ditch Faulkner and never look back.”