He was gripping my neck by the time I finished. “There’s no fucking conclusion to this story, Will. To this nightmare.”
I smiled. “Good.”
And then he kissed me.
Tore off our clothes.
And we tried to find sanctuary within one another.
Gage
He didn’t know how to feel after spewing his past out at Lauren like that little bitch from The Exorcist and her not run screaming from the room, never to be seen again.
He should’ve known better. Known his woman was made of tougher shit than that. Tougher shit than him. Because she’d felt his pain. Every inch of it. She’d sucked it all up and taken it upon herself, attached it to her bones.
He fucking hated that.
Hated himself for giving her more ugliness.
But then he loved her for it. Loved her so fuckin’ much he could barely breathe.
And that’s why he didn’t leave her after she’d made it clear that she wasn’t going anywhere. That she wasn’t being scared away.
He didn’t leave her because he couldn’t.
So he did the best thing he could. He fucked her hard. Brutal. Beyond anything they’d ever had. He hadn’t tried to fuck the pain out of her—he’d fucked it into her. Unrestrained. All of his violence and darkness.
And she’d loved it.
He took her to the edge, then pushed her off it. Because she’d passed out with him still inside her. He’d literally fucked her unconscious.
He’d wanted to slip into oblivion with his dick still inside her, her hot and comforting weight on him. But he didn’t find it. Couldn’t.
So he’d slowly slipped out of her, taking more care with her sleeping body than he ever did with her waking one. He eased her glasses off her face, folding them and placing them on her bedside table, where she put them so she could shove them on upon waking.
She was really blind, his Will. He hated that in theory, but he fucking loved her in those glasses. Every time she absently pushed those things up the bridge of her nose, his cock ached.
He’d gone to the bathroom, warmed a washcloth and cleaned himself from her, the marks covering her milky skin hardening his cock once more.
He shouldn’t have found satisfaction in the evidence of the pain he caused her. But he did.
Then he watched her. For hours, just watched her sleep, her silky hair splayed upon the pillow. Her eyelids fluttering in her dreams. Her scent pressing into him.
His arms itched, not just with the truth of what was on top of them being laid out. Underneath, he itched for a fix, because the past he’d been running from had finally caught him.
No, he’d finally stopped running. For Lauren.
And he’d known it was coming, this new and visceral craving. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t sleep, because he was waiting for it to hit. Bracing.
He was glad Lauren wasn’t awake.
He could barely see through the need for the junk. Even with her right in front of him serving as an anchor, a reason—the only reason in the world—not to seek out nothing when he had everything in his grasp.
The craving still won.
So he stood. Dressed quietly. And skulked into the night. Where demons like him belonged.
When he got to the bar outside Hope where Lauren had unwittingly saved him and damned herself that night, he didn’t sit on his bike like he had then. Didn’t pause. The engine had barely stopped rumbling beneath him before he was halfway across the street.
In another heartbeat he was in the dingy alley where people paid for the drugs with scraps of cash and scraps of their souls.
He didn’t have any of his soul left to barter, and whatever crumbs were left were lying in a bed in a loft by the ocean.
Fourteen
One Month Later
Lauren
What followed after Gage opened the doors of his hidden closet and let all those decomposing, mangled, and skeletal bodies out was not peaceful.
That’s what books and movies told you, right? That after a couple’s demons met, made nice, and exposed themselves, there’s a peace?
Nothing left to hide?
There might have been nothing left to hide, but that didn’t mean there was peace.
Especially not since I woke up the morning after.
And everything was split into before and after, the serrated knife of truth splitting the days between when he told me about his past and everything that had come before. It didn’t stop the before from being important. If anything, it made it more so.
But it changed the after.
Gage was different when I awoke to him sitting in the chair across from my bed, the one positioned for the perfect and beautiful view of the ocean. I often got up and watched the sun rise from that chair. More recently, I’d been watching the sun rise with Gage bending me over that chair.
But he wasn’t watching the sun rise—it had long entered the sky, since I’d obviously been dead to the world longer than usual—nor was he bending me over the chair. The tenderness between my thighs likely wouldn’t have allowed for that, though I craved it the second my eyes met his clear and alert ones.