Smother (16 page)

Reese sucked in a shaky breath, told herself this was right. It had to be this way. She wasn’t strong enough to turn away—he had to be the one to do it. He had to end this, and maybe she’d be ended with it. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes at night, she prayed they wouldn’t open. Maybe this would do it—end her blackened heart in its stolen beats. Wipe away the bits of mocking light, cocoon her in a never-ending lagoon of night.

She opened the door for him. His pale brown hair was disheveled in a way only repeated attacks by angry fingers would produce. The air filled with his scent, taunted her, and made her want to relax when everything inside her should be screaming at attention. Even in his anger, he was a balm to her perverse soul.

Reese stepped back and closed the door after he entered. “Are you finally going to fire me?”

He whipped around, features twisted with rage and something else. “If you want to go, go!” he roared, flinging an arm out and pointing to the door. “I’m not keeping you here. I’m not making you stay.”

Reese stumbled back a step. His normally quiet voice rumbled with force, taking out any words that wanted to pass her lips with the aim of a boulder that couldn’t miss. She’d finally pushed him too far, but even in his red-lined fury, she knew he wouldn’t hurt her. She hugged that knowledge to her, wanting his irk to rain down on her in cleansing drops of what was due her.

She would take his words, his fury, and she would bask in it.

“I can’t go unless you tell me to,” Reese brokenly confessed.

“Why?”

“Because, even though I know I should, I don’t want to. I can’t. You have to tell me to go.”

He stepped toward her, his body strung taut, anger making his eyes shadowy and his mouth rigid. He took a stabilizing breath and his chest heaved as he struggled for control. “I’m not doing that. You will get no judgment from me. That’s what you want, right?

“Forget it. I know why you do the things you do and I can’t make you stop—I can’t do anything but watch. But also understand this—” Leo leaned close to her. “—I am not going anywhere.”

“I do horrible things.” Her throat was tight, and she didn’t know why she was stating the obvious. To remind him how bad she was, she supposed.

The anger faded from his features and he sighed. “You want me to hate you, and it isn’t going to happen. You won’t get it from me. This isn’t really you. This is some damaged part of you that you let take over. I’ve been there. I know.”

“What happened to you?” she whispered.

Leo shook his head. “This isn’t about me. It’s over for me. But you, you’re living it right now.”

Tears pricked her eyes as Leo flipped the magical switch that controlled her emotions. “You think you know me so well.”

“I do.”

She laughed—a twisted, brittle sound.

“You purposely do bad things to justify feeling the way you do about yourself. You think you’re bad, so you act bad. It makes sense somewhere in your head. It isn’t right, but to you it is.”

“You don’t know why I do what I do,” she said in a shaking voice. “You have no idea.”

“I know more than you think.”

“I don’t even know why!” Reese cried out. “How could you?”

“I know you don’t want to be the way you are.”

“I just screwed your friend and you’re trying to justify it. If I’m messed up, what are you?” She raised her hands and wordlessly pleaded with him to wash his hands of her, move on, and leave her in the past.

Leo flinched, and that barely noticeable motion ripped her heart in two. “Why did you do it?”

“To hurt you,” she confessed in a toneless voice.

“Feel better now?”

Reese turned away, rolling her shoulders. “No. I don’t. But I also want you to stop acting like you care about me or something.”

“You tell yourself that, but it’s a lie.”

She faced him, mouth turned down. “That’s where you’re wrong. I don’t care—about anything. Not you, not anything. Nothing.”

Leo rubbed his face, dropping his hands to reveal the weariness etched into his features. “There’s a difference between not caring about what others think, and not caring about yourself. Your problem is you don’t even care about you. And if you don’t care about yourself, how the hell is anyone else supposed to?”

“I don’t want anyone to, that’s the whole point.”

“That’s not true. Everyone wants someone to care.”

Just him. She just wanted him. She hated that need, wanted it gone. Couldn’t deny it.

“You know that saying about good things happening to good people?” She spread her arms wide. “I must be really bad.” Reese’s eyes stung and she let her arms fall to her sides.

“That’s a stupid saying.”

“It is, but maybe it’s true. I’m not a good person, so I guess I deserve all the bad I’ve gotten in my life, right? Except I was just a kid when it started, so how could I have been bad? Was I born bad? Did I ask for it without knowing? What did I do or say to deserve it?” The last words ended on a whisper.

She still didn’t understand it. She never would. How could Reese heal from something that made no sense to her? Pain was a part of her. Her heart beat with it, her pulse thrummed with it. It was stitched into her body.

Reese breathed hurt.

“I know what you’re thinking. Stop.” Leo moved for her and she moved back, caution in her eyes.

“Just—stay back. I need you to stay back right now.” She stared at him until he nodded, regret changing his eyes from gray to silver and adding brackets around his mouth.

Reese swallowed and took a deep breath. “Do you want to know what caring about others did to me? It meant not understanding how my adoptive father could come into my bedroom at night and hurt me the way he did. He touched me. He made me do things.” Her throat was dry, wanting to close around the words so they could not be heard.

Leo’s face paled and hardened, and that just made her angrier. She was just getting started.
Wait until you know it all.
He was disgusted by what had been done to her. Fine. That was fine. It disgusted her as well. But she couldn’t change it. She hadn’t even been able to stop it. She hadn’t even known it was wrong.

No one ever told her fathers shouldn’t touch their daughters that way. She’d thought there was something wrong with
her. Years and years of not understanding what was going on. Years of shame. Pain—more emotional than physical. Years of twisting her childhood into something ugly and diseased.

“He would wait until my mom and sister were asleep, tell me I was pretty and that I made him feel better. Told me I was the only one who understood, who knew what he needed.” Her eyes burned and her voice came out choked, but she forced herself to keep talking anyway. “He made me touch him, and then he made me let him touch me.”

The urge to vomit was sudden, intense. Reese remembered the slither of his rough hands on her skin, the smell of unwashed skin. As she’d grown, she’d realized it wasn’t right, and she’d fought, but it had never stopped him. In fact, he’d seemed to like it more when she resisted him. The only thing she’d been able to do, when helplessness and hopelessness had taken over, was tune it out, pretend it wasn’t happening, and stop caring. That defense mechanism had never left her, and it couldn’t, because if it did, she wouldn’t be able to tolerate herself.

Now there was a crack in it. It formed when Leo stepped into her life, and it grew the longer she knew him.

Leo’s hands fisted as his jaw set into a line of hard rock. His eyes shot fire into her, not leaving her, not even when she wished he would look away from her contaminated image. They seared her with intensity, unwavering and powerful. Why did he never look away?

“I would cry—at first I couldn’t keep the tears in. I would ask him to stop, plead with him. Tell him no, that I didn’t like it. I told him I’d be a good girl, if he’d just stop touching me.”

The tone of her voice was dead, just as she was numb. “And then . . . and then the tears became silent, until it got to the point where they didn’t come at all.”

Reese rapidly blinked her eyes until Leo came into focus. His shoulders were hunched with his head lowered, and yet those eyes that always seemed to judge her were riveted to her—no expression at all in them. She realized something as she stared at him. Reese expected judgement from him, so she told herself that was what she saw when she looked at him. He always tried to hide what he felt, and that was really what put a guarded look in his eyes.

“Caring about others made me scared to tell my mom and sister. I was scared my mom would blame me. I was scared she knew and didn’t do anything about it. I was scared that if I asked my sister if it happened to her too, she would say yes. I was scared about so many things. That’s what caring did to me.

“It made me weak. It made me stupid. I even cared about him. How sick is that? I just wanted him to love me. And he told me he did, when he was doing those things to me. So I guess that means I wanted it, right? Because I wanted him to love me and the only time I felt like he did was when he was raping me.” She choked over that word, not wanting to admit her true childhood years to anyone. But with Leo, she had to.

She’d just lay it all out for him and then they could be done. He could walk away like she always knew he eventually would and she wouldn’t have to try so hard to continue to not care about someone.

His jaw tightened. “Stop.”

“No.
You wanted to know why I don’t want to give a shit about anyone or anything, well, now you know! Now you know and you can’t pretend you don’t.” She brushed tears from her eyes. “Caring about others . . . made me think I deserved to be hit by my boyfriend. If I didn’t make him so mad, so out of control, it would have meant he didn’t care about me, ya know? So I pushed and nagged until I deserved to be hit.

“I did. I deserved it. He only got that mad at me because he loved me. The bruises on my face and body were signs of his adoration. The more he hit me, the more I knew he cared. I wanted him to hit me.” She pressed an arm to her midsection as nausea swept up through her stomach.

“You’re so fucking stupid! So Goddamn stupid. Come here.” Sawyer grabbed the back of her neck and squeezed, shoving her face toward the baseball cap. “Why the fuck would you wash this? Now it’s ruined.” He pushed her away, kicking her down with his boot when she stumbled to stay upright.

“I washed it because it was dirty! I didn’t know it would ruin it. I’m sorry, Sawyer,” she cried from the floor.

“You’re sorry?” He laughed darkly.

Reese slowly stood. “I’ll buy you a new hat.”

“That’s not the point! The point is that you can’t do anything right. I don’t know why I stay with you. You’re worthless. Can’t even not ruin a hat.” Sawyer showed her his back. It was taut, cut with faint muscle definition.

“I’ll—” He moved fast. The slap came without warning, the sound of it like the crack of a whip, stinging her flesh and instantly lighting it on fire.

“What are you good for?” he roared, chest heaving as he loomed over her.

She swallowed. She had to keep him. She would do anything to keep him. “I’ll show you.”

The pain and the pleasure were hard to distinguish at times. They came together, in a pair, and one was not allowed without the other. So Sawyer would hurt her, and Reese would let him, because then he would heal her.

Reese stared into brown eyes lightened by fury and whatever drug was in his system, and she just wanted him to love her. He was her life, all she had, and she would cling to him until there was nothing to hold.

Leo took a step toward her, brows furrowed. She swore she could feel his heart reaching out to heal hers.

“You stay back, Leo,” she warned, raising a hand.

His jaw clenched, but he didn’t move. The air crackled as black truths filled the space between them. If he touched her, or offered comfort in any way, it would be the end of her. Reese was the one to break eye contact.

She continued to talk, not seeing him as she lived in her past instead. It was an ugly bruise of blue and black, and she was the star in the endless role of victim. “Caring about others made me unable to walk away from Sawyer. I never could, not until I saw him screwing someone I thought was my friend, and even then, I don’t know if I would have been able to let him go. You see, he told me to go. I would have stayed. I was so pathetic that I would have stayed.”

Reese blinked and looked at Leo. “He hurt me, over and over. He hurt me and that is how I knew he loved me.”

He swore softly, partially turning away from her.

“Caring about others made me want to die when my sister did,” she got out in a disjointed whisper, her words broken, and she along with them. “I was supposed to save her, and I couldn’t.”

Leo slowly faced her, still as a statue.

Tears streamed down her face and she let them. “I drink to numb it all, but that only lasts so long. I have sex to feel pleasure when all I normally feel is pain. And then I feel sick from the sex. Any bad thing you can think of, I’ve done. All to feel something other than
this.
And then I just feel it anyway.

“Nothing works. Nothing makes it go away. I don’t know how to end it. I don’t think I can. It’s all so fucked up, Leo. Me especially. I am not a good person. I don’t want to care about anyone, all right? I don’t want to.”

His gaze lingered on her face before it shifted away. If eyes could bleed pain, his would. Leo slowly nodded, not looking at her. “All right.”

Reese’s shoulders slumped. So that was it then. She’d opened up to someone and he was done with her. Imagine all the drama she could have foregone had she only known honesty was all it took to push people away. “I’ll look for a new place to live and a new job this week.”

“No.”

She frowned as she met his iron gaze. “Trust me, I’m doing you a favor.”

“I don’t think you understand,” he said slowly. “You’re not leaving. Not like this. If you decide you don’t want to live in the apartment anymore, then you can go. If you decide you don’t like working for me anymore, then you can go. Not until then. Not before then. Both are yours for as long as you need them, or want them.”