Page 91 of Sweet Nightmare

“Do you think that’s what I’m doing? Playing games?” His face is as intense as the words themselves.

“I don’t know what to think!” I shoot back. “Because you won’t talk to me. About anything!”

“It’s not that easy!”

“Sure it is.” I’m not backing down this time to make him more comfortable, not easing off because I’m as worried about upsetting him as I am about the answers he has locked up. “You just take a deep breath, open your mouth, and let the words come out.”

He opens his mouth, then closes it. Shoves a frustrated hand through his hair, then opens his mouth again. And closes it again.

“Is it really that hard to be honest with me?” I ask after several seconds go by.

“Is it really that hard to trust me?” he counters.

Yes! I want to shout at him. Especially when I feel like I’m one betrayal away from shattering all over again.

But telling him that will only build the walls between us even higher. And it will just keep us at this impasse we seem to have reached, where neither of us is willing to give the other an inch.

So even though there’s a huge part of me that wants nothing more than to hurl a bunch of painful words at him so I can build that wall to protect myself, I bite them back. And extend a tiny, little olive branch instead.

“I know there’s something weird about the tapestry.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

I’M NOT IN THE

JUDE FOR THIS

If possible, Jude’s face grows even more shuttered. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Seriously? That’s how you want to play this?” I demand, moving closer so that I’m in his face. Or as close to in his face as I can get when I’m ten inches shorter than he is.

“I’m not playing at all,” he growls back. “I’m trying to protect you. Why can’t you see that?”

“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe I don’t want you to protect me? Maybe I want you to trust me, too.”

“I don’t trust myself, Kumquat. It has nothing to do with you.”

His words hang in the hot, steamy air between us. Part of me thinks that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, and part of me is just spinning them around in my head over and over again, trying to figure out if this is just another excuse. Just another lie.

But Jude doesn’t lie, not really. He omits. He clams up. He disappears when you need him most, but he doesn’t actually lie. So what does it mean that he doesn’t trust himself? And more importantly, why?

“Is this what you want, then?” I ask, and for once I don’t bother to hide my bewilderment or my pain. “To just keep pushing me away until I don’t come back? To destroy everything—not just what we used to be but everything we could be as well?”

The mask slips, and for a second I can see the torment underneath. I can see the pain and the indecision and a whole lot of self-loathing that I never knew existed in him. It calls to the pain inside me, has my whole body pulling toward him with a need to comfort even as he tears me apart.

“I just don’t want to hurt you,” he tells me in a voice gone hoarse with agony.

“You’re doing nothing but hurting me,” I counter as the storm continues to rage around us. “You’ve done nothing but hurt me for three long years. How can telling me the truth be any harder, or any worse, than what we’ve already gone through?”

Jude’s whole being seems to recoil at my words.

But then he’s reaching for me.

Pulling me into his big, warm, powerful body.

Holding me so tightly and so carefully that I can barely breathe from all the emotions welling up inside of me.

“It feels like I’ve spent my whole life trying not to hurt you,” he whispers against my ear.

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