Page 147 of Until I Own You

His eyes are on me. I can feel him watching. trying to understand where my head is at. Trying to read me the way he does in a scene.

I touch my collar, cool feeling of metal grounding me in reality.

Seth splits the silence with two words. “I’m sorry.”

I frown. “Why are you sorry?”

He looks off, his bad hand resting in his good one. “I should have gotten to you faster.”

“You got there before anything bad happened,” I say.

“That’s not true.” He frowns. “One moment with that guy was one moment too many. I should have been down there with you.”

“Seth–”

“When I saw you, I should have gone down there.” His jaw his hardened, tone is cold. But it isn’t standoffish. His coldness is to himself, something I’ve never heard from him. “I was too fucking prideful.”

I shake my head. “You couldn’t have known.”

“But I knew you were mine,” he says with such strength I almost fall over.

His mouth is taut. His nostrils flare.

This all hurt him too. Not only the dislocated finger. All of it.

“And I should protect what’s mine,” he continues.

I want to reach out and touch him. But touching anyone right now sounds hard. “Well, you did,” I say. “You protected me.”

He looks down. “I wanted to kill him.”

“Me too,” I say with wryness.

Seth looks at me, eyebrow raised, small smirk on his lips.

I try to smile too, but it must look crooked and strained because Seth’s smile fades.

I know I have to tell him the story. The truth. “I knew him,” I say in a soft voice.

“…What?”

I chew on my lower lip.

The stitches of the past have been torn open. I can’t keep the memories locked in anymore.

No one knows my story. Not even my father. But Seth should know. Because I am his. And he shared so much with me in Key West. Bore it all to me.

Now, it is my turn.

“Zack. His name is Zack,” I say. “He’s my…ex-boyfriend.”

Seth’s eyes widen. “Your ex-boyfriend?”

“You never knew about it because I made sure you didn’t. College,” I say.

He continues to stare at me.

“I went all the way to fucking Iowa so you couldn’t have eyes on me.” Two years in Iowa, two of the longest years of my life away from my beloved New York, all in the name of an independence I found out I hated. An independence that punished me. “Zack and I started dating at the beginning of my sophomore year and he…” I swallow. “You remember how I was in the hospital for a bit? And then I came home?”

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