Page 81 of Tell Me Something True

“I fell and hit my chin on the corner of a coffee table.”

It was the same story she’d told him when he’d first asked about her scar ten years ago.

It could even be true.

But something told him it wasn’t.

“You really are nothing but a fucking liar, aren’t you?” he murmured.

But he was worse. He was an idiot for believing he held any type of advantage here.

For thinking she might trust him now when she’d never trusted him before.

“What do you want from me?” she asked shakily.

“I want you to tell me something true.”

His words were soft, barely a whisper. He told himself they were a command, much like the ones he’d issued that night at his house. That he’d only blurted them out to disarm her. That it was yet another attempt at dismantling her.

But there was no denying what they really were.

A plea.

And she knew it. She fucking knew it, her eyes going soft with sympathy.

“You first.”

Rage rumbled through him, like thunder after the lightning strike, shaking him to his core. How dare she ask him for something? Something she didn’t deserve?

Something she hadn’t earned.

He didn’t owe her anything.

She owed him.

He’d already given her too much. Had shared his thoughts and feelings with her while she’d withheld every one of her own.

He’d given her his heart.

And he’d never gotten it back.

Goddamn her.

“I was fucked up after you left,” he admitted, not fighting the edge of pain that crept into his voice. “Everywhere I went, there was a memory of you. The coffee shop where we met. The grocery store we shopped at. The diner we ate breakfast at on Sunday mornings. I couldn’t spend more than an hour at a time in my apartment because you were everywhere I looked. In the kitchen, barefoot, making cookies. Curled up on the couch reading a book. Naked and smiling at me in my bed.”

He’d felt haunted.

Cursed to repeat the same grief, the same torment he’d felt those horrible first days and weeks and months after his parents died.

“Every day I’d find another piece of you that you’d left behind,” he continued. He wondered, as he had at the time, whether she’d been so desperate to leave him, in such a hurry to get as far away from him as possible, that she’d overlooked them.

Or if she’d left them on purpose to further torture him.

“A pair of earrings on the dresser. One of your T-shirts at the bottom of the hamper. Your favorite coffee mug in the back of the cabinet. I threw out my sheets because even after washing them, they still smelled like you.”

She shook her head, the pink in her cheeks now a guilty flush. “Miles, I—”

“You wanted that,” he pointed out mildly. “You wanted me ripped open and bleeding after you left. Don’t act squeamish about it now.”

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