Page 117 of Tempting Fate

Everything depends on me.

Forcing myself to ignore the niggling worries that hang over my head, I retake my feet and strip. Once I’m naked, I quietly open the bathroom door and slip inside the steamy room without Lily realising.

She’s standing under the water, hands in her hair as she rinses it. Her back is arched. The shower streams over her face. I run my gaze over my woman, starting at her closed eyes and ending at the blue polish on her toenails.

Lily is a fucking goddess.

Every inch of her body is flawless. As if she was ripped from the deepest recesses of my imagination and designed with only me in mind. It’s like her creator took every fantasy I’ve ever had and assembled the perfect woman. Blonde haired and blue eyed. Smooth, almost porcelain skin that takes on the barest hint of colour when she spends time in the sun. Her limbs are long and gracefully curved. Her tits are well beyond a handful. Full lips, pink and pouty.

She takes my breath away.

Always has.

Even with our seven-year age gap to contend with, the mistakes made while I spent her teenage years watching her grow from the tomboy who hung on my every word into the woman she is now, I regret only one thing.

That I didn’t fight harder to have her.

My dad always warned me my pride would be my downfall.

He cautioned me that life had a way of fucking things up.

I told him he was wrong.

Buoyed by the stupidity of youth, I’d scoffed at him. Didn’t believe him. Told him he was full of shit. Declared I was too much of a villain to fail to get what I wanted. With the same confidence I approached everything, I pushed Lily away when she kissed me as a fifteen-year-old. Content to crave her until she was legal, I watched her from afar. Forced her onto a pedestal as I remained celibate. Kept her untouched but never unloved.

I thought she was safe.

From me.

From everyone.

I believed I was the ultimate antihero.

Undefeatable.

Always one step ahead.

Only my dad was right.

Still, I never expected the downfall he’d predicted to come in the form of Lily’s blood.

But that’s how I discovered for the first time that I wasn’t invincible.

Holding my hands in front of my face, I swear I can still feel the warmth of her life force as it coated them that night. Her body broken, eyelids fluttering open and shut as she struggled to breathe, terrified me. The only thing that kept me sane long enough for the ambulance to arrive was the presence of Lily’s blood streaking my hands as I wiped it from her mouth every time it bubbled from between her lips. Her fight to live kept us connected. Kept me tethered to earth. I couldn’t lose my grip on sanity because Lily needed me. Her pain forced me to hold her together, hold myself together at the same time, when all I wanted to do was lie down on the floor with her and die if she did.

When her heart stopped and the paramedics pulled her away from me so they could attempt to bring her back, the dried blood that stained my skin became a damning indictment of my ruin.

It was the same colour as my damaged soul.

Black and flaky at the edges with pools of blood-red in the middle.

I didn’t wash my hands until the doctors informed us she would survive.

Twenty-one hours of wearing my failure for all to see.

Curling my fingers into fists, I fight to stop myself from falling into the black hole that threatens to swallow me every time I think about that night. It doesn’t work. My control slips as the reminder that I compounded my disgrace by allowing Alex to live five and a half years ago invades my head. Our current reality derides memories of that failure.

Alex is back, has already hurt Lily again, and I’m stuck helplessly staring at the beautiful woman who owns every part of my humanity through a pane of glass.

---