Page 88 of Beautiful Dangerous

“You needed someone to talk to.” He looks at me, and my heart aches all over again, it’s a permanent feeling now, heartache, that fucker exists, believe me.

I lean back against the tree, I’m trying to keep my distance, trying to make this all look and feel normal. If we get too close, I’m afraid I won’t be able to do that.

“He wants to help us,” Lucca carries on, and I can see a weariness in his face that goes beyond the usual darkness. And then he bows his head, clasps his hands together, and once again his shoulders tense. As do mine, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to relax again. Not for a long time.

Until you escape the life you chose to live?

What if you can never do that?

What then, huh?

“We need to talk, Liv.”

I know. We do. But the likelihood of us having any real time alone together is slim. “I just want to get out, Lucca. I want to go.”

Those were words I never meant to say out loud, but I’m living on adrenaline and fear now, and it’s making me dangerously weak. Something I can’t afford to be.

He stands up, comes over to me, and I let him. I stay where I am, and I look up into his eyes, feel his breath on my neck as he leans into me, his fingers dancing lightly over my collarbone. “Let me handle this,” he whispers before pulling away, that’s all he says before he lets go of me and goes back inside.

I sit down, in Javier’s chair, the chair I vowed no-one but him would ever sit in. But all those rules, all those things I put in place while I created shrines and mourned memories of a man who’d never actually died, they’re dissipating by the second.

“You look good in that chair.”

I look up, and I smile at Javier, I’m finding it remarkably easy to switch to that role I need to play now. “No-one else ever sat in this chair, while you were gone. Not even me. Until today, obviously.” I get up and go over to him, tugging gently at his shirt collar as I tilt my head up to kiss him.

You have to do this.

You have to play the part…

“I wouldn’t let them. I only wanted to rememberyousitting there, reading your paper or your books, you always used to seem so at peace in that chair.”

He smiles, his arm circling my waist, and the second his hand connects with my skin I feel my stomach jolt, and not in the way it used to. “There are some places where it feels like all the shit we get involved with, it doesn’t exist. Places where pockets of normality are created.”

But it’s all a façade, and he knows that.

So do you. Now…

“If we had a child, could we not create more of those moments? Allow a little normality into this crazy world?”

Just the thought of using a child as something to help us forget the bad and pretend there’s even a modicum of normality in this life, it makes me sick. But that’s just another emotion – another feeling I have to keep to myself.

His eyes are staring so deep into mine it’s making me nervous, and I don’t know how long I can keep this up. How long I can do this. How long it’s going to be until he realizes the truth…

“We need to start making arrangements, Olivia. Organize our vow renewal ceremony.”

“I have a meeting with Eddie today.”

He smiles, but it almost feels like he’s, again, patronizing me in some way. “I know,mi amor. But you won’t be there all day, will you?”

I’d like to be. I’m spending far more time at the compound than I ever used to, but I like it there. I feel free, over there, I don’t feel that so much here at home, now Javier’s back.

Javier’s back…

You still can’t get used to saying that, can you?

“No, but, we don’t have to rush into anything, do we?”

Should I have said that out loud? Should I have given him any indication that I’m trying to delay this from happening?

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