Page 4 of Wreckage

But even as I kissed her and her fingers tangled in my hair, I wasn’t thinking about her.

I was thinking about Elena. She kept popping into my damn head.

I thought about how she always sat alone, lost in her books. I was thinking about the sadness in her eyes, the way she never laughed, never tried to belong. I liked that she was sad. She deserved to be unhappy.

Because she was the reason my mother never came back.

It didn’t matter that it had been years. It didn’t matter that my mom had stopped calling, stopped caring. In my head, I told myself that if Lacey had never come into the picture, my mom wouldn’t have left us behind like we were nothing.

And Elena was a product of Lacey.

A reminder of everything I lost.

I gripped Rachel’s waist tighter, dragging her toward the nearest empty room. She giggled against my mouth, pressing herself against me, but even as I backed her into the bed, all I could see was Elena’s fucking face.

Her quiet sadness. Her sweet beauty. The soft allure of her voice. The way her body moved. She was grace personified.

I forced the thoughts out of my head, drowning myself in Rachel, in the alcohol, in the need to forget.

I just needed the weekend to be over.

Our clothes were off in moments. Rachel moved against me, but it felt like nothing. Just a warm body in a cold bed with no purpose other than to get me off so I could be lost for a small fraction of time. It was a cheap imitation of what love and desire were supposed to be.

I kept my hands on her hips, but my grip was slack. I wasn’t really touching her—I was somewhere else.

Somewhere where blue eyes burned into mine like they saw everything I didn’t want to admit.

I bit back a curse and squeezed my eyes shut.No. Not her. Not fucking now.

Rachel dragged her lips down my neck, sucking at the skin there and surely leaving her mark, but my body didn’t react the way it should have. I was still trapped in my fucking head, in the past, with a ghost who haunted every fucking facet of my life and wouldn’t just leave me be.

Elena.

I saw her at thirteen, sitting on the front porch, curled up with a book, completely ignoring the rest of the world.

I saw her at sixteen, standing in the kitchen in one of those oversized sweatshirts. Her hair was a mess from sleep, and her voice barely rang above a whisper when she spoke.

I saw her at eighteen, walking through campus, earbuds in, eyes down, as if she wasn’t real, as if she wasn’t right fucking there, ruining my life with her presence.

Every memory of her clawed through me like a predator toying with its prey.

I wanted to scrap her out of my head. She was a fucking virus infecting me every part of my twisted soul.

Rachel’s nails scratched down my chest, her breath heavy against my lips.

“Adrian,” she moaned, her hips grinding against me as her pussy squeezed my cock. “What’s wrong?”

Every-fucking-thing.

I tightened my hands on her waist and thrust upward as a way to put in effort. I forced a smirk onto my lips and made myself give her some version of the guy she thought she was with. It wasn’t like I was new to her. We hooked up way too often, and she usually got pissed when I was fucking someone who wasn’t her.

“Nothing.”

She kissed me again, but my mind drifted once more.

Because the thing was, I liked Elena being sad.

I liked the way her eyes carried her ghosts, her demons. I liked how she never really smiled, never let herself belong to anyone, and was untouched, untainted—because it meant she felt it, too.

---