Page 27 of After Dark
“I don’t blame you,” Josette said roughly. “But I also don’t know how long I’m going to be on probation.”
“Neither do I.”
Her eyes burned, but she nodded. “I guess that’s fair.” She couldn’t look away from him, so she stared at him instead, and everything inside of her felt like it was made of that silver gray. “I think I’d rather be whipped.”
This was a dangerous thing to say to a man of his predilections, but Arlo laughed. “I don’t think that you would.”
And there was something about this precarious feeling inside of her. It made her feel reckless. It was the opposite of the way she’d felt before. Too terrified to do anything, to put a foot wrong, to let a hair be seen out of place, in case he finally sawallof her.
It wasn’t that she didn’t care about that now. Itwas that, having already cast herself as the villain here, she didn’t see how much worse it could get. So why not say all the things? Because if she didn’t, what was the point of having broken them apart in the first place?
If her leaving didn’t mean anything, if it didn’t change things, then it had been pointless. An exercise in futility. And coming back was even worse.
She didn’t think she could live with that.
“I know you have a list,” Josette said.
Arlo sat back on his haunches, letting go of her jaw as he treated her to one of those sweeping assessments of his. “I have a great many lists. You’ll have to be more specific.”
“A list, a tally, whatever you want to call it. You’ve noted down all of my sins and I don’t believe for one second that you think we’re just going to sink back into domestic bliss without a reckoning.”
“Oh,” Arlo said, and that harsh mouth of his flirted with a curve. “That list.”
Josette tried to even out her breathing. “I think you should start working your way through it. I can’t make you trust me. I can’t make time move faster to prove I’m not going anywhere.”
“What you can do is take a whole lot of punishment,” Arlo said quietly. “And I already know this. So what does it prove?”
She felt something like despair rise inside of her. “If I can’t prove myself to you, what do we have left? How is there a way forward?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
She didn’t like the way he said that. There was no heat in it. It was a simple statement of fact and yet somehow it made her feel completely hollowed out inside. “I don’t know what you want, Arlo. Maybe I never have.”
“I think you know exactly what I want.” This time, there was heat. There was what looked like a whole thunderstorm, suddenly, crashing through his silver eyes and turning them a stormy gray. “You ran away to avoid confronting it. You subjected yourself to risky vanilla sex to avoid it. But deep down, Joelle, you want it as much as I do, because you’re here. You couldn’t stay away.”
Her chest was moving, too fast and too hard. “I couldn’t stay away fromyou.”
“The funny thing about that,” he said, leaning in closer, “is that you believe it. So that’s not a lie. But it’s not the truth, either. Is it?”
“Then why don’t you tell me what the fucking truth is!” Josette threw at him.
They both stared at each other, the shock of her actuallyshoutingat him hanging between them.
Josette felt herself go pale.
Arlo only studied her as if he’d never seen her before. After a moment, he shifted back and shook his head.
“Would you care to repeat that?” he asked, something silken and deadly in his tone—but there was that silver light in his eyes again.
“I would not,” Josette managed to say.
“Here are your choices,” he told her, very quietly. So quietly it seemed as if he was speaking from inside her own bones, making them hum. “You can try again, in an appropriate tone of voice and without swearing at me. Or we can decide that you’re tired of discussing truths I sometimes wonder if you even know yourself. But either way, Josette, you’ve been back ten days. You don’t like walking on eggshells. And you’re right to point out that I’m waiting for you to make a mistake. What this says to me is that we bothneed outlets for these feelings that apparently can’t be fit into words unless they’re shouted.”
Josette was still shaking, and she was hot, everywhere.
“I didn’t mean —” she began.
“I think we’ve moved into formality here,” Arlo said, still dark and lethal.
