Page 6 of After Dark
She let out another breath, though he could see that this one was tinged with something like temper. The temper he’d always sensed in her, though she’d showed it very, very seldomly. And he was too much of a Dominant, in every sense of the term, not to find that a very deep turn on.
“This is harder than I thought it would be,” Josette said quietly. “Maybe I should have expected that. But this is what I want to say to you, Arlo. I love you. You know that.”
“I do know that,” he shot back. “But what the fuck does love matter if I can’t trust you to talk to me? To tell me what’s happening with you? Is it really love or do you just like the way I make you come?”
She nodded, jerkily. “I deserve that.”
When she swallowed, he watched the way her throat moved and felt it echo all the way through him, like he already had his cock there. His dick responded to that notion enthusiastically. But then, his dick didn’t care about trust.
“Maybe it’s a shitty love, but all of it’s yours,” Josette said. “I couldn’t run away from it. I couldn’t get rid of it. And I tried.”
He kept his face impassive. “What do you want me to do about this? I assume that’s why you’re here, right? You want something from me.”
She ran a hand over her mouth and he thought he saw the faint hint of her lips trembling. Though when she pulled her palm away, they were pressed into a straight line. He still felt like an asshole.
“I don’t know,” she said, as if that hurt. “I just wanted to make sure you knew that. And that I had to leave, but it wasn’t because of you. It was because of me.”
“Yeah? And you found yourself out there?”
“I found a lot of answers.” She stood a little straighter. “I’ll be honest with you —”
“Wouldn’t that be an exciting change,” he said, because he couldn’t help himself.
Her expression turned rueful. “Ouch. But fair.” She smoothed her curls back from her face. “I was going to say that I got a lot of answers, but I didn’t like them. And they all brought me back here. I don’t know what that means. I fully understand that you might not want anything to do with me. I know that I broke something precious. Chances are, it can’t be repaired.”
“No,” he agreed, his voice hard. “It can’t.”
And the woman he’d known would have crumbled at that. He could see that she really had changed, and the trouble was, he was still too fascinated by her not to admire that. She didn’t fall apart. She didn’t wrap her arms around her torso while tears welled up in her eyes, like a kicked puppy. She wasn’t as raw as she’d been before.
Arlo could see the pulse in her throat, wild and hot. He could hear the deep breath she took, as if she was trying to regulate herself. She certainly didn’t look happy, but she looked as if she would survive this conversation, whatever happened.
The man who’d loved the fragile version of her, who’d worried that too stiff a wind might carry her away, loved seeing that more than he wanted to admit.
The woman he’d known before had been poised to shatter. It had all been eggshells and excessive care. This wasn’t to say that he hadn’t taken great pleasure in taking care of her, because he had. But he’d always been worried that he would accidentally hurt her.
Not with the games they played, because physical painmade her glow. It was the emotional shit. She always seemed like she was made of glass.
Tonight it was very clear to him that was no longer the case. And he wanted to tell himself that he was no longer the man who’d dreamed of seeing her like this, able to stand on her own even against him, but he couldn’t.
“Thank you,” she was saying. “I wasn’t sure if you would speak to me at all. I appreciate that you did.”
“We can’t repair what we had,” he told her, quietly. Intently. “Because if you could leave the way you did, what we had was bullshit.”
Her eyes shot up and fixed to his. He knew exactly why he’d ever pretended otherwise, but the truth was, there was never going to be any scenario where he didn’t give Josette another chance.
Because there was never going to be a part of him that didn’t belong to this woman. He’d spent eighteen months trying to pretend otherwise to no avail. It had been a very long year and a half trying to excise her influence on him, to cut it out of his bones.
In all his life, in all his hellish years, she was the only thing that he had ever loved.
Turned out, that shit didn’t go away no matter how much he wanted it to. There was no getting it out. It was a part of him now, like all his scars.
Arlo had told himself a lot of vibrant little fantasies, pretending that he might turn her away if she ever came crawling back. That he might laugh in her face or something equally impossible to imagine when she was standing here before him, still every single one of his dreams come true, or close enough.
He’d had a lot of time to think about that, too. Thealmostpart. Strip away all that perfection and what wasbeneath it? What would it look like if they started honest and stayed that way? What if he showed her that they all had scars? That scars were nothing but stories, and the stories they made together could beat the ones she didn’t want to tell him, every time. He’d told himself that was a pipe dream when she was gone. It had hurt to imagine it.
But here she was, like he’d conjured her out of the bay himself, and he needed to know.
Heneededher, was the thing. It was a funny feeling to understand only after she’d left that she was the thing that made him whole. Something he’d never imagined he would be, or could be, before her.
