Page 61 of Little Liar
She’s lying. She isn’t happy. I’m not making her happy.
What if we watched a movie tonight? Any movie. You choose.
Olivia tries to force a smile as she stands, the loss of contact making me grow cold. “Okay. We can do that. Come shower with me before I go back to work. I’ve been gone for too long.”
I hesitate at her blank tone, but as she glances over her shoulder on the way into the bathroom, she smiles.
My gaze drops to her ass before I jump to my feet and follow her.
16
Olivia
Malachi’s arms are tight around my waist while I stare into the mirror and apply mascara to my lashes. The side of his face is pressed to my back while I sit between his parted legs. I keep thinking he’s fallen asleep, but then he tightens around me some more and groans with moodiness.
His fingers play with the waistband of the sleep shorts I threw on after the shower because apparently sitting in a towel makes him feral. I slap his hand away when he tries to slide it between my legs. He lifts his head to glare at me in the mirror from over my shoulder.
“Learn to be told no.”
He sighs and buries his head into my back again. “You don’t love me.”
Laughing, I try to move forward, but his hold gets tighter. I huff. “Can you let me go so I can get my hairbrush?”
He shakes his head, pulling me into his body more. “Stay.”
“You’re so clingy,” I reply with a laugh, checking the time on my phone. “Shit, I’m late. Mom’s already going to flip about me being off all last week. Do you want her to hunt us down and arrest you for kidnapping?”
The silence is deafening. He’s thinking about the possibility of her intruding on us, popping our little bubble of happiness. If she appeared, he would probably be arrested for murdering her. Even the thought makes me shiver because it’s not like he isn’t capable. Malachi may revolve his entire life around me, but he’s violent and unpredictable.
I think he’d kill someone for me. I mean, he nearly murdered our father because he caught us at the top of the stairs. What would he do to Mom?
Maybe I should set up a meeting for us to all sit down and talk. Get it over with—rip the Band-Aid off and accept the backlash that will definitely come our way. They already know we’re together, so what’s the worst that could happen? They don’t accept us? We’re adults now.
Besides, I could use their help right now.
They know him—they’ll have an idea of how to help with the way he is. They adopted him knowing about his troubles and his issues, even helped him get his diagnosis—they’ll be able to give me directions on how to help him not spiral and lose himself.
I always knew he struggled, but this last week since coming back to him… Sometimes he’s here but he’s not. It’s getting worse, and I don’t know what to do. I try to make sure he takes his meds, and he’s refused to go to his therapy appointments this week because being separated from me is the worst thing to possibly happen to him, so he dismisses everything else to be close to me.
It’s the main reason I want to go back to work—I need Malachi to focus on himself.
He’s going to fall off the cliff, and I’m not strong enough to catch him.
He’s going to hurt someone—I can feel it. Unless he already has. He has an alarming number of weapons in one of the spare rooms.
I think he’s hurt people since he was released. It explains why the people Mom has thrown me towards have gone silent.
Images of Malachi throwing our bloody father down the stairs after beating him to a pulp make me inwardly wince. That was a long time ago—he’s not like that anymore surely?
Well, if we forget the fact he abducted me, chained me up, then continued to pleasure me against my will while hiding his identity. I had a feeling it was him. I pretended in my mind that it was him. Maybe that makes me ridiculous, but I loved every moment.
He has every reason not to trust me based on the fact I let a stranger ruin my body without knowing completely that it was him the entire time. But my delusional self knew, deep down, that it was Malachi.
It excited me.
It also scared me because I was fully willing to let Malachi take his revenge on my body. I still have his initials burned into my skin. He kisses them when his mouth travels down over my breasts, on his way between my legs to fuck me with his tongue.
He won’t apologize for the burns. It’s his way of claiming me. A brand that tells everyone who I belong to.
