Page 177 of Green Flag
Had she just punched me in the chest? If she did, Marco was giving her some moves he hadn’t shown me because my breath was gone. Her words were a physical blow, mental whiplash spiralling my thoughts that tangled and splintered.
Sixteen?
She’d been sixteen?
“What did you just say?”
“I’m not breakable,” she repeated with a smile. “I like it when you’re rough with me. I like knowing you can’t control yourself around me.”
“No,” I said softly and brushed her cheek. “You were how old?”
“I was sixteen,” she repeated. “I told you this. On our first night together.”
No, she did not.
My mind sprinted back to that night, pushing aside all the events I countlessly replayed. She’d said a teenager, I was sure of it.
And I’d assumed she meant the very tail end of those years.
I blinked back the tears and looked down at her, taking her face between my palms. “Everly,” I said, voice choked. “Oh my god.”
She tried to shrug it off, but I pulled her onto me and squeezed her, wrapping her up in my arms. That soft love, the gooey centre I melted to around her, hardened into a protective need to keep her safe.
“I’ll kill him,” I breathed. “I will fucking kill him.”
Her head shook against my chest. “No, I wouldn’t fare well if you went to prison.”
I wouldn’t need a ring to choke him out. I’d do it without a wrap or a boxing glove. I would smash his face until it crunched and popped, bursting with blood by my bare hands.
But I let her lead the topic of discussion. It was the least I could do.
“Would you visit me?”
She shrugged again, wriggling to rest her head in the crook of my neck. “Depends.”
“On?”
“Whether it’s for the press or not.”
I chuckled so loudly she looked up with a smile, placing her chin on her hands lying on my chest.
“Nothing about us is for the press, Everly,” I said, brushing her hair again because I had to touch her always. “Has it ever been?”
Her eyes narrowed in thought.
“When you kissed me in the pit box, that wasn’t for the press.”
“No,” she admitted, with a hint of surprise.
“It’s all been to piss off your dad, but not for me. I always wanted you.” Holding her with one arm, I leaned down to grab my phone from the floor, where it had fallen when she’d tugged down my trousers. I found her Instagram and swiped and swiped and swiped until I came to the end of her 389 posts. “This photo is the first time I ever saw you,” I told her. On the screen, in a very pixelated photo, she was grinning with a swoopy side fringe and an ice cream. “I’ve been following your account for five years.”
She laughed and tried to argue with me that it was old and ugly.
“I couldn’t believe it when you walked up and sat beside me at the bar. Let alone when our pinkies touched.” I wrapped mine around hers and her cheeks flushed. “And, at first, it might have been friendship and lust, but… then it wasn’t. Very quickly, it wasn’t. It isn’t, Everly. So if I become a murderer and go to prison, you’ll be coming to visit me as my very real girlfriend.”
My phone was out of my hand and thrown across the bed as she pushed herself closer to me again to kiss me.
Before we could get too carried away, I pulled back. Because it wasn’t just lust.
