Page 200 of Soul So Dark
His eyes round and he stifles a laugh.
“Don’t you laugh at me, Alex!” I snap, scowling at him through gritted teeth.
“No!” he exclaims. “Cariño, I’m not laughing at you.”
I thrust my finger up at him. “Don’t you call me that when you have nicknames for other women!”
His jaw drops and he lets out a scoff, his eyes darting around the closet. I don’t know why he’s laughing about this, but the longer I look at the clothes hanging along the wall and the shoes neatly lined up beneath them, a lump grows in my throat. Why would he bring me here…where he lives with another woman?
“Are you,” my voice cracks, “married?”
“No.”
“Oh,” my tone turns sour again, “so it's just a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Then whose is it?” I growl, my eyes beginning to water.
“It's yours.”
“What is?”
“All of it,” he nods to the drawers. “It belongs to you, Dal.”
My eyes dart back to the drawers, the shoes, and the clothes on the racks. I didn’t look that closely at first, caught off-guard by a woman’s wardrobe that’s not supposed to be here. But then a stark realization washes over me. I run my hands over the stacks of shirts, over the blue screenprint adorning the front of a black tank top.
Shapeshift.
These are my clothes. But they look different—they looknew.
“Where did all my clothes come from?” I squint at him.
“You do a lot of online shopping, I just looked at your email receipts from the past year and reordered everything.”
“You hacked my email?”
I scan the lines of shoes and realize he’s telling the truth. I own every single pair of them, from the pink and purple Nike high-tops to the black patent leather goth boots and chunky purple pumps.
“Are you angry?”
“No. That sounds like the kind of shit I would do, too,” I peer at him out of the corner of my eye. “But why?”
“So you can live here with me. Because this is your home now.”
I blink, staring at him in shock at the same time a wave of warmth rushes over my entire body. Alex curated a carbon copy of my wardrobe and had it waiting here next to his plethora of black t-shirts, boots, and guns?
“Your last pair of shoes came two days ago,” he adds.
“Is this why you didn’t say anything until now?”
“I had to finish it. It needed to be perfect—like you always lived here.”
I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.
“Anyway,” he slides the drawer shut with a grin, “like I said, you must be starving.”
CHAPTER FORTY
