Page 75 of Jagged Line Paradise

I feel my forehead wrinkle in confusion. “You’re not messing with my head. I mean…I’m okay. I’m fine. I got through it, didn’t I?”

“You deserve better than to just get through. I want you to thrive.”

My gaze moves beyond him. “I’m not thriving.” I pause, afraid to speak the truth, though I know I have to. “I should’ve left with you. I should’ve left this place and never looked back.”

He sighs, moving in closer. “Maybe it was for the best that you didn’t.”

My eyes snap to meet his, heartache washing over me at his words. “What do you mean?”

“I would’ve hurt you eventually.”

“Hurt me how? More than I’m already hurting?”

He nods slowly. “Yes. I’m afraid of losing control with you. How could you ever have been happy with a man who doesn’t give you every part of himself?”

“Right,” I scoff, “because I can’t handle your inner demons. I survived tonight just fine, didn’t I?”

“Because I can control one night together. But more than this?” He looks so troubled, his eyes flickering back and forth across my face, his muscles straining, his cock still hard between us. His chest heaves as his stress peaks. “Don’t let me hurt you, sunshine.” He grabs me and hugs me close, his arms encapsulating me, pulling me in so tightly that I feel every inch of him against my skin.

The desperation in his tone sparks anxiety within me. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I don’t want to think about the idea that he might hurt me somehow. I don’t really understand why he’s so afraid of himself, but I can’t deny that his fear triggers a soft warning within me, something that hovers over the panic button but doesn’t press down on it…not yet.

I urgently need to get out of my own head. Though Andrés thinks I should fear unleashing his dark sexual desires, overwhelming physical sensation is the only coping mechanism I have to take me out of my troubled mind.

It almost makes me want to laugh that the thing I need to escape the ghosts which haunt my mind is the very act where he fears he’ll lose control of himself and hurt me.

Could he hurt me?

Could hisso-called dark fantasies really be all that bad?

A memory of the magazine pictures he used to tear out and plaster on his bedroom walls as a teenager creeps into my mind, making me shiver. The images of bound and gagged women in sexual positions hadn’t bothered me as much as they probably should have when we were younger—before I was taken by his father. After what I went through with his father, though, perhaps I should be outright fearful.

Is that type of inhumanity bred ortaught?

Andrés was bred from it and taught by it, and that sudden understanding makes my blood run cold.

I’m frozen in his arms.

“Hey,” he says, bringing his face close to mine, pressing our foreheads together. “I fucking love you, Lonnie. I mean it.” He softly kisses me, and though I can feel the truth of his words making my heart pump an extra beat, the potential threat makes it skip the next one.

All I’ve ever wanted in life was to be loved.

I never thought Andrés Hernandez could love me.

It sends blissful adrenaline through my veins, but right behind it is the alarming warning that grips my heart and squeezes, holding it still until the bliss fades, and when it finally lets go, all that’s left is fear.

Fear that love is fleeting.

Fear that love is conditional.

Fear that he’s right…that maybe I haven’t seen the worst of him.

Yet even in the fear, I know my words are true. “I love you.”

I don’t really know where to go from here. I don’t know how to handle the odd mixture of fear and lust. I’m wet for him despite the anxiety, despite the warning, and he’s still hard, pressed up against my stomach.

I don’t want to go to bed with him wanting. I don’t want to let anxiety ruminate in my brain, keeping me up, making me afraid. I want the physical to drown out the prickling unease. And at the same time, I don’t know if I can take his intensity again.

I spin to face the wall, forcing him to drop his arms from my waist. I lean my forearms against the tile and arch my back in invitation.

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