Page 2 of Deceiver

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Sitting on the sideof the road, I watch brokenly as cars whiz by me, not one stopping for the pathetic girl with her knees to her chest, covered in dust with tears streaking down her face. They’re probably afraid to stop, afraid I might be having some sort of break and will put them in danger. They’re probably right. In this moment, as I sit numbly, I’m not entirely sure what it is I’m capable of. Crazy is an understatement for the way I’m feeling right now in this very moment.

I’ve screamed until my voice disappeared, dragged my nails through the dirt until they bled. I feel as though I’m losing it, like nobody will hear me out, like nobody cares. Mostly, hearing his brittle voice when he told me to leave broke something in me. He won’t hear my side of the story, he won’t even look at me. He’s filled with the kind of hatred that is irreversible, and I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t even know if Icanfix it, and that thought hurts the most.

“You can’t sit here all day.”

Fury’s gruff voice comes from behind me, but I don’t turn. My eyes stay trained on the road, on the browning trees that need a good rain, on the red car that has gone past twice now.

“Bonnie.”

“I didn’t release that story,” I croak. “He won’t listen. He won’t hear me. I didn’t do it.”

“Did you write it?”

I close my eyes, a lone tear running down my cheek. “Yes,” I whisper.

“Then it don’t matter if you released it or not. You lied to him. You let yourself into his life and, I’ll tell you, you’re the first person he let in in return. All along, you were doin’ it for a story.”

I turn, staring up at him.

He’s sheltering the blistering sun with his big body, and as his eyes rake over me, they’re devoid of emotion. He’s closing off, too. Of course he is, Western is his family and me? I’m nothing.

“It wasn’t just for the story...”

“So you would have approached him and pushed your way into his life if you weren’t writin’ that story?”

I look away, shame rising in my chest.

I know how it looks, I do.

I can’t even deny it, really.

There is nothing I can do but accept that I fucked up.

“I never meant to hurt him, regardless of what you think. He matters to me, Fury. He ... I ...”

“If he mattered, Bonnie, you would have told him the truth.”

“I was trying to help him,” I say, staring down at my bloody fingers. “I wanted the world to know that he isn’t a monster.”

“He didn’t ask you to fix his world, but he did trust you to become part of it, and you fucked it up. There is no comin’ back from that. You need to get up now and leave. Pains me to say this to you, but this club means more to me than how I feel about you bein’ here. Go home, Bonnie, and accept that whatever you think you had here is no longer.”

His words hurt. God, they send a searing pain shooting straight through my chest. It’s as if a hot knife has been plunged inside me and someone is twisting the handle. Nothing could have prepared me for just how much Western and his club would come to mean to me, and now not only is he cutting me off, but they are too. I have no one outside of Leo. I’m unprotected and unsafe.

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