Page 118 of Blood

“Why are you hovering in the doorway like a creeper?” I offer him a smile, but he doesn’t relax, his shoulders tense and his eyes hard.

“I’m not sure if I’m...wanted in here,” he confesses after a long moment of silence, peeling his gaze away from me to stare off into the distance.

I can feel my brows furrow. “Alex...”

“It’s fine, Violet. I don’t need you to pity me.” His voice is rife with self-loathing and vitriol. “I know I was an asshole to all of you when I first arrived.” A low, husky chuckle—one devoid of any true humor—rumbles through his body. “Even my own father hated me.”

Before I can stop myself, I whack him on the shoulder. Hard.

His eyes widen as he stares down at me, at a loss for words.

“You knock that shit off!” I growl, dimly aware that Cal and Barret have stopped their murmured conversation and have both turned to face us.

“Someone’s in trouble,” Barret singsongs.

“You kick his ass, Vi,” Cal adds.

“But if you spank it, let us know, so we can watch,” Barret adds, and then the two doofuses fall apart in laughter.

I roll my eyes at their antics, biting down on my own blossoming smile, and grab the front of Alex’s leather jacket, pulling him outside.

The cold air raises goose bumps on my arms and seems to seep into my skin, settling in the hollow of my bones. An icy wind whips my blonde locks around my face. The setting sun brushes the sky with copper and flames, creating patchworks of orange and yellow within the monotonous gray. Those startling colors somehow emphasize the red in Alex’s eyes.

“Since when have you become all ‘woe is me’?” I demand, pushing up onto my tiptoes to maintain eye contact. It’s surprisingly difficult to do, considering he’s a whole head taller than I am.

Alex brushes a hand through his tousled hair, heaving out a breath. “It’s nothing, Vi baby. I’m being stupid.”

“It’s obviously not stupid if you felt the need to say it out loud,” I point out. “Talk to me.” Gently, I cup his face between both of my palms. His skin is like silk, raveled here and there by old scars. I hadn’t ever noticed them before, but I feel them beneath the pads of my fingers, slightly raised bumps that I’m desperate to explore.

His eyes burrow into my own as he seems to wrestle with something. Finally, he comes to a decision, and a muscle in his jaw flexes. “You’ve never said you love me,” he whispers.

Out of everything I expected him to say...it wasn’t that.

“What?” I breathe, my fingers moving from his cheeks to the dark strands of hair that hug the angles of his face.

“You’ve never told me that you love me,” he repeats, his lashes fluttering shut, concealing his russet-black eyes from view. “And I need to know... I need to know how you feel about me. Because I think I love you, and it’s terrifying that you might not feel the same way, and—”

Instinctively, I place one of my hands over his mouth, cutting off his words. I don’t even know why. I think I’m just panicking. There’s so much vulnerability peeking through his normally indifferent eyes. All I want to do is soothe him any way I know how, to smooth away the lines of worry creasing his brow.

“Alex,” I begin.

He says something then, but with my hand still over my mouth, it sounds like a foreign language.

“I didn’t say I love you because I wasn’t sure back then,” I confess, watching as his eyes shutter and then harden. I can see he’s closing himself off to me, constructing walls around his heart, pulling away from this connection between us. I hurry to continue before he can get the wrong idea. “And I’ll admit, with everything that happened the last few weeks, the timing wasn’t right. When I say I love you to someone, I mean it. Those aren’t just throwaway words for me.” His spicy scent tunnels into my throat and forms a thick ball of tension that proves impossible to swallow around. “So, you’re right. I didn’t say I love you, because I was never sure how I felt about you. You pissed me off and hurt me, yet you saved my life and stood by my side through it all. I can feel you in my soul, and I know that you’re a part of me, but does that equal love? Do I want this bond between us to dictate how I feel?”

I’m rambling, I know I am, but Alex doesn’t seem inclined to stop me. He simply stares at me, my palm still over his mouth, my face nearly level with his. “You push every single one of my buttons, Alex, but you make me a better person. You help me look at every avenue instead of only the most obvious one. I’m not sure when I fell in love with you, but somewhere along the way, I went from despising your presence to craving it. Hate and love are closer than one would think. Both are visceral reactions that can puncture your damn heart. I honestly don’t know when hate turned to like, and then like turned to love. But it happened.”

Gently, Alex grabs my wrist and removes my hand from his mouth. “What are you saying, Violet baby? Because you’re saying a lot of random shit that makes me both confused and aroused simultaneously.”

I wrap my arms around his neck, and his hands immediately settle on my waist, pulling me flush against him.

“I’m saying that I love you, you big idiot. I don’t know when it happened—or even how, because you have the personality of a bloody tampon—but I love you.” A giddy smile unfurls on my lips. “I love you, Alexander. With my whole heart.”

He lowers his forehead to my own, his breath fanning against my face, his heat seeping through my clothes and settling into my skin. “I don’t know when it happened for me, either. I mean, we both know your own personality is the equivalent of a dictionary—”

“Useful and smart?”

“Boring and monotonous,” he quips, his lips tugging into a smile meant just for me. “But I love you too, you bigger idiot.”

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