Page 7 of Taming Liberty

The door opens, and I quiet, my arms tensing around the pillow. I lift my head up and peer at the person in the doorway, their black silhouette casting shadows in the room from the little bit of hallway light.

Light abruptly bathes the room, and my eyes snap shut from the intensity of it. Slowly, I open them and allow my eyes to adjust.

Angel walks to the bed, his mouth held in a sympathetic frown that kills me. He’s so unfair, offering the comfort I need while simultaneously taking my dignity. It reminds me of sadists paying the homeless to fight each other.

“Hey,” he says, sitting on the edge of the bed, a mere foot away from me. If I reached out, I could touch him. I could fling myself into his arms like I wanted to do a countless number of times over the last year, back when I thought I was communicating with a caring, lonely figure on the other side of a computer screen. But now I’m conflicted. I’m a moth, and he’s a flame, yet unlike a moth, there’s no excuse for me to go toward the danger because I’m aware it exists. It would be pathetic. Tempting, but pathetic.

I can’t do this.

“I need to get back to the manor.”

His lips part, and I think for sure he’ll argue with me, but he just stares.

“I have to tell Sawyer what happened. It… I…” I close my eyes and take a breath. “It was an accident.”

“I know.Heknows. You don’t have to explain yourself.”

I keep my eyes closed, rubbing my hand over the pang in my chest. His voice. God, how many times have I imagined what his voice sounded like?

This is Angel. This is the man I spent the last month and a half with, but … it also isn’t. It’s like I’m seeing him, hearing him, for the first time. When I thought it was Sawyer who betrayed me … it hurt, but it was bearable. It was black and white. He was a piece of shit who tricked me like he did all the others.

This is so much worse.

“Liberty…” Angel’s hand splays over my shoulder, and I bite my lip at the warmth I feel mixed in with repulsion. It doesn’t make sense that both could coexist. “I think it’s safe for me to assume Des was the one who sought you out. She came looking for a fight. And if that’s the case, what happened last night was not your fault.”

Except I’m the one who started it.

I cringe.

“As morbid as it may sound, she had a worse fate in store for her. If she hadn’t fallen last night, Jasper would’ve done worse. He planned on purchasing her.”

I open my eyes, look at his serious, sympathetic expression, and I don’t know whether to be amazed at his ability to lie or slap him for it. I could argue, tell him I know he’s the one who was trying toconvinceJasper to take Desiree off his hands, but instead, I just stare, my mouth glued shut.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so terrified of someone. Sawyer and Jasper are predictable. Angel… I don’t even know what Angelwants,let alone what he’ll do, or more likely, have someone else do.

He sighs and scoots closer to me, making me internally shrink away even though my body’s stiff.

“You're safe now, Liberty.”

No. I most certainly am not.

“Say something,” Angel commands, although it sounds more like a desperate plea. “I need to know you’re okay.”

I need to know you’re okay.

I close my eyes and am transported back in time to a fight Robert and I had. We’d just had dinner with another couple, and I’d offered my napkin when a dab of frosting from chocolate mousse cake fell onto Robert’s colleague’s tie. I thought I was being polite, but Robert felt it was rude of me to point it out to begin with. He said I humiliated him.

Once the colleague left, the yelling grew intense enough that I threatened to leave. Robert jerked clothes from hangers in my closet and threw them in a bag. He shoved it at my chest and told me to go.

When I tried to check into a hotel, my card was declined. My throat clogged as they ran it again and again at my request, then two different cards. Robert had shut them all off. I understood the message he was sending. It was the first time I realized how cruel Robert could be and the lengths he would go to teach me a lesson. That I had nothing without him. That Iwasnothing without him.

I stayed up all night, using the five-dollar bill in my wallet, the only money to my name, to buy a cup of coffee at a twenty-four-hour diner. I somehow held back tears while I told the Internet stranger what was happening. We’d only been speaking for a couple of weeks at that point, so the shame I felt sharing my situation with another soul was very apparent, but it was less crushing than bottling the heartache any longer.

I went years without telling anyone how unhappy I was. That night, I let it all out. And for the first time in a very long time, I felt cared for.

I didn’t cry during the fight. I didn’t cry when I realized that three years into my marriage with Robert, there was not a single soul who would be willing to take me in for the night. I didn’t cry when I realized the extent of my dependency on my husband, and I didn’t cry knowing he was cruel enough to show it to me.

But when saltyshells, some random person I would never meet and did not know, asked me to message after I got home so he’d know that I was okay, I cried. I fucking bawled. And then I shamefully drove home and begged my husband for forgiveness. And I never offered my napkin at dinner again.

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