Page 198 of Pierce Me

Of course I heard. I think I blacked out for a second there, out of pure shock. I just stare at her as the rain pours on us, wild, feral joy stealing my breath. ‘Wanting you so much I can’t breathe’. Did she really say those words or did I want her to say them so much I imagined them? My lips are still throbbing from kissing her. Other things are throbbing as well.

My heart, for one thing.

“I know,” I say. “I know. It’s the same for me.”

“But I’m… I’m not ok. Maybe I’ll never be ok. At least, I have stopped having panic attacks every day, multiple times. It’s moved now to a few times a week.” She motions towards me with her hand. “You’ve seen it, you know.” I do. “I am so far from ok, and you… You just found out, and you are looking at me with that absolutely tormented look on your face, as if you’re suffocating or drowning or…”

“I just found out, sweetheart,” I interrupt her softly. I she calls me ‘tormented’ one more time, I swear I will lose what little of my mind I have left. I didn’t mean for the ‘sweetheart’ to come out. I wince. “I just can’t wrap my head around it.”

“That’s what I said,” she says.

I clamp my lips shut. It is.

“I’ll go to therapy,” I say desperately. “Well, more therapy. I’ll date you. I’ll date you slowly until you can’t stand it, and you’ll just grab me like I want to grab you and kiss me senseless like I want to kiss you and then you’ll…” A laugh escapes her, but she gets sad again immediately.

Dammit.

“You fainted on stage tonight,” she says quietly. “Your friends hid it, but I saw. You are not ok either. This…” she points between us, “is not ok. We are not ready, Isaiah. It’s… it’s bad timing. Again.”

“No. Baby, no.” I grab her wrists in mine, pressing so hard I feel her delicate bones give way. I relax my grip immediately, but I don’t let go. “No. No. No.” I repeat it over and over again, but she keeps shaking her head. “It was bad timing then, it can’t be bad timing now as well.” My voice is a broken record. “It was so cruel what happened to us, it can’t be happening again.” But it is. I can see that it is. “No, dammit,” I bite down on my lip until I taste blood.

She stares at her white sneakers. They are swimming in puddles of rainwater. I can see it clearly now: the way she is, the way she has been all this time, since we met on that boat in Corfu. It’s not normal. It’s not healthy. I don’t know how to explain it, but she was too passive. Too docile. She never argued with me when I was being an ass to her, and I was an ass to hera lot. She did stand up for herself, or try to, but she didn’t get angry enough. Not nearly angry enough. She didn’t send me to hell enough.

I know that she is the sweetest person on the planet, but then I think of how that monster treated her as a ‘pet’ and I realize that there is a lot of work to be done here.

This is not sweetness: she hasn’t learned to defend herself. She hasn’t learned to take her space in this world. Maybe she hasn’t learned that she deserves it. Oh, God.

And there never was a more incompetent person on the planet than me. She has a family and a therapist and doctors, I’m sure, who are nursing her back to health. It will take time, but I… I want to be there for her too. But I’ve lost that privilege, haven’t I? And even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t know where to start.

I don’t even know what to do right now, dammit.

“Help,” escapes my lips.

“I am so not the person to ask for help,” she says, infinite sadness in her voice.

“No, that’s not what I—”

“You were yourself with me, and that was the best thing you could be,” she tells me. “I am grateful that you didn’t know the truth, even though it destroyed me to see you act so angry with me. But my sisters called a few hours ago. Manuela explained to me that you didn’t know my story. They told me how you didn’t know what happened to me, or why the… these horrible things happened to us, to you… Is it true?”

I lift a hand to stop her. I’m going to be sick.

“It’s true,” I say in a strangled voice. “I didn’t know. I’m an idiot.”

“You’re anything but that,” she says, smiling that sad smile of hers that makes me see red. I’ve never been one to get violent or get into fights. But that smile right now, trembling on the side of her pink, wet lips… it makes me want to murder whoever put it there.

Me. I did.

“I can’t believe this happened to us, on top of everything else,” I murmur. “That I would meet you after all these years, but I wouldn’t know the truth. And that I would ruin it all, all over again. Much worse than before.”

“That is my miracle,” she says, and my jaw drops open. Rain rushes in.

“Your what?”

“This is a gift,” she says. “Because you didn’t know, because you unbelievably are the one person on the planet who didn’t know, you showed me your true face,” she says. “You didn’t pity me.”

I want to shake her.

“I don’t care about what I knew or didn’t know!” I shout at her. “I have not and willneverpity you. Do you hear me? In my book, Eden Elliot and pity do not belong in the same vocabulary. I would never pity you, ok, Eden? You are the most amazing person I know. You always have been, from the first moment I met you. But I wish I knew what you had been through, so I could be there for you, so I could—” But she’s already waving her hand at me.

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