Page 72 of Voracious

My ears ring with her words. This must be the Chris Stacey mentioned before, and I’m desperate to hear more. I need to hear more. But my phone dings, reminding me I can’t. I yank myself away from Stacey as it dings again. I already know who it is, and it only reminds me that I need to hurry and get the fuck away. If Bernadette finds me here, she’ll find Stacey.

I try for the door again, and she cries out as she drops to her knees behind me. “Please don’t leave me. Please. He’s a monster and will come for me. Please don’t leave me. Please. He’s the reason I was there that night.” She’s crying so damn loud, it’s ripping my heart out. “Please don’t go.”

Another ding of my phone, and I hate myself for what I’m about to say and do.

I need to hit deep – I need her to stop. I need to leave before I run out of time.

“Stop fucking crying, Stacey. It’s pathetic. We aren’t together – it was just a fuck. We won’t ever be together again. Do you know why?”

She looks up at me with red, bloodshot eyes, and it fucking breaks me that I need to speak to her like this, but I need her to stop, to let me go. I have just over an hour to make a two-hour trip.

Images flash before me, and they add to the venom in my words. “You cheated on me a month after we lost our daughter. Not with just anyone either. You screwed Jason. Mybig brother. No matter how many times we fuck, I will nevereverfucking forgive you.” And then I walk out and slam the door.

I’m not sure how I make it to my apartment in one piece, but I do.

My motorbike hit speeds it’s never hit before all the way up the motorway. And I think the number of times I punched myself in the head out of rage, I should definitely have crashed.

My mind is fucked.

I don’t even know if everything that happened tonight was real.

The scratches on my back are real.

I focus on them. I focus on that fucking name.

Chris Fields.

The more and more shit I do, the more I see myself as my dad. He’s an evil bastard when he wants to be, and I just tore Stacey’s heart in two and walked away from her.

You’d think a fifteen-year-old obsessing over his sister’s best friend to the point of being blind to every other person in the world romantically would be the first sign that I was like my father. I didn’t want to kiss anyone, entertain any of the girls who approached me at school, and whenever I was in the same room as Stacey Rhodes, my heart would speed up and I’d sweat.

And guess what? After teasing her constantly, I finally got her. Ihadher. And she admitted that ever since we met down at the pool house, she’s never been interested in anyone else either. It was like fate, but then again, fate is a fucking wanker who pushed her into my brother’s bed.

I never wanted to say those words to Stacey. I wanted to tell her that I’ve already broken rule five. That she can have every fractured shard of my heart, if only she knows how to fix it back together – but I’m an asshole, and I broke her heart instead.

Stacey doesn’t know what she means to me, and that’s fine. She’s safer not knowing and thinking I hate her – that I used her. That I’ll never forgive her.

I keep reminding myself that I’m doing all of this to protect her. Because not only is she my weakness, but she’s also my strength – my main reason for continuing, the air to my fucking lungs. When I’m around her, I feel like the person I was before – the teenager who fell in love with a beautiful girl and had no idea how to handle the emotion. The kid who always looked at her, even before I kissed her for the first time.

She still makes me nervous, even when I’m following her as she crawls up my spiral staircase, even as I fuck her mouth up against a wall or kiss her moans away.

It hurts to look at her, but I can never stop myself. Denial and bitterness coated my tongue when I told her I wouldn’t ever forgive her. In truth, I already have.

But do I want a future with her? Undoubtedly yes.

I could work on my trust issues with her. I never want to step into the same room as her and Jason again, but I would try. For her, I’d try anything. I’d even stop and call my brother right now if I had the luxury of free will and the time to spare.

But none of that is realistic. All I can do is protect everyone from afar.

Bernadette will never find out who she is and what significance she has in my life – past and present.

All I can think about is going back to Stacey and apologising – crawling into bed beside her and holding her against me.

Base pulling through on speaking to his grandfather will sort this for me. If he can get his family involved, maybe Bernadette will see my imprisonment as being not worth the hassle and free me. Who the fuck wants the mafia on their ass anyway?

By the time I pull my motorbike into my garage and haul out the keys, I’m over an hour late. There are SUVs parked outside, which means Bernie got pissed at me and brought her men over.

My phone has no new notifications. I turn most of them off anyway, but there are no angry messages from Stacey, and there’s still fuck all from Barry. I quickly message him Chris’s full name. Stacey may have already told him, but just in case, he should know.

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