Page 58 of Live for Me

“What?”

“These conversations. Why do you need to be facing away from me or in the dark or over the phone? Why don’t I get to see the look in your eyes when you give me the tiniest glimpse behind this motherfucking seven-hundred-foot-tall, forty-nine-foot-thick concrete wall that’s around you?”

She swallowed so hard I could hear it.

“Do you hear yourself when you say things like that?” she asked with a nervous giggle. “How can you expect anyone to know how to respond to that face-to-face? No one says shit like that in real life.”

She tried to step back just ever so slightly. So, I let go of her wrist and slid that arm around her waist to keep her pinned against me.

“It’s still dark in here, Memphis. I know you can’t see me any better than I can you right now. Tell me.”

“Utah—”

“No one else is here. No one else will hear the reason. No one else gets to know. Tell me something. Anything. Something that lets me know a little more of the real Memphis than anyone else gets to know.”

“Everything aboutthe real Memphisis awful, Utah. I don’t know how to do…whatever this is. If you find out what’s behind that concrete wall—which is ridiculous, by the way—what happens if you hate it? If you hateme? Do you leave? Will you stop helping? Will you take Indy and run? If I can’t see your face, I don’t have to wonder what your reactions to my words mean. If I see them, I’ll spend the next thirty years of my life wondering why you smiled the way you did or wondering why the look in your eyes changed over something I said. It’s easier to just?—”

“You don’t have to break yourself open for me,” I interrupted. “I don’t want you to change or rearrange who you are just because I showed up in your world. The best thing about you is that you’re perfectly comfortable being unapologetically yourself. Even when you’re hilariously out of place and don’t fit in anywhere, it’s because you were never meant to. It’s like seeing the moon during the day. She doesn’t belong there. It’s not her time to shine, but there she is anyway, putting the sun to shame in the middle of the day because nothing else gets to define her. She decides what she does, who she is. You’re flawless just like this, sugar.”

“Then—” she said and paused. And I fucking wished I could see her face to tell me how I was supposed to be handling this situation, regardless of how little she wanted to see mine.

“Then…what do you want?” she asked.

I laughed and her whole body tensed against me.

“You, you stubborn little shit. Just you. I’ll take it all as is. I already know you’re tough as nails. Everybody does. But you don’t have to keep that wall up when I’m around. You can crash, collapse, stumble, whatever you need to do with me here. I’ll be ready to catch you every time, whether you actually need to be caught or not, until you believe me that you don’thaveto do it all yourself.”

She was quiet again for another several seconds.

“It’s not really that eas?—”

“Itisthat easy,” I interrupted and laughed again. “If I can be ready to catch you at any moment so that you never legitimately fall again, you can figure out how to let me in. Just a little. You don’t have to make everything difficult and complicated. We aren’t Jersey and Trista. I’m not here to fight you just for the fuck of it. When your world starts to cave in, all you ever have to do is say my name. I’ll carry whatever weight you can’t.”

She couldn’t even see me, and I was still making her uncomfortable. She pressed her forehead against my chest rather than even risk seeing the outline of me in the dark any longer.

Or maybe she was afraid that I was going to kiss her.

Because I absolutely was going to, before her face disappeared.

Turtle pace, I reminded my ogre brain.

Memphis required turtle pace.

Maybe Memphis required the ability to make all the decisions herself when it came to intimacy for it to be able to progress. She’d gotten noticeably more comfortable with me holding her, but even that had taken me trapping her into it repeatedly before she realized physical comfort could be pleasant.

Women were exhausting.

I moved my arm from her waist up around her shoulders and added the other arm to squeeze her harder. If holding her was all I was allowed to do for the time being, I was going to take every opportunity that she’d give me.

She didn’t knowhow to do this. That was what she kept telling me. She didn’t know how to rely on other people. She didn’t know how to trust someone else. After whatever had gone down with her parents and her sister, her only connection to another person in any recent period of time was New Jersey.

Fucking New Jersey.

The least stable of any human I’d ever encountered in real life.

That was an exaggeration.

But only slightly.

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