Page 65 of My Rose

The visual of me reaching for my gun concealed in my nightstand was starting to seem very appealing to make a reality. No moremeetings,no moredemands. I could just kill him and be done with it all. Rose would be safe. We could be together. Maybe if I’d told her the truth, she wouldn’t be so willing to fight whenever I tried to avoid telling people who she was.

My father barely glanced at her as he walked toward the door, removing his cufflinks. “Make sure you do whatever is needed tonight. I’d hate to have a repeat of what happened to Briggs a few days ago, much less allow my son to waste his time on a young little bitch like yourself.”

“Excuse me?” Rose’s anger fueled the visual I’d concocted. I glanced at the nightstand, ready to defend her.

“Feisty.” His green eyes, the same as mine, cut over to my injury, his face hardening with the hint of a smile at the edge of his mouth. “Our clients expect more from my son and heir. You’ve deeply disappointed me, and I won’t stand for it to happen again.” His footsteps didn’t move fast enough as he left, unlike Rose’s heart as it beat wildly against my side.

At the sounds of his footsteps fading down the hall, she shot up in bed and stared down at me, a mix of confusion and anger—no, mostly anger—filling her features. “Did he just—what the fuck was that, Briggs?” Her hand raked through her hair. “What the hell kind of meetings do you go to?!” she whisper-shouted right before she pushed her small hands into my side to get me away from her.

“Stop it, babe.” I grabbed for her wrist, aiming to pull her back to me, to calm her down, but what was I going to say that would make any of what he just said any better? My life had more secrets than she’d be able to handle in one morning. “Please, let me—”

“I don’t know how you can explain that to me. You fuck strippers?” My jaw worked. I wasn’t sure what angle she’d find, but the one she did was the correct one. At least, before her,that had been mostly accurate.

“No.”

“At business meetings?!”

“No, Rose. You need to listen—” She started to punch me along my uninjured side, more like slapping as a tear rolled down hercheek. I reached for her arms and spun us, pinning her to the bed by her wrists. “Rose, stop. You’re acting crazy right now.”

That did it. Her angry face contorted into pure rage, and if she wasn’t so mad at me about things she had every right to be angry over, I’d lean down and kiss her.

“I’macting crazy? You said I meant nothing to you. You tried to pass me off as a—basically, a whore. Because strippers don’t fuck for money, I would know. Jasmine was one and she never—” Her gaze drifted to the side. “Oh my god. That’s how she met Dean, isn’t it? She worked at Van—”

“VanLuxe.” I cursed under my breath. I tried protesting the meetings before, and one particular time I was too fucked up to get out of bed and go—black and blue all along my sides with two ribs broken. That was around the time Jasmine came into Dean’s life, and although I didn’t ask where they met, it all seemed to click at the same time it did for Rose.

She fought against my hands, but I pushed her wrists deeper into the mattress. “You don’t understand, Rose.”

“Maybe I don’t want to anymore.” Another tear escaped, and my chest cracked as I watched it bead and roll down her temple. She jerked her face to the side to wipe away what I’d caused with my shirt, unable to look at me. “Just let me go, Briggs. I can’t do this.” Her eyes pinched shut as my fingers grew numb.

I rubbed her wrists with my thumbs, my voice shaking. “Can’t or won’t?”

“Both. Please, let me go.”

“Rose, I—” I stared down at her, wanting to keep her there with me more than anything as words froze on my tongue. Wanting to tell her so much that I…just couldn’t. My father spent years grooming me to be callous and hollow—to numb my body with women and drugs and money and power, and it had worked. Until her. Rose was getting underneath the cracks I laid bare on the surface and was quickly chiseling the real me out of the hardened shell of the man I was. And looking at her as she neared the edge of a meltdown, those hardened pieces of myself were falling faster than I could keep up with.

“Get off me. I’ll call a ride—”

“No.” I shook my head, cutting off her protest. “No, I’ll take you.”

Her head snapped back to me. “No,” she seethed. “I don’t want to be near you right now. I just want to go home so I don’t have to think about you anymore.”

There was no escape for me when it came to her, but she had one from me. I released her and started pacing beside the bed while she slowly reached for her phone and made a call. The entire phone call, she refused to meet my eyes, refused to face me as she got up and found the clean clothes Rhonda had left for her.

She walked into the bathroom and shut the door, the sound like a signal to the end of everything I never should have let happen. My fingers splayed across my chest as I sat on the edge of the bed, the pain unbearable as I thought about how much I’d completely fucked up everything by thinking I could ever be worthwhile to anyone. That I could be something or someone for herlike she so quickly became for me.

Chapter 25

Rose

“He who feared that he would not succeed sat still.” ? Horace

Post-it notes littered the house now, with more than what was left out for me to eat or what my grandparents’ plans were for the day. Now they included a slew of motivational quotes that did anything but motivate me. To make matters worse, my first day back at work after the storm was a longer shift than usual, all withJanice breathing down my neck about why I looked more pale and bleak and why I was so quiet.

The few times I snapped back at her weren’t helping. When she started bagging for another cashier, I knew I’d messed up. It wasn’t her fault I was being such a bitch. I wasn’t even sure it was Briggs’ half the time either, but just thinking about the way his father talked about what they were going to do made me feel like I’d been covered in slime.

And after he said I was nothing? I didn’t quite know how to take that. It hadn’t been well.

My mind was a mess, my heart felt like it moved into a permanent place somewhere in my throat, and it was hard to swallow past it—especially when I was sobbing in the shower or late at night on my pillow.

---