Page 101 of Pulse
“The kind where you fuck to forget.”
She had me there.
“I’ll only ask you one more time, then you can either come upstairs with me or you can fuck off home. What’s. Wrong?”
Fuck, she was a hard-ass. If she knew something was off, did she know about…? No, if she knew about the scout and this thing with Hammer, she would’ve just come out and said it. That’s the kind of woman she was. Feisty…there was a reason I called her Spitfire.
“I’m cracking, Ren. I can’t…” I shoved a hand through my hair. “I can’t…” I couldn’t say the words ‘hold on’. Because I was breaking, I kept telling myself that I had to hold on, I had to keep my control, but it was easier said than done. The things he’d done to them… How could I have let him go…twice?
“Ash, please talk to me,” Ren said. She didn’t step forward or even try to touch me and I began to wonder if she was afraid of me. Afraid of the beast that could lash out at her at any second. I was stupid to think I could do this my way. Maybe I should be locked up.
“I can’t control it Ren,” I said beating my fist over my heart. I couldn’t tell her the real reason, so I decided being a dick was better than smashing her heart. “I see other men... I saw him touch you and I almost lost it.”
“Seth?” she asked, her eyes narrowing. “You don’t trust me?”
“I don’t trust them!”
“There’s gotta be a point where you let go Ash. We can’t keep going on like this.”
“I keep hurting you,” I exclaimed. “I keep hurting you by trying to do the right thing.”
“We knew it would be tough,” she said. “We knew…”
“You can go and I can finish it and…” I trailed off, the ending of that sentence too terrible to even comprehend.
She stared at me in shock, her eyes sparkling. Shit, I’d made her cry…again.
“And you’ll leave me again?” she exclaimed. “You’ll destroy your own life? Completely this time?”
Thinking about all the crap we’d been through, I wondered if the kindest thing I’d ever done was to leave her. When I was gone she’d hurt, but she’d also made pro, built a better relationship with her father and she had friends to help her through. Ever since I’d come back, her life had been nothing short of hard.
“No Ash,” she said, reading my expression. “I love you, you love me. You promised me and I sure as fuck promised you. I’m not letting you leave me again.Ever.”
Even as she said the words, I knew I wouldn’t go through with it. I loved her with everything I had, but I didn’t love her enough to let her go. I was such a selfish fuck. What would it do to her when I finally got in that cage with Hammer and only one of us walked away? What would it do to her then?
“This is exactly what they want,” she whispered.
I stared at her and began putting the pieces together.
“Psychological warfare,” she said, staring right back. “Rogue warned us that they’d try something different.”
“Fucking…” I ran my hand over my face.
“You need to let it go and trust me. I. Trust. You. Don’t let them win. You told me that. You-”
This unbelievable burst of feeling spread through me and I pulled her roughly against my chest and crashed my lips to hers, winding my arms around her waist.
She pulled away, tears dampening her cheeks and her breathing ragged.
“We’re a team,” she gasped, clinging to me like I was her lifeline. Little did she know that she was mine.
“I love you Spitfire. Always.”
She sniffed and buried her face against my chest, her arms winding around my neck.
If I was going to die, then I wanted to take whatever time I had left with her and make the most of it. I wanted to love her, fuck her, make her feel special…but I had to be strong. I had to hold on for a little while longer.
Ren could never know what we intended to let happen at that fight. If she knew, then she’d try to stop it. If it didn’t happen in the cage, then it would happen elsewhere and that would be so much worse. In the cage, if I won, I had an escape. Outside, I was looking at life in the slammer.
Ren could never know that this was how things would end.
There wasn’t any other way.
