Page 40 of Fighting For You
Sleep was a rude jerk and played keep away, so I sat there letting the disbelief grip me, then the denial. Finally, I got up and decided I’d clean everything in my place before my friends arrived just in case there were any fun germs hanging out from before I’d left—aka in another lifetime.
How was I supposed to function normally when that man just said he’d beenin lovewith me? How could I possibly wrap my head around his words when he’d treated me with such glaring disdain for so long?
Could I even believe him?
Beast wasn’t someone to talk for talking’s sake. He didn’t speak even when spoken to half the time and I didn’tsee what he had to gain from lying about something like that. If anything, it put him at a disadvantage. Admitting he’d loved me, even in obvious past tense, made everything so…
So…
Messy.
Confusing.
Utterly incomprehensible.
By the time Dove and Elise arrived, I was crawling out of my skin and ready to get some feedback from someone outside my own head. I’d also escalated from sadness and disbelief to… well, really, to anger.
Because how dare he.
It’d become a chant, a low-level refrain in the vein of one of his classic, barely intelligible grunts—how dare he, how dare he, how dare he.
It’d built and built, each passing second, each remembrance of his agonized face and that tone weaving together to create the parachute, and by the time my friends saw my face, I’d jumped fully out of the logic plane and was spiraling on gusts of confusion and untethered, irrational fury.
Dove bustled in with a large bag sporting the Guac logo splashed across it, and the sight instantly brightened my life, even through the storm of anger banging cymbals in my mind.
Nothing would help the situation like chips and guac. Since my appetite had fully returned and my stomach appeared to be behaving normally, I would drown at least some of my rage in avocado-based therapy.
Elise followed, brow furrowed and face downcast as she tapped at her phone before slipping it into her pocket andlooking up right as Dove rushed me and pressed her palm to my forehead, nurse mode activated.
“Oh my gosh, you’re alive. I thought for sure he would’ve skinned you and boiled you for stew.” She squeezed me tight, then leaned back and squeezed my shoulders, then my biceps, then wrists then hands before holding my palms up, then flipping them over to inspect my unpolished nails. She raised her phone and shone a light in my eyes for a second before I flinched away. She grabbed my head and steadied me, studying my pupils before saying, “Okay, you seem okay, but are you okay? Because I would not be okay.”
I laughed, grateful for her sense of drama and humor, not to mention her instant care-taking that provided the perfect momentary distraction and disarmed me for a minute.
“Seriously, it’s amazing you two made it out alive,” Elise added, a small grin on her stunning face.
“I’m amazed, too, though it probably helped that I was either unconscious or delirious most of the time.”
And… had I? Somewhere in me, I recognized that part of who I was didn’t make it out. Jude had steadily throttled the hatred out of me with his attentiveness, his gentleness, his homemade bread, and wearing his fluffy boy cat on his shoulders.
No. No. We do not think of the cat or we lose all ability to think clearly.
Dove settled the bag on my counter. “Not even lying, I knew you were in bad shape based on your texts.”
Elise nodded. “Totally.”
“Because they were short?”
Dove chuckled, pulling out a large bag of chips with a splotchy patchwork of grease stains on the sides. “No.Because you were only reassuring us you were fine and not ranting about how awful he is.”
I forced a laugh. “Yeah. He was…” How could I explain it? “He was actually really good to me.”
Maybe that’s what sent me through the loop-the-loops of anger yet again… he could be so lovely. He’d been so far from the beast he’d embodied, and yet our history… he’d loved me, and he’d let us go on like this?
Clearly, the love had died out at some point.
The silence in response to my statement had me looking up to find them both frozen, Dove holding a container of guacamole aloft, and Elise holding two glasses she must’ve just taken out of the open cupboard in front of her.
“What?”
