Page 174 of Sinful Desires
“Only once. A week before I pulled you out of that fountain.”
My brow drew tight. My chest already ached, but something in me twisted harder.
“Two days after I got out of the hospital, I went to see him. Kissed his forehead goodbye.” His voice came low, hoarse. “And that same day, I enlisted. No fucking hesitation. I didn’t want peace. I wanted punishment. I wanted pain in every bone of my body until I couldn’t feel anything else.”
Waves slammed into the rocks behind us, cold spray lashing our skin, wind clawing at the back of my neck.
My heart broke for him even more when I realized everything around us must remind him of that night.
My beautiful broken star, swallowed in endless darkness.
“I spent the next nine years letting the world tear me apart. Military ops, blood, heat, bruises stacked on bruises. Some of the damage still burns. Some’s carved so deep I’ll never get it out. But it helped me stay in control. Gave me something to bleed for.”
He blinked slowly, eyes hollow.
“Then after, I became a bodyguard because it was the only way to stay busy enough not to snap. My mother came to visit the bases. Came to New York too. Always begging me to go back and see him. Said ten years was too fucking long.”
He looked down, voice shaking.
“But I couldn’t. I couldn’t look at him. Not when I’m the reason he’s like that. I didn’t deserve to be in the same fucking room.”
The wind whipped around us. I could barely breathe, like the sea was trying to pull the oxygen straight out of my lungs.
“But I did go,” he said quietly. “Because she begged.”
I watched him as something deep inside me cracked.
“When I saw him, Scarlett?…?I wanted to fucking die. Right there. I wished I could open my veins and bleed out on the floor beside him. He looked older, but everything else was the same. Pale. Silent. Frozen.Gone.”
He wiped his face on the back of his hand roughly.
“I lasted two hours. Then I puked in the parking lot and got on a plane back to New York.”
He finally looked at me.
“On my last night with the Dawsons, I walked through their maze. I used to go there when I needed to shut everything off. That night, it wasn’t about shutting it off. I’d made up my mind.”
His voice cracked, raw as an open wound.
“I was done. With the world. With myself. I was going to stroll through there one last time before blowing my brains out with the bullet waiting on my nightstand.”
His eyes held mine like they were the last lifeline he had left.
“But then I met you. My beautiful shooting star.”
The breath I’d been holding left my lungs like I’d been punched in the chest.
À Dieu, mon étoile filante.
“And you?…?you fascinated me. You fascinated me with that filthy mouth and those fucked-up, hopeless words. You looked like a ghost, Scarlett. The same kind I saw in the mirror for years. Your pain felt like mine, carved into skin, echoing in silence.”
The wind shifted, pushing my hair across my face. The waves behind us slammed harder against the rocks, each crash a jagged heartbeat in the dark.
“We both wanted to die that night,” he said, voice unraveling. “But something, maybe fate, God, fucking coincidence, I don’t know?…?shoved us into each other instead. Saved us both at the same time.”
A low, broken sound escaped my throat. Half sob, half laugh. My tears blurred the shoreline, the moon, the shape of him in front of me.
My heart was splintering. And it didn’t stop.
