Page 38 of The Worst Kind of Promise
My distracted mindset is completely eviscerated in the span of two seconds. He sounds serious. Kit’s never serious. Something’s wrong.
“Is everything okay?” Bile cradles the back of my throat, rising up from a sour stomach lining.
His biceps strain, the inked tiger eyes on his forearm undulating from minuscule muscle movements. I don’t expect the next words that come out of Kit’s mouth. They catch me off guard, and I have no emotional capacity to digest them.
“I don’t think we should do this anymore.”
Whoa, what?
I freeze at the roughness in his voice, the one that peels open a sore on my heart, that batters me from all directions. Shock responds before sadness does, before self-pity coerces tears to dam my eyes.
My blood coagulates, my confusion palpable. “What are you talking about?”
With a torn breath, his fingers badger tousled strands of his hair, cutting through a raven sea like a shark’s fin, a frown favoring the right side of his face. “Yesterday was a mistake,” he whispers.
I feel my heart stop, feel the goddamn world stop. Everyone around me fades into a blurry background, merging until bodies are rendered indecipherable, chatter a mere shuffle of mouths that don’t convey any meaning. I strangle the dread that welcomes me like an old friend.
Yesterday. Was. A. Mistake. Sex was a mistake.Iwas a mistake.
I can’t…I…
My mind’s playing host to millions of questions right now, yet not a single one makes it from my brain to my mouth. How could he have changed on me so fast? Is he being blackmailed? Was this all some sick game to him? I don’t know what to think right now. He got what he wanted, and now it’s time for him to move on—like he always does.
God, how could I have been so stupid?
Pain bolstered, I involuntarily inch backwards, my back hitting the side of the house, forbidding me from going any farther. I don’t want to hear what he has to say. I don’t want to be having this conversation at all. He doesn’t list closer to me. He stays a reasonable distance away, as if entering my personal bubble will deliver some kind of shock to his system.
“What?” My voice is small, just like it was that night at the gas station. I keep convincing myself that I’m getting better by the day, acknowledging that I’m in control of my trauma, yet here I am, back at square one.
“I should’ve never kissed you.”
Five words. Five words that have a cataclysmic effect on my inner world, crumbling the pillars of our relationship, pulverizing the compassion I have for him deep down. No emotion, no display of anger. It’s just a statement, and it hurts so much more as a result.
I don’t know why my first instinct is to correct him, but I do it to lift the pressure pressing on my sternum. “I kissed you.”
“I meant at the hotel,” he explains, barely able to hold eye contact with me, his thickset chest ballooning with deep inhales. The worry lines creasing his skin are anomalies themselves, and I don’t remember there being such dark circles under his eyes—eyes that look like they’ve been drained of life and light and laughter.
The hotel. He regrets everything.Everything.
I refuse to believe him, believe he can change his mind just like that. I want to lash out, but the encroaching anxiety makes me muzzle myself. I want to get to the bottom of this, not give him another reason to believe we shouldn’t be together.
I drop the strong woman act. “What’s going on, Kit?”
There’s a crack in his visage, large enough to let me peek in for a split second. But then it’s gone, and those walls come right back up, a physical barrier that will always stand in my way. “Nothing. I just think we should nip this in the bud before it becomes anything serious.”
“It’s fucking serious,” I retaliate, my tone smoldering with undue ire. “You’ve led me on this whole time. Do you realize how messed up that is?”
“I’m sorry. I never meant to lead you on, Faye.”
There’s probably an inkling of truth in there, but it’s buried beneath a toxic waste of lies.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I know this isn’t what you want. We’re in a good place, Kit. Why do you want to ruin that?”
He flings his arm wildly between us. “Thiswas never going to work.”
He can’t even say “relationship.”
“So everything you’ve said to me has just been a lie, then? How much you care about me?” I hit him where it hurts, wanting him to feel the pain he’s causing me, wanting it to hurt so badly that he can’t eat or sleep because he’d rather feel nothing at all. He knows how badly I’ve been hurt, yet he has the audacity to say this to me? The one person who broke down my walls and helped me heal from my past is now leaving me with more scars than my rapist.
