Page 76 of The Cruelest Kind of Hate
“Gage Arlington, golden boy of one of the scariest hockey teams in the league, wanted to snuggle?”
“Why is that so hard to believe?”
Cali snorts a few times until her laughter devolves into giggles, and she fails to hide the larger-than-life smile overtaking her face—one that shoves all my blood to my cheeks and gives me a permanent just-fucked look.
I was fucked. Figuratively. This girl plays with my emotions like a cat plays with its food. Never in a million years would I picture me voluntarily scaring the living shit out of myself to impress a girl.
“You’re just…I don’t know. You’re not the same guy I met at the rink months ago,” she admits demurely, brushing the back of her knuckles over my shameless blush, all while adoration shimmers on the ocean-blue surface of her eyes.
I’m not, I think to myself.You’ve made me a better person.
“Are you going to make me beg for a snuggle?” I groan, dramatically splaying myself over Cali’s body and pretendinglike I’ll see death’s doorstep unless she showers me in affection. “Because I will. I’ll even admit it, Spitfire. I’m scared. I’m scared, and the only solution is for us to snuggle…for the foreseeable future.”
Cali rolls her eyes. “The foreseeable future?”
“I think I’m already getting flashbacks.”
“Ugh. Fine. Shut up and come here.”
Considering I’m already all over her, I plunk my head right over her heart, wrapping my arms around her midsection and nuzzling my nose into the dip of her sweet-smelling neck. She’s like a cinnamon scratch-and-sniff sticker.
Cali doesn’t turn the movie back on, which is probably for the best. Instead, we lie together for what feels like forever, basking in the slight stirring of each other’s breaths, her fingers composing a soundless tune on my forearm. I’d planned to fall asleep on her, and I probably would have if it wasn’t for the grating sensation of her palms on my skin. But even in my sleepy state, I’ve never noticed her hands to be rough with callouses.
I gently guide her hand palm-up to reveal the scarred crescents stamped into her flesh, and the comfort that once coddled me slips through my fingers before I can grab it.
I know Cali hurts herself. I’ve known ever since the night her mother was hospitalized, but I didn’t want to upset her more by talking about it. But fuck, seeing the state her hands are still in, I wish I had.
The blood has congealed and darkened, contrasting starkly against the paleness of her palms. Eight deep wounds span the width of her hand, structured in a line that looks like a botched stitch job. And I don’t need to press into the half-moons to know the skin surrounding them is delicate.
“Why do you do this, Cali?” I ask quietly, brushing the pads of my fingers ever-so-gently over her lacerations.
She looks at me in confusion at first, but then her gaze dropsto the conjoined caress of our hands, and a frown ghosts over her lips. She almost refuses to answer me. She strangles her words, shuffles the truth around like a deck of playing cards.
“I…”
My stomach turns—a repercussion of treading on unspoken territory. Her eyes are beginning to gloss over, and her teeth tug at her cracked bottom lip.
“Calista…” Heartache cowers in my tone, and I feel like I’m breathing through shot lungs. This is killing me to see the evidence of a lifetime of self-blame and self-loathing etched into the life lines of her palms.
Her voice is reedy, on the verge of breaking into unintelligible cries and spit-obstructed garbles. “I do it to punish myself,” she confesses shamefully, focusing her gaze on the skin-deep marks, almost as if she’s remembering each time she mutilated herself.
Tears swell over my lower eyelids, and it takes twice the amount of power to rid my response of throat-clogging emotion. “Oh, baby.”
“I didn’t use to do it. It started when my mom got really sick. And each time I saw her suffer, I’d dig my nails into my palms. It was a way of punishing myself—a way to remind myself that I need to do better by her. A way to remind myself that I wasn’t doing enough.”
I wish Cali could see herself the way I see her. She’s made so many sacrifices for the well-being of her family. And she’s harbored just as many emotionally scarring consequences. People like Cali are rare. She has this selflessness about her that some people only have less than one percent of.
“I wish you didn’t do it,” I whisper pathetically.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she responds quickly, backed by a numbness that tells me, at one point, it did. It hurt, but it wasn’t strong enough to counteract the guilt.
“It hurtsme.”
Cali freezes in shock, right before her whole frame collapses, and I can tell she’s trying to evade my eyes. She even tries to pull her hand away, but I don’t let her.
She swallows thickly. “I never wanted you to see them. God, they’re so ugly.”
I tip her a half-smile, shaking the corkscrews of hair that dangle against my temples. “They’re not ugly. They’re beautiful. They’re a part of you—even if it’s a part you’re adamant about hiding from me. I adore you. Scars and all.”
