Page 56 of Wicked Temptations
Those other times, I’d felt relief after. The satisfaction of cutting someone loose before they could cut me first.
This just felt like bleeding out slowly.
I grabbed a glass from the cabinet, filled it with water I didn’t want, and then dumped it in the sink. My hands shook.
You want me to hate you so you can prove to yourself that nobody actually gives a shit.
“Fuck you, Ash,” I said to the empty apartment. My voice came out rough, barely above a whisper. “Fuck you for making this complicated.”
But it had been complicated from the start, hadn’t it?
From that first night when he’d pinned me in the corridor and I’d felt something shift inside me. Something dangerous and inevitable.
And the sex. God, the fucking sex.
I dropped onto the couch, head falling back against the cushions.
It had been incredible. Explosive in ways I’d never experienced before. Every time with Ash felt like falling into something raw and uncontrolled, all rough hands and bruising, bites and the kind of desperate intensity that left marks for days after.
He’d matched me. Met every aggressive impulse, every darker craving I’d kept locked down with previous partners who wanted soft and sweet and safe.
With Ash, I could be myself. The version that liked it rough, liked the fight, liked taking and being taken in return. In unequal measure, even, because it felt so good to let Ash win and have him bend me over.
I’d never come so hard in my life.
I’d tried to keep it simple. Keep it physical. But Ash kept looking at me like he saw something worth keeping, and that terrified me more than anything else.
Because people didn’t keep me.
They tried, at first. They were drawn to the darkness, the brooding silence, the walls I’d built so carefully around myself. They thought they could fix me. Thought their love would be enough to make me whole.
Dylan had thought that.
Dylan, with his easy smile and his linebacker shoulders and his endless fucking optimism. He’d loved my intensity until he didn’t. Loved the mystery until he wanted answers I couldn’t give. And then he’d realized that dark, broken boys were like that for a reason; emotionally constipated and damaged goods with issues locked behind years of learned silence.
As a kid, I’d learned that speaking up only made things worse. So I stayed quiet. Swallowed everything down until it fermented into something toxic.
Dylan had left six months in, frustrated and hurt and tired of trying to love someone who wouldn’t love him back.
Before Dylan, there’d been Jimmy. Jimmy, who’d seemed so steady at first, so grounded. Until he wasn’t. Until his hands became fists and his words became weapons, and I learned that needing someone meant giving them the power to tear you and leave you shattered and bleeding.
I’d left that relationship with bruises that faded faster than the lesson.
Don’t need. Don’t trust. Don’t let them close enough to hurt you.
There’d been others. Guys whose names I barely remembered now. Hookups that turned into something more until I panicked and ghosted. Relationships that lasted weeks before I found a reason to bail.
A pattern. A cycle I couldn’t seem to break.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I pulled it out, half expecting it to be Ash. But it was just a notification from Instagram. Someone had tagged me in a photo from tonight’s performance.
I opened it because I was a fucking idiot.
The image showed me and Ash mid-fight, frozen in a moment. My hand was fisted in his shirt, his fingers wrapped aroundmy wrist. We were so close that our faces nearly touched, eyes locked, mouths parted.
The caption read:These two are EVERYTHING.
