Page 95 of Break the Ice
That girl.
Me.
I’m hanging on to his every smile and every laugh. I’m latching on to every look and every word he gives me. And it doesn’t matter how much he gives; I want more.
CHAPTER 28
JAYDEN
With Kailey and Isla’s Thanksgiving gifts in the trunk, I get in the car. It’s a tradition I started when I was across the country from my sisters and the holiday was one of the few times I got to see them during the season. I’d take them a gift, so they knew I missed them. That I thought about them every day. It stuck.
I sit for a moment, contemplating whether now is the right time to give Finley her gift. It’s the cheapest gift I’ve ever bought a girl—mostly because the only women I buy gifts for are Kailey, Isla, and our moms—but when I saw the way she smiled when she was looking, I knew she had to have it.
Taking the small pouch from my pocket, I hold it out in the palm of my hand. “Don’t give me crap, I’m making up for traumatizing your tastebuds with my poor taste in alcohol.”
I figured she likes to try new things…
Thank fuck I ordered the lychee juice as a back up for her, because after a tiny sip of the beer, Finley looked set to barf.
Wide eyes greet mine when I meet her blue stare. Her words from earlier echo a little louder, the same way the weight of her touch still lingers on my chest.
“What is it?” She asks, taking the card pouch from my hand.
“Open it,” I tell her, watching as she follows my instruction.
“Jayden,” she murmurs, her voice trembling with a restrained sob when she strokes over the pearl studded hoops with her finger.
“It’s nothing much, but they’ll look pretty on you.”
In all honesty, she’s the kind of woman who will make anything lookincredible. I mean, I’ve barely been able to keep my hands to myself all afternoon. All she’s wearing is a short dress and Elijah’s hoodie, but every time I look at her in his number, something happens to me that I cannot control.
I want to touch. I want to hold. I need to get as close as I can because she is the closest thing I have to him, and somehow, that numbs some of the burning ache inside me.
“I can’t keep them,” she tells me, her mouth twisting in an apologetic wince.
“Of course you can. I bought them for you.” Finley shakes her head, and as a result her silent tears rain onto her hands, making my insides shrivel with the sick sensation turning my stomach. “Why not?”
A shaking hand tucks her thick waves behind her ear, revealing herunpiercedlobe. Without moving her gaze from the earrings, she tells me, “I can’t wear them.”
“Do you want to wear them?”
“They’re beautiful.” A sad smile tugs at the corner of her mouth before she finally looks at me again. “God fearing girls…godlygirls don’t call attention to themselves with these worldly objects,” she grinds out the words between bitten teeth while clenching her hand around the earrings.
“Bullshit. They’re just earrings.”
An acerbic laugh wracks through her, making it impossible to resist the urge to wrap her up in my arms and hold her to my chest. If I could just absorb her pain, I would drink it all in without a second breath, until I was drunk on it. On her.
“I know,” she speaks into my shoulder. “I know it’s not true. That they’re just earrings. But in Havenview?—”
“Fuck that place, Fin.”
What more can I say that I haven’t already said?
It’s all bullshit. Bitter misogynist crap that makes me sick with rage. The thought of someone so perfect and precious believing that they are nothing more than some bastard’s property…
It boils my blood to know that the people who lectured them about being godly, are the same who have hurt them. And I don’t know how to undo any of the harm they’ve caused. If I’ll ever be able to fix it. But I’m a proactive man, and when something pisses me off, I can’t not do something about it.
“Do you want to wear the earrings?” I ask, trying to keep the gravel of my anger off my voice when I tip her chin up with my finger.
