Page 86 of Like Fathers, Like Son
We were still for a long moment after we landed, both breathing hard, even as pain started to bloom across my shoulders and spine.
“Fuck,” I groaned, as Anneka tensed again.
“Did you make him take me?”What?What the actual fuck did she just ask me?
I wanted to tighten my grip on her, and force her to shut the fuck up instead of spouting that shit at me, but instead I let go, and she kind of slid onto her butt beside me as I sat up.
“Did I make who take you? That fucking so called ‘serial killer’? Are you out of your fucking mind?” Was she seriously fucking thinking that?
“I… I don’t know… It was just this crazy thought.” She hugged her legs but she stayed beside me on the floor. I didn’t know why my parents had never carpeted this part of the room, but I really fucking wished they had, because any padding would have cushioned my fall a little.
My shoulder was throbbing, and my back already felt bruised. What a great fucking way to feel, when I find out she thinks I could set another serial killer on her.
“Why the fuck would I let another man near you? Why the FUCK would I send someone after you to kill you? You think I couldn’t kill you myself? You heard him, two measly fucking kills. He was an amateur!”
I somehow got up and strode out of the room, needing a few minutes away from her before I fucking lost it and hurt her. It wasn’t that she didn’t deserve that right now, but I couldn’t risk hurting our kid too, could I?
Anneka
HE WAS SO FURIOUS with me, but I felt like it was a valid concern at the time, because wouldn’t that just be so Blaze, to set up something like that so he could ‘rescue’ me. It’d make me grateful for him, wouldn’t it? I’d see him as my saviour, my protector. Just like I had seen him.Exactlyhow I’d seen him.
The part that maybe didn’t fit was how he’d tortured the guy after. Would he do that to someone he’d been in cahoots with? Maybe he would. After all, it was Blaze, wasn’t it? Wasn’t he the most depraved, psychotic person on the planet?
I straightened up and pushed up from the cold tile floor and, as I stood up and looked around me, I realised just what a fall Blaze had just taken to protect me. He didn’t have to help me. He didn’t have to even try to stop me. It wasn’t as if the door wasn’t locked, was it?
We’d landed hard, and he had to be hurting. Why did I keep deciding he was a monster, when he kept proving that he wanted to keep me safe? Why was I going back and forth like some ‘too stupid to live’ moron, who should just make a fucking decision and go with it. He was the father of my child. Didn’t we owe it to that little soul to give it a go?
I grabbed a bottle of water from the kitchen, and a pack of anti-inflammatories from the overhead cupboard, and then I went looking for him. I found him sitting on the end of his bed, his head in his hands. He looked young, and vulnerable, and a little lost.
He might have been the one who did awful things to me, but I hadn’t exactly been all that nice myself. True, I hadn’t raped him, but emotionally I’d harmed him.
I headed around the bed and he sighed heavily as he saw me.
“Please, Anneka, just leave me for a bit. I can’t take any more of your accusations right now. I get it, I’m always going to be the bad guy in your eyes, but I don’t know how to fix that, or if I even can.”
I sat beside him and handed him the pack of pills, ignoring his urges to leave him alone.
“You need to take these for the pain.”
He tried shrugging but I saw him wince, so he couldn’t exactly pretend he wasn’t sore from our fall.
“Please. I’m sorry, okay? You keep saving me, and I should be grateful for that. I’m sorry you got hurt out there.”
He took the water once he’d popped the pills in his mouth, and washed them down.
“Thanks.”
He was too quiet, and while Blaze had always been quiet and that had been part of what made him so creepy as a kid, I didn’t like it while I knew I was responsible for it.
“It was stupid of me to think you arranged what happened. Of course you didn’t. We were making it work, weren’t we?”
Blaze stared morosely at the pack of pills in his hand.
“You know, at first I thought you’d left me. Thought you’d run off again as soon as my back was turned. It was like being stabbed in the stomach, because I thought we’d started to build something real, and then you were just gone.”
“I wish I’d gone with you to the beach. Was it pretty? The sunrise, I mean?”
He shrugged again and cursed, as he tweaked whatever injury he’d suffered.
