Page 144 of Destined Dawn
She’s going to ask me to leave and I can’t deny this woman anything. Nah, I can’t even deny that. If she asks, I’ll leave.
It sucks. Life sucks. Just when you think it’s going right –it slaps you hard around the face and kicks you in the balls. Sometimes it even digs a knife right between your ribs.
“You want me to go,” I say. I keep my eyes trained straight ahead. It makes that thing in my chest hurt too much – and not in the good way – to look at her. I’ll leave. I’ll go. Fuck knows where. Fuck knows what I’ll do next.
“Go where?” she says.
“Usually it’s more than 100 yards away.”
“Why would I want you to be 100 yards away from me?”
I sigh. “I know who I am, little rabbit. You know it too. I’m not like them.” I jerk my chin out towards all the fucking normal people. “I don’t fit in. You won’t want me around.”
“Do you usually care what I want?” she mutters.
“I didn’t use to care. I care now. I think you made my heart start working.”
Beside me she shakes her head. “You think you can say things like that to me and I’d actually be able to send you away?”
“People send me away all the time. They find me … difficult.”
“Because you try and kill them.”
“I’m trying my best not to do that. I know you don’t like it.” I turn my gaze back to her, unable to resist it anymore. She’s so … fascinating. “You didn’t kill your dad. You didn’t kill Christopher Kennedy. Even though you had the chance.”
“If we kill, they kill, then we kill, on and on it goes until there’s no one left. It’s time to end the cycle of violence. It’s too … exhausting.”
“Violence is all I’ve ever known, little rabbit,” I say softly. It’s my earliest memory. The belt. The buckle. Because I couldn’t sit still.
“But now you know something softer,” she whispers, stroking her hand down my cheek, “and you like it.”
“I like it,” I say, covering her hand and pressing it firmly against my face. “I like it a lot.”
“Better than the violence?”
“If you were touching me like this every day, I’d have no need to kill,” I admit.
“Then you’re staying right with me.”
“Even though I’m crazy?” I say, my eyes meeting hers.
“You’re not crazy, Renzo. You’re …”
“Different? Special? Yeah, they mean the same thing.”
“You’re perfect just the way you are. And I love you.”
A warmth spreads from the very center of my heart right through my body, along my limbs to the ends of my fingers and the tips of my toes and my bond hums with something I think might be happiness. It feels fucking amazing.
“Shit, you do?”
No one ever said that before. Not even my mom.
No one.
“Yes.”
“I love you too, little rabbit.”
