The Evolution of Man (The Trust Fund Duet 2)

“But—” I want to keep going until the building comes down on me. Isn’t that what everyone said would happen? Without a yellow hard hat on my head. I would buried.

I want to be buried right now.

Christopher doesn’t take me back to the Gone with the Wind house.

Instead we pull up at a contemporary home making angles over a sloping hill. I step inside and stare dully at the large piece of rubble with Cleopatra’s eye. It doesn’t seem strange that he should have it. Of course he paid some exorbitant amount of money online. Lord knows he made much more money from the deal than that.

It’s a trophy.

“Why do you have that?”

“It took some convincing to get the buyer to part with it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You take that crow bar to me, if that’s what you need to do. It’s my skin you wanted to break open, and God, you have every right to do that. I never should have closed myself to you.”

I can’t hold onto the anger. It slips through my fingers, leaving only the grief. I would rather be fighting the wall, becoming bloody and hurt. I’d rather anything than this terrible emptiness. “This is another game. Another conquest. Another way to make me love you and then push me away. I won’t survive it, Christopher.”

“You’ll survive anything,” he says, a little sadly. “Even the terrible way I love you.”

My breath catches. I want to argue with him, but part of me always knew it. “I hate you. I hate you.” The words blur together, and then I’m crying. The words change. “I love you.”

He leads me farther into the house, and I stop in front of a fireplace almost large enough to stand in. And above it there’s the Medusa I painted from the art show all those years ago.

“I should have made you mine then, Harper. You were mine, even then.”

He lowers his lips to mine, and I tilt my head up to meet him. I’m done fighting this, done destroying things, done making trophies for him to collect. And I know that he won’t push me away again, not because he’ll never retreat. Because I won’t let him. I’m not only a woman. I’m a she-devil. A siren. A mythical creature, except I’m the one who’s been made of stone. And he’s the man who turns me into flesh and blood.

The wrecking ball slams into the building, the sound deafening.

Dust rises around us, stinging my eyes. I’m not happy about the destruction. It feels a little like death, but sometimes you need to die so you can start over again. There’s a crowd behind us—our friends, Bea and Hugo. Avery and Gabriel.

There’s a community behind us.

Christopher squeezes my hand. “Are you okay?” he asks, though it’s less of a sound with the rumble still falling in front of us and a hard hat obscuring my hearing. It’s the only way he let me within two miles of the construction site today. It’s more the way his lips move.

The whole thing is coming down, along with every hope I ever had for it, every wall I ever built around myself. Leaving room for something new. I nod to him, squeezing his hand back. “Because you’re with me.” He shouldn’t be able to hear me either, but there’s no mistaking the satisfaction in his onyx eyes. It’s the same as when I wake up beside him in bed. The same as when I spread my legs above his mouth. Because he didn’t only need to save me.

He needed me to save him, too.

I reach up on my tiptoes, and he obliged by bending down. Gentle, gentle, even though there’s a wildness inside me, I tug at the lobe of his ear with my teeth. “Diabolical,” I murmur, though he probably only feels a whisper of breath. “You wanted this all along.”

And when he straightens, his eyes brim with the lazy pleasure of a man who’s recently come, his body sated, his mind at ease. “Yes,” he says, the word unmistakable.

My heart snags on something close to the surface.

Love, I think.

Through the cloud of destruction, you can make out vivid colors peeking through. Dust settles in slow degrees, the way a sun would set, crouching low to the ground and then gone. In its wake we have a full view of Christopher’s luxury condo building, with its walls of glass along the ground floor and concrete above. A woman stands proud and unashamed of her breasts, her wings, her wild mane of hair. Lilith is a demon and a sex goddess—the heart of female defiance.

She was the first woman created, even before Eve, made from the same dirt as Adam. Was she cast out of the garden for disobedience? Or did she leave in search of greener pastures?

Is she a deviant pleasure-hungry whore?

Or is she simply a woman who wants freedom?

They are the same story, depending on who tells the tale.