Heartbreak (Stripped 1.50)

“You’re right,” he says softly. “They don’t care about us. They don’t understand. But I care, beautiful. I care about you more than I should.”

The words burrow inside me where I can keep them. No matter where I go after this, no matter how far away I am from him, I’ll always remember this. “Me too,” I whisper.

He puts two fingers under my chin and tilts my face up to his. “And I’m waiting because I’d rather not have you at all than hurt you.”

“I thought you wanted to hurt me.”

“Only when you want it.”

I have to laugh. “You’re crazy if you think I’d ever want that.”

Sex is one thing. Tie ups are another.

He just shrugs, easy with my denial. He wasn’t going to push me before this conversation, and he isn’t going to push me now. He isn’t going to demand sex now, isn’t going to demand any of that kinky shit now either. He’s content to talk to me, to kiss me, and something eases inside me at the knowledge.

A beat passes, and I scoot closer to him. He wraps his arm around my shoulders and pulls me close—he’s always touching me when I’m near. Careful touches. Heated touches. Possessive touches. This one feels achingly tender.

From this spot in the cramped attic we can look through the grimy window and see the city stretch out—the high-rises with lights blinking off and on. They might be ants living in little glass squares.

That’s just an illusion. The people downtown are rich and powerful.

We’re the small and insignificant ones, liable to get crushed under their shoes if we’re not careful.

“He wasn’t a kid.” Blue’s voice rings out in the dark, and it takes me half a second to realize what he’s talking about.

The rumors. That you killed a kid at your last school.

My hands clench into fists at my sides, but if he couldn’t scare me before, he won’t scare me now. And I realize that may be what he meant to do. To push me away before the truth came out. But I’m still here.

“Who was it?” I ask, my voice trembling. I have enough courage to stick around but not enough to hide how scared this makes me. I’ve been around violence all my life, the kind that bruises, the kind that stings, but not the kind that kills.

He’s quiet a long moment. “Same old story,” he finally says. “Dad liked to spend his night at the bottom of a bottle. And when he got home, he’d take it out on Mom.”

They’d been kicking me around, and it was documented by the caseworker.

It wasn’t some other kid he’d been talking about then. My heart skips a beat, sympathy almost a tangible force inside my chest. It’s a story I’ve heard before, but it’s not any less painful for being common around here. “I’m sorry.”

He just nods as if accepting my sympathy—or maybe accepting the inevitability of what happened. “One day he went off the deep end. Started hitting her and wouldn’t stop. By then I was big enough to put up a fight, but she…” His voice breaks off. “She didn’t want me to. By the time I did, it was too late.”

“God, I’m so sorry.”

“He came after me next,” he continues softly, lost to the past now. “I don’t think he even knew what he was doing then. He was pissed drunk, and I saw my mother on the floor and lost it. I killed him that night.”

All the words catch in my throat. It wasn’t your fault. He deserved it.

I’m trapped by the cold look in Blue’s eyes. Even when he threatened to tie me up, he didn’t seem as ruthless as he does now.

He faces me, and the core of ice in his eyes freezes me. “They called it self-defense,” he says, “but it wasn’t. I could have defended myself without killing him. I could have run away and he couldn’t have caught me. I wanted him to die.”

“Of course you did,” I say softly.

“I’m not sorry.” He sounds almost defiant—and younger than I’ve ever seen him. Not the confident bad boy, but the scared child forced to kill his father.

“It doesn’t matter now,” I say, but I know it’s a lie. It matters more than anything.

He laughs, a cold sound. And just like that, the veneer is back in place, smooth and strong. “If any of the kids in that house get into a fight, they don’t give a shit. It’s like pit bulls fighting in a cage. It’s almost the point.”

I shift, uncomfortable with the analogy. It strikes me as a little too accurate.