Truth

Dread hit me head on, and I gripped my blanket tighter. No. I know that look.

“Brooklyn...” he muttered, averting his eyes away from mine. I stared at his back, the tense way his shoulders were pulled back. Tears stung the backs of my eyes, but I held my ground. I kept my composure. There’s no way he’s about to—

“I need you to leave.”

I was stunned. My face stung like Reid had slapped me. The bottom of my stomach fell out from below as I replayed the night in my head—his body on mine, the way he peered down at me and made me feel like what we had was something more, like what we were doing was almost sacred. Did I make it all up in my head?

“What?” I stuttered, pulling the blanket up even tighter, as if the thin cotton was somehow going to protect me.

Reid’s back was still facing me. “I need you to leave, Brooklyn.” His words weren’t rough. In fact, they sounded soft, almost too soft to be his.

Hurt and anger both gripped me so hard it made my stomach ache. I winced and grabbed onto it.

“But—”

“I know,” he interrupted. “I know what you’re going to say.”

Reid quickly turned around and stood up, placing his hands on his hips, right beside that V shape his abs formed. He was standing there just in pants, his bare torso gleaming but his face drawn tight as if he were pained. “You told me not to hurt you, and this is me not hurting you. I need you to leave.”

Fury hit me so hard it felt like I was being whipped. I stood up, too, the blanket even tighter in my hand. “No.” Reid’s jaw muscles worked back and forth. His nostrils flared; his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. I glared at him. “I’m not leaving. You can’t just snap your fingers and demand I leave, not after last night.”

Reid swallowed as he looked away. He couldn’t even look me in the eye. How dare he strip me naked and have his way with me and then demand I leave.

“Brooklyn, please,” he begged, still keeping his gaze aloof. “I… I can’t do this.”

I laughed a cold-hearted laugh. “Too late, Reid. You did do this.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Brooklyn. Just leave.”

“No!” I demanded, stomping my foot. “You can pretend that last night didn’t mean anything. You can pretend like there isn’t something between us, like I’m just an annoying little gnat that was sent here to collaborate on songs with you, but I’m not leaving.” I gasped, catching my breath. “I’m not leaving because, at the end of the day, I know the truth. I know that there is something happening between us—last night proved that very clearly.”

“None of that matters, Brooklyn.”

Another slap to the face. The anger simmering below was quickly morphing into hurt. I was hurt. He was hurting me. How did I let this happen?

I pinned him with a desperate stare. “Tell me why.”

He took a step back and looked away again, unable to meet my gaze. “Why what?”

“Why are you pushing me away? Again. What did she do to you that has you so afraid to feel?”

Reid snapped his head over to me so fast I jumped. His narrowed eyes were like slits on his face, but I pointed my gaze right back. He should have known by then that I wasn’t one to back down from him.

“You want to know what has me so fucked up?”

“Yes,” I ground out through the wall of my clenched teeth.

He laughed sarcastically and then shrugged. “Okay, then maybe you’ll see that I’m no good. That I have nothing to offer you, other than a whole lot of drama.”

“That’s not true,” I argued.

He huffed, shaking his head, walking a few steps toward me. “It is true, Brooklyn. It is. Have you ever once thought about the prospect of you and me being together? What that would mean? You are so pure and so damn good. You’re kind, and beautiful, and like a fucking beam of sunshine. You’re an elementary school music teacher. You’re so far away from the world I live in that you’d be fucking swallowed up whole if you were to even put a pinky finger inside it. My world is full of fame and meaningless gossip. It’s disgusting at times. It chews people up and spits them out. My entire life is my music, and the one time I put it in front of someone else, they ended up not coming out on top. I couldn’t bear the thought of the same outcome happening to you.”

Reid stopped talking for a few seconds. He ran his hands through his hair, pacing back and forth in the living room. I stayed completely still, watching him stroll around. Then, he finally stopped and shot a glance at me. “What would you say if I told you I had a child?”

My mouth fell open. “You have a child?” I asked, completely dumbfounded.

A short, sarcastic laugh escaped his lips. “I have no fucking clue. Do you want to know why I’m so fucked up? Why I’m hot one second and then cold the next? Why I pull you in and then push you away?” He didn’t give me time to answer. He strode over to me and stood so close I had to peer up into his face. “The last time I saw Angelina, she was lying in a pool of blood on a hotel bathroom floor with a knife in her hand, saying that she cut our baby out of her stomach. I gave up on her, and it turned her into that. Me pushing her away made her do that.” My mouth gaped, and I felt so incredibly sorrowful that tears truly did brim my eyelids. Not for the fact that he was pushing me away again, but for the fact that he was going through something that didn’t even sound possible. It sounded like part of a horror story, or part of a wicked movie that had me pulling back from the screen because it was so absurd. I snapped my jaw shut when he spoke again. “So, when I tell you that I’m not intentionally hurting you, and that I’m only trying to protect you, I need you to take it and deal with it. I know what last night was. I know what you felt. But, Brooklyn, you need to just stay the hell away from me for your own good.”