I stared at him, literally unable to speak. To move. To anything, really.
Run, a small voice instructed.
Too small.
His words echoed through my head.
“This is insane,” I whispered finally.
“Or maybe everything else has been insane up until this point, and this is the only sane thing in this crazy fuckin’ world,” he replied.
I wanted to believe that. To be the heroine in the movie that let those words fill her up, replace the chaos with stillness and let the man take care of her.
But I wasn’t.
I would never let a man take care of me. Because the last time I tricked myself into thinking a man would, I ended up bloody and broken. The first time I thought that, I watched my mother get bloody and broken. So no, I wouldn’t take things at face value, even if I was fooling myself by thinking I might see beyond the surface and agree with Keltan. That maybe this… connection wasn’t insanity.
Maybe it was clarity.
But I didn’t have time for maybes. I wouldn’t survive the maybe.
I found the strength to extract myself from his arms, and although he squeezed tight before letting go, he did it. Let me go. The way his face lost all emotion was sudden and brutal and hurt more than I would ever admit.
I didn’t break his gaze as I fashioned my own emotionless façade, my strongest one yet.
“You’re so ready to say these things because you’ve just come back from things I can’t even imagine, so—”
“That’s right, you can’t imagine, or even dream in your worst nightmares. So, I wouldn’t try,” he interrupted harshly. “Or use what you think you know about that shit as an excuse for being a coward.”
I blanched but didn’t outwardly react. “I’m not being a coward,” I hissed.
“Sure, I might not know shit about what you went through, but you don’t know anything about my nightmares, Keltan. Nothing. And you don’t get to accuse me of being a coward just because I refuse to let a man I barely know into my life without a second thought. You have no right to do that. Or to push your way in.”
My words were heavy with fire, yet I kept my cool gaze on him. Now that I’d found it, he wasn’t melting me.
His eyes weren’t doing that, though. That smoldering thing. No, they were sharply regarding my own, as if he was trying to dive beyond the words to see what I wasn’t saying.
My skeletons rattled in their closet but stayed put.
“You’re not ready,” he said finally. “You hide it well, babe, especially when you have so much else to distract me. To drown in. I didn’t see.”
I blinked, my curiosity getting the best of me. “Didn’t see what?”
“That you’re broken too. Not in a way I can fix, though I’d give a fuckin’ limb to do so. I was right in thinking you were royalty, babe. A kind of princess. But not one any man can save. You’ve gotta save yourself. I’ve gotta let you. I’ll wait. And hope that’s gonna happen in time for you to realize that you’re not the only one who’s broken. And you’re not the only one you need to fix.”
On that, he walked away. The gentle closing of my door wasn’t so much of a slam, but it echoed through my house, and my soul, with its finality.
A single tear trailed down my cheek.
“You what?” Rosie all but yelled at me. Actually, not all but yelled. Just straight-up yelled. She craned her head, her glitter-rimmed eyes focusing on my gold hoop earrings in a way that made it obvious she wasn’t admiring them. Though they were gorgeous. As were the rest of the clothes I’d sheathed myself in. Some girls slobbed around in sweats when men fucked with them. Me? I dressed for battle, because that’s what Audrey would do. She may have said that happy girls were the prettiest, but she also said that lipstick on a bad day could cure all. Or some such sentiment. I took that and rolled with it.
“What?” I asked Rosie, trying to look at my own ear self-consciously.
“I was just seeing if there was any leftovers,” she said, returning her sharp gaze to me.
I furrowed my brows. “Even I’m not following the crazy train today, and I usually drive it. Leftovers?”
“Yes, leftovers. Of the fucking brain that seemed to have leaked out of your fucking ears by pushing a man who looks, walks and talks like Keltan out of your life. He can make a girl orgasm by giving her one of those stares he does! God can only know what his manly parts can accomplish with their stare alone,” she continued on the same decibel as before.
I glanced around the café, but no one had even blinked. Rosie and I had been coming here since we started drinking coffee—so twelve years old. They were used to scenes. Heck, this wasn’t even a scene.