Flawed (Ethan Frost 4)

“There wasn’t time. You were set to give the interview in a few hours and I knew you didn’t want to do it. I needed to get this info out there so you wouldn’t have to.”

“Do you hear yourself?” I ask for the second time in as many minutes. “You knew, you needed. What about what I need?”

“This is what you need.” He takes the tablet, scrolls through some stuff, and then holds it up to me. “Are you looking at this? Are you seeing what they’re saying about you? You’ve gone from whore to victim in the space of four hours.”

“Maybe I preferred being a whore, Miles. Did you ever think of that?”

He looks at me like I’m crazy. “Yeah, well, you don’t always make the best choices, do you?”

I gasp, which totally pisses me off because the last thing I want to sound like right now is some nineteenth-century virgin with a case of the vapors. But I can’t help it, not when his words—and the contempt that motivated them—are making me want to curl up into a ball and hide.

Shame swamps me, makes my hands and my voice shake as I answer, “No, I haven’t always made the best choices. But I’ve spent the last few months trying to change that, and for you to throw it in my face now over something that isn’t my fault…that’s low, Miles. That’s really fucking low.”

He sighs, shoves a frustrated hand through his hair. “You know that’s not what I mean. I’m just saying, in the past week you’ve been disowned by your father, become notorious on the Internet, and been forced to go into hiding with nothing but a backpack and a couple of pairs of yoga pants. This is your way out of that. You say you want to find a job, want to have a life. Fixing this mess gives you a chance to do all that and more.”

“So you fixed it for me.”

“Of course I did. I—care about you a lot, Tori. There’s no way I’m going to let you suffer through this if I can fix it.”

“I get that. I do. And I care about you, too. But did it ever occur to you that I need to be

the one to fix it? Not you? That I need to be the one to put my life back in order because it’s my life? We just talked about this—”

“Are we back to the fucking clothes?” he demands, exasperation ripe in his voice.

“We are back to the fucking clothes. And the fucking electronics and the fucking shoes and everything else you thought it necessary to buy me without consulting me.”

“I was trying to help!”

“I know. You’re always trying to help.” It’s why I can’t be angry at him, no matter how much I wish I could. Because if I was angry it would make what comes next so much easier to bear.

“Except you’re not doing it just because you want to help. You’re doing it—”

“If you’re about to accuse me of helping you for sexual favors, I strongly suggest you don’t.” His voice is deadly quiet, deadly serious. Just the idea is obviously a hot button for him—not a surprise considering the guilt he carries for what happened to Chloe—but that isn’t what I was about to say.

“You know, you could give me the benefit of the doubt and wait to hear what I say before you jump down my throat.” A bit of that anger I was looking for finally sparks to life inside me. “Then again, why would you? It’s not like you give me the benefit of the doubt on anything else, right?”

It’s his turn to look offended. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means that you always think the worst of me.”

“Excuse me? I’ve worked my ass off to help you because I don’t think the worst of you and I don’t want anyone else to, either.”

“No, you’ve worked your ass off to help me because you don’t think I’m capable of helping myself.”

For long seconds, he just stares at me, teeth clenched and jaw working overtime. Fury burns in his eyes, so dark and bright that part of me wants to take back what I just said. But I can’t—partly because I know what I said is right and partly because I refuse to back down to Miles. If I do it now, I’ll always do it, and if our relationship has any chance of working (something I’m doubting right about now) he needs to see me as an equal. More, I need to see myself as one.

“That’s not fair, Tori,” he finally grinds out.

“I know it’s not fair. But I also know it’s true. You think I’m a mess. You think—”

“You are a mess!” he roars. “I mean, just look at you. You’ve been disowned by your father, you’re so broke that you have to crash at your best friend’s house, you don’t have a job, any clothes, or any devices to help you look for a job, and up until this morning you were the punch line to an international joke. It doesn’t get much messier than that.”

His words hit like fists, so hard that I have half a mind to lift my shirt up and look for bruises. “Wow. Don’t hold back. Tell me what you really think of me.”

“Damnit. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure there’s only one way you can mean that, Miles. But thanks for being honest with me.”