“You.”
I nod. “Yeah, choose me.”
“Why?”
This is the easiest thing for me to say, the easiest of all the things that I’ve ever said to him. “Because I love you, Arrow. I’ve loved you for years and if you give me a chance, I can make you happy.”
“You can make me happy.”
I swallow. “Yes.”
“By loving me.”
He’s saying all these things in a flat tone but that’s not the part I’m worried about, or at least not the only part.
The fact that he keeps repeating everything that I say is even more concerning to me.
“Y-yes,” I reply.
He nods.
Then he ducks his head and shifts on his feet before looking up. “I just have one question though.”
“What question?”
He cocks his head to the side and asks very casually, “Did I ask for love? From you.”
“I…”
“Answer me!”
He yells out the words and it’s such a shock after his curious tone that I flinch and whisper, “No.”
“What did I ask for?”
“Arrow –”
“Answer the fucking question, Salem. What did I ask for?”
“My body.”
He narrows his eyes. “Bingo. I asked for you to spread your legs for me. All I ever asked from you was your tight little pussy. That’s it. I asked for a good fuck. Because you’re supposed to be my fuck doll. Or did you forget that? Did you forget what your job is supposed to be? Your job is to shut the fuck up and take it. That is your job. Those are the rules.” He scoffs then, shaking his head. “But then, who am I talking to? You can’t follow a fucking rule to save your life, can you?”
I wring my snowy, cold hands and blurt out, “But I just thought if you could try…”
To love me…
“Try to do what?”
“T-to open your heart and maybe love –”
Something about that makes him laugh.
It not only makes him laugh, he even throws his head back and lets out that bark of a sound – a broken glass sound – up to the snowing sky.
The flakes settle on his harsh face and disappear. They settle on his agitated chest, his shoulders, his sun-struck hair and disappear.
I watch them, wishing I could be like that.
I wish I could be like snow. I wish I could touch him.
I wish I could disappear.
I wish…
A second later, he lowers his face and it’s… agonized. The hollows of his cheeks, the arch of his brows, the line of his jaw, bathed in some kind of misery.
Some kind of torture.
“You wanted to know what happened in LA, yeah?” he says, his voice tight and heavy with both anger and something I don’t understand right away except that it’s hurting him. “You wanted to know if I still loved her. You wanted to know that, right?” He laughs again. “Yeah, okay. Okay. Let me tell you. Let me tell you that no, I don’t still love her. I never loved her.”
“What?”
He scoffs, looking at the sky again, running his fingers through his hair, fisting the strands almost, before looking back down at me with tormented, desolate eyes.
“All this time I thought our relationship was perfect and she was perfect and that she threw everything away. And I couldn’t figure out why. I couldn’t figure out why she would do that to me, why she’d break my trust like that, why she would cheat on me and destroy eight years of our love. I couldn’t figure out how my perfect relationship, my perfect love fell to pieces. But the truth is that it wasn’t love. There was no love between us. There never was.
“What I thought was love, what I thought love looked like, turned out to be convenience. Apparently, it was easy to be with her. It was easy to be with someone who was exactly like me. Ambitious, perfect, driven. Someone who didn’t interfere with my precious fucking soccer. Someone who didn’t distract me from my goals.
“Well, until she did. Until I read those goddamn messages and I lost my focus. Until my perfect girlfriend became a distraction and I lost a game. And last night in LA, I realized that I’m angrier about that lost game than I am over the fact that I lost my girlfriend. I’m angrier about the fact that my perfect relationship turned out to be a lie than I am about the fact that she slept with someone else.
“Last night in LA, I realized that I was never in love with her and she was never in love with me. We were just two perfect people in love with perfection. And I was so damn focused on my career and my game and my strikes and kicks and how much I can bench press, that I never noticed. We were together for eight years and I never fucking noticed. I never noticed that the girl I was going to marry was with me because she had high ambitions and I was with her because she never interfered with those ambitions.”