Claiming Beauty (Taking Beauty Trilogy 2)

He walked away, leaving me there on the floor crying, his shoulders stiff and tense.

“Bear!” I cried. “Don’t leave! Bear!”

He didn’t even look back.

Chapter 22

I was pretty sure my eyes were swollen shut. I tried to open one at a time, but the light pierced them painfully and I finally gave up, keeping them half-shut and feeling around my room until I made it to the bathroom.

I’d come home last night after the terrible scene with Bear and cried myself to sleep. He’d gone to his bedroom and never come out. I took a cab home, leaving without saying a word to him.

I couldn’t believe the way he’d reacted. The way he’d hit me like that, without putting any love into it.

God, it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?

But last night had been punishment for punishment’s sake and I wasn’t into that.

That was just violence.

I was willing to go along with so much, as long as the love was there, as long as there was an element of play to the game.

Last night, whatever it was, wasn’t a game.

He’d been legitimately pissed off at me and he’d taken it out on my ass.

He’d never done that without talking to me before. Without gently rubbing my ass now and then. Without turning it into a sexual thing, fingering me, pinching my nipples, whispering dirty words to me. He’d always turned into a sexual game.

Last night was anything but sexual.

He’d not even undressed.

He’d disciplined me like a child and I was absolutely mortified and angry. I was angry at him for doing it, but I was angry at myself for letting it happen.

Should I have seen it coming? Maybe.

It all seems so obvious now, doesn’t it? Like, where did I think it was leading? Didn’t I realize I might be in over my head the first time he’d ‘punished’ me for wearing panties?

But no. I thought it was all fun and games.

I don’t know what I would have done if he hadn’t stopped. I’d used my safe word for the first time and he’d respected that, and I had to at least give him credit for that. But it was like he was a robot, a zombie, a man possessed by something else.

My beautiful, gentle, loving, yet demanding man, was gone.

I don’t know what was there in his place, but I didn’t want any part of it.

I jumped in the shower and tried to wash it all away, but it wasn’t dirt. There wasn’t anything I could do to change things, to go back and make last night different. There wasn’t anything either of us could do or say to take it all back. I couldn’t wash it away.

Last night was one of those nights I would never forget, no matter how much I wanted to. Like a bad disease, I was stuck with it.

The hot water poured over me, mixing with the hot tears that had begun as soon as I’d stepped under the water.

“Fuck!” I yelled. “Fuck!”

What the hell happens now, I wondered?

Will he ever even talk to me again?

Did I even want him to?

If he got that upset because I had dinner with someone, no wait—if I lied to him about having dinner with someone—what else would he get upset about? And what would he do then?

Did he not trust me? Did he think I was going to fuck, Levi? Didn’t he realize how much I loved him? What I would do for him? What I had done for him?

I’d given up everything I’d ever known, left my home just because he told me to, left my friends, all for him. I’d taken him deep into places that I didn’t even know existed before he came along, and now…what were we left with but two fractured pieces of something that I thought was whole and true?

Had I been wrong all along?

I contemplated calling him, apologizing, but my pride wasn’t about to let that happen. He needed to apologize to me. He was the one who’d gone too far, he was the one that had gotten out of control. He needed to come to me first. I wasn’t about to go to him. And I wasn’t sure I was going to forgive him.

My head was spinning and my heart felt like I’d been stabbed a million times. I had no idea if we’d ever be able to heal this.

Time. Maybe we just needed time.

The wounds were still fresh.

Surprisingly, my ass was in pretty good shape, considering the abuse he’d heaped upon it last night.

It was my heart that was broken into a million pieces now.

Chapter 23

ONE WEEK LATER

The damned ring reflected off of everything as I tried to work, catching my eye every time I moved my hand. I couldn’t take it off, despite the fact that I hadn’t heard a peep from Bear in a week.

At first, waiting for him to call was like doing a fast.

Usually, we texted each other all day and his sudden absence was like I’d suddenly stopped drinking wine. Which I had, because just the smell of it seemed to make me nauseous these days. I felt stone cold sober now. My life without Bear was like waking up from a hard bender, reality crashing down around me in the starkest of wake-up calls.

I had no idea what I was going to do without him in my life. My entire existence in New York was built around him. I’d barely seen or talked to my mother. Hell, she didn’t even know about my relationship with Bear in the first place. I’d bailed on the one chance I had to tell her, hiding my ring in my purse. I couldn’t go to her now. Not with this.

I’d talked to Marie almost non-stop and ignored her advice completely. She thought I should just call him, or go see him, talk to him. I was all up for talking to him, because it was time I got more answers from him, but I wasn’t about to make the first move.

Marie thought I was being stubborn and maybe she was right. But I felt so weird about the whole thing, I didn’t understand why he’d done what he’d done—everything was so out of character, but in a way, I guess it wasn’t.

Had this all been leading to this awful place and I’d just been incredibly naive?

I sighed as I closed the seam on the dress I was working on.

I should have known.

I should have known.

It was all right there in front of me the whole time.

I was convinced now that it was the intoxication I felt when I was with him that allowed me to get to that other place. It was a game. I wasn’t to blame.

So, I hadn’t thought he would take it to that level, but I’d participated in what I’d thought was something entirely sexual.

Apparently, to Bear, it went further than that.

And to me, that was too far.

I wasn’t about to accept violence for punishment’s sake. I would gladly tell him that, explain every thought and feeling I had, too.

If only he’d fucking call.

But he didn’t.

So I didn’t.

And, here we were. Or, rather, here I was.

Alone. Confused. Hurt.

But after a week of lying around and nervously twisting my hair around my fingers and staring off into the distance, my eyes swollen from constant crying, unable to keep anything down— at this point, I was just tired of being love sick.

I picked myself up, took a shower, ignored the nausea, ate a good breakfast and made myself get to work.

I reminded myself that I had other options.

My entire life didn’t have to be based around Bear.

I still had a career. Or, at least a dream. And that wasn’t dead yet.

Maybe my engagement was, I still wasn’t entirely sure, but my dream was the only thing that got me out of that bed and propelled me into the shower and to the sewing machine and then, finally, to the phone.

Levi had left me messages all week that I’d ignored completely. I just couldn’t talk to him at first. I had no idea what to say.

At first, I didn’t want to piss Bear off any more than I had already. I figured he would call me the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that, and we would make up.

But after all this time, what?