Waking Kiss (BDSM Ballet 1)

“No.”

“I do. I love you, whoever you are, whatever your past. I fell in love with you and I want you to love me back. Nothing bad will happen. Just affection and caring between us.”

She was there, right there, with her intent, pretty face and her tearful eyes. She terrified me. What she was offering terrified me. I fended off her hands when she reached for me. “You don’t love me,” I said. “You loved the sex. That’s all we had together. Sex.”

“I love you, Liam. I’ve loved you forever, since the start. Since you told me in the dressing room that everything would be okay. Since you waited outside my door that night to be sure I locked it. Since you paid off my teacher’s school and made love to me at your cottage and…and bought me that goddamn bed. Your denials won’t change anything. They just make both of us frustrated and unhappy.” She reached out and took my hands. “Trust me, please. Love doesn’t have to be a tragic thing.”

She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand anything. It had nothing to do with her or my brothers or sisters, or my mother, or anything except the pain of loving someone. It had to do with the danger, the horrible risk, and the way you couldn’t control any of it. I pulled away from her, wishing I had a blanket fort to hide in. Safe walls, luminescent stars. “I don’t want to love anyone,” I yelled. “Why can’t you respect that?”

“Because I love you,” she said just as angrily. I refused to look in her eyes or process the fact that she was crying. Everything about her petrified me. Her intensity, her emotion, and the bond between us that I couldn’t seem to break.

“Why can’t you love me, Liam?” she asked, prodding me. “What are you afraid of?”

I breathed the word, because I couldn’t say it. “Everything.” I forced myself to look into those eyes, the deep blue-gray pools that had compelled me from the start. “None of it’s real, you know. Boundaries and control. Consent. All that shit I taught you about. In real relationships, it’s not there.”

I turned away from her, drawn back to another time, another place. I remembered shock and helplessness, gunshots, the horrible blood and the silent intensity on my mother’s face. I never meant to hurt my mother. It sounded so stupid, that I hadn’t meant to hurt someone I’d shot in the face, but it was true. It just happened, a desperate incident outside of any consent or control. I squeezed my eyes shut, willing the memories away. “I can’t, Ash. I can’t. Will you please just go away?”

She slid her hands around my neck. I stood stiff, frozen. “Liam,” she said against my lips. “You won’t hurt me. You helped heal me. You’re a wonderful, caring person and I love you. Won’t you let me help you now?”

“You have to go,” I said, pulling away from her. “I have work to do.”

“Liam—”

“Enough!” I bellowed in a voice I’d never used with her before, an even worse voice than I’d used with Ruby that night. “The answer to your question is no. I won’t let you help me. I’m—I’m—” I cast around for words to express the way I felt. “I’m fine exactly the way I am. I don’t need your fucking help. That was wrong of you to go see my father, to go sneaking around behind my back. You think you can fix me? Maybe nothing’s wrong. Maybe the problem is you. That I don’t trust you, that I don’t like you, and that I don’t really want you. Did you ever consider that?”

She blinked at me once, twice. “No, I didn’t,” she said, her voice cold and sharp as an icicle.

“Well, maybe you should.” I pointed at the door. “If you don’t mind, I’d like you to leave without saying anything else. If you need a ride home, talk to Mem about it.”

And I left her standing there, because I couldn’t bear to look at her any more.

*** *** ***

Mem touched my arm as he drove me home through the busy streets of London. “You must forgive me, Ashleigh. This is all my fault.”

I shook my head, twisting my hands in my lap. I’d taken so much care to dress up and look pretty for Liam. And the flower, ugh. I’d pictured an emotional scene that ended with him falling into my arms, thanking me for my concern and maybe even professing his undying love for me.

Nope. It hadn’t gone like that at all.

“It’s not your fault,” I said to Mem. “At least he knows now that I understand. I wanted to see if it changed things, but it obviously doesn’t.”

“It changes more than you know.”

“But those things he said to me at the end—”

“He did not mean them. He loves you and it frightens him terribly.”

I covered my face as more tears squeezed from my eyes. If Liam loved me, it was the bad, destructive kind of love that made you want to hurt whoever it was you cared about.

“So what do I do now?” I asked from between my fingers.

“I think there is nothing to do.” Mem stopped at a light and looked over at me. “I believe the next move must be his.”

I studied his dark, steady eyes. He seemed to know everything about everything. I wanted to beg him, What? What will his next move be? I hoped it wasn’t to file a restraining order against me. “Maybe we’re not meant to be together. It shouldn’t be this hard to love someone.”

“It shouldn’t, but sometimes it is. Both of you have the cards stacked against you, as the saying goes.” He looked down at the gearshift of Liam’s sporty car. “I was sorry, by the way, to hear of your father’s passing.”

I snorted. “I wasn’t sorry. I drank a whole bottle of wine to celebrate.”

He looked at me until the light turned green, and then moved back into traffic. “Do you think you will ever be able to let the anger go?”

Anger? I never thought of myself as being angry. I was the victim, the person betrayed, the powerless one. But he was right. I carried around a lot of anger and hate, not just for my father, but my mother too. It took up a great deal of space inside me, but their sins seemed too horrible to forgive. “I don’t know,” I said to Mem. “I don’t think I can ever let it go completely. Is that bad?”

He shrugged. “You will never forget the wrongs done to you, but anger, like guilt, can poison an entire life.” He pulled up to my building and put the car in park, then took a deep breath and looked over at me. “You must strive to exorcise your demons, you and Liam both. You cannot change the past, but you can change the future.”

“I’m trying. I’ve been changing a lot, but how can I make Liam change if he doesn’t want to?”

“You ripped off the bandage. It was a good start. He’ll need time to stop the bleeding, time to try to put it back on again, and then…”

“And then what?” I asked, desperately needing answers.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure he’ll ever be fully healed, but I also know he’s not happy the way he’s living. He deserves a love-filled life.”

“A love-filled life,” I echoed. “Maybe with us, two wrongs can make a right.”

“There is nothing ‘wrong’ with either of you,” Mem said. “You’re a very strong, brave woman, and Liam is a caring man. Give him a little time to bleed. All of us, deep down, have some survival instinct. At some point, he’ll realize he’s weakened from lack of bloo

d. Or lack of love.”

“So I have to wait? I can’t do anything?”

“I’ll watch over him in the meantime. I won’t let him come to harm.”

I didn’t want to wait, but I knew from experience you couldn’t force someone to get better until it was time. It had taken a certain degree of desperation for me to reach out and ask Liam for help.

I gave Mem a hug and a nod of solidarity. “Tell Liam to come to me when he’s ready. Tell him I’ll be waiting for him, however long it takes.”

*** *** ***

I skulked around my big echoing house, feeling wrung out and battered. I avoided Mem on principle, and I skipped out on my usual Sunday dinner with my dad. They’d both betrayed my trust, under the guise of “helping me.” I was so damn sick of the whole helping thing I was about to bust. I’d worked through my issues as a child and come to a place of peace, and I didn’t want to open up that can of worms again. The status quo was easier, and I was mostly happy with my life.

Except that life didn’t include Ashleigh.

Fucking hell.

I understood the hypocrisy of my actions, believe me. I’d done far more snooping around on her than she’d ever done on me. Hell, I’d even broken into her apartment once, but I only ever did those things to be a friend to her. I hadn’t waved a flower in her face afterward, demanding honesty and trust and love.

Her words haunted me as I drifted through the week. I heard them during the day while I worked, and in my dreams when I slept. Why can’t you love me, Liam? What are you afraid of? Bedlam and loss of control, for starters. Blood and screaming. The grinding, devastating burden of not being enough. Not being enough brother, not being enough son. I understand the pain, the impulse of hating yourself. Of believing it was your fault when it wasn’t really. But that wasn’t the issue, whether or not it was my fault. The issue was the risk inherent in love, especially love for someone like Ashleigh, who’d already been hurt so badly.

It was impossible, all of it. I went to Amsterdam to work on the new office, thinking distance could smother my feelings for Ashleigh, but it didn’t. I dreamed of her every time I managed to sleep.