I wanted to ask him what he feared. Ached to know it. But I didn’t have enough courage. Not yet. I didn’t have control over this. Over us. And I never would. But nonetheless, I waited. For him to offer me something. Anything about him. About his past. His present. What he dreamed of. Though I still nursed that fool’s hope, I expected him to stay silent, maybe to continue kissing my thighs, dragging me further in to him. But he surprised me. He spoke.
“You quote Albert Einstein,” he said, voice husky. “You have a cat called Voldemort. You stand up for strangers with no thought for your own wellbeing. You’ll do anything for those you love. Even those of us who don’t deserve that love. You’ll fall in love with a man who has shown you nothing but cruelty.” He stroked my cheek so gently, his fingers barely brushed my skin. “You love wicked things. And you make those wicked things love you back.”
His words echoed in my brain, and I waited to jerk out of a dream. But Jay stayed, stark and harsh. My entire body shook, the foundation of me cracked apart.
“You said you’d never love me,” I whispered. “You promised you wouldn’t.”
“I lied,” he murmured. “I’m a sinner, pet. You know this. My job is lies. My very existence, inhaling and exhaling, are a series of mistruths, secrets and betrayals. There was no way I could admit to you, or myself, that I was capable of loving. Because I knew I was, and I knew that my love would be your curse. Knew that it was an inevitability to fall for you. Knew I’d ruin your life loving you. So I lied. Like only a sinner can.”
My thundering heart threatened to jump right out of my chest. If only I could present it to Jay. As if he didn’t already have ownership of it.
“What does this mean?” I asked, my voice shaking.
“It means the arrangement is over,” Jay said.
My stomach roiled as soon as the words left his mouth. Panic paralyzed me as I tried to digest what he was saying. That this was over.
“Over?” I repeated, my lip quivering as I spoke.
“Over,” he repeated. His eyes were no longer hard, face no longer cold. “There’s no way I can only have you on the weekends. No way I can keep my rules. I broke every single one of them the second I brought you into my office. You’re tied to me, Stella. Wrapped around my insides. And I can live with that. Even though I promised myself that I would never care about another soul in this world. But here you are. Twisted around me.”
I blinked at him. This beautiful, complicated man. The man who was indeed wrapped around my insides. He wasn’t ending things with me. He was ending the arrangement, the illusion that things between us could be controlled.
“The red string of fate,” I whispered.
Jay tilted his head in question.
“It’s old Chinese folklore,” I explained. “A connection between two people destined to be something to each other. Lovers. People who find each other no matter the circumstances, through that red string. It will twist and tangle through the course of time, of life, circumstances. But it will never break. The red string will always keep them connected.”
The words chilled me as I said them, yet I didn’t know why. This was meant to be a happy moment, wasn’t it? But there was nothing happy about love. Not ours, at least. For better or for worse, Jay and I would always be connected. Of that, I was certain. I just wasn’t certain about anything else.
Jay had taught me so many things. He had taught me that I could survive in darkness. That I could handle violence, come to crave certain kinds of it. Most of all, he had taught me what love really was. When I first met him, I’d told him that I’d never been in love. That I wanted to live so I could experience the ‘can’t breathe without you’ kind of love. That ineffable kind of love.
The man who I’d thought was going to kill me before I could experience love had shown me what it was. It wasn’t at all what I’d imagined. It was complicated. It was sickening, worrying, terrifying. It was that feeling you had when you jerked awake in bed, convinced you were falling to your death, and you couldn’t find purchase on reality. On safety.
“Tomorrow, we’ll make arrangements to get your things,” he told me, not acknowledging the words I’d just said. “You can decide which you’d like to keep, what you’d like to replace here. We’ll arrange to have one of the bedrooms turned into an office for you. I imagine I’m going to have to have the closet expanded. I’ll call contractors about that tomorrow.”