Page 127 of Bitter When He Begs

I need to fuckinggo.

I try to shove past them, but Julian grabs me, gripping my arm, his hold strong. “Sit your ass down, Luca. You know I can take you.”

“Fuck you,” I snap again, yanking my arm away, but he doesn’t let me go.

The need crawls under my skin, wrapping around my ribs like a vise. My breath is uneven as I stare down Eli and Julian. They’re two of the only people in this world I actually consider family, but right now, I want to fight them like they’re the fucking enemy because they’re standing between me and the only thing that will make this night disappear.

“You don’t fucking get it,” I snap, my voice shaking with barely contained anger. “Just move, alright? You don’t have to fucking care—”

“We do care,” Eli interrupts. “You’ll just have to get used to it.”

I shake my head. “I can’t—”

“Youcan.” Julian’s voice cuts in fast. “You already did. You made it out. You made it through the worst of it. You were clean. Youareclean. Don’t fucking give that away.”

I try to shove past them again. I need air. I need space. I need that fucking silence I used to chase down in little white pills. But Eli grabs my arm and shoves me back hard enough that I stumble again. This time I don’t recover. I drop down to my knees on the carpet, head in my hands, breath coming out in short, hot bursts I can’t control.

“Please,” I whisper, fingers tangling in my hair. “Please just let me go. I need it. I just—I can’t stay in this feeling. I can’t sit herewith it. I need to forget this day ever fucking happened and get my dad’s voice out of my head.”

“You don’t need it, Luca,” Eli says firmly.

I let out a bitter laugh. “You have no idea what it’s like.”

“No, we don’t,” Julian admits. “But we saw what it took for you to crawl out of it.”

My hands shake as I try to explain why I need this. “It never goes away, Juls. Not really. It just… fuck, itwaits. It waits for moments like this. For nights like this. For one more loss. For one more fucking call from him. And then it whispers that I can make it all go quiet again.Just one pill.Just one hit. And the noise stops.”

“That’s a lie,” Eli says. His voice doesn’t waver. “ “It never fucking stops, you know it doesn’t. It just trades one kind of pain for another.”

“I’mbeggingyou,” I choke, and it’s not just a phrase—I’m pleading. The way my chest caves in, the way my voice breaks, the way I dig my fingers into my hair like I can hold myself together physically because, mentally, I’m already unspooling. “Let me go.Please. Just this once. Just tonight. I’ll handle it. I swear, I just—I just need to breathe again.”

Julian kneels in front of me, and grabs my wrists, pulling my hands away from my face, but I refuse to meet his eyes. “Look at me.”

I don’t want to. I don’t want to see the pity in his face. But when I do, there’s no pity there. It’s love. Raw and unflinching and fucking painful.

“You remember the nights you detoxed?” he asks, his voice low and even. “You remember the sounds you made?”

I flinch. “Don’t—”

“You begged Damon,” Julian says, not letting go. “You were crying. Screaming.You said you’d do anything if he’d just give you something for the pain.Anything.You offered to crawl, tocut deals, to lie. You said you’d rather die than go another night like that.”

“Stop,” I whisper as flashes of those nights play in the back of my mind.

Eli drops down next to Julian. “We heard it, man. We heard every fucking minute of it when we sat outside that door and listened, and it tore us apart. We’re not just teammates, we’re your fucking brothers. And we swore we wouldn’t let you go through that again.”

They heard… fuck, they heard me.

“Why would you want to go through that again?” Julian asks. “If you know what it cost you last time, why would you want to sink into that shit again?”

“Because it hurts less!” I yell. “Because my dad just called me a mistake again, and I’m supposed to smile through it. Because I walked off that field and all I could think about was how he would look at me like I was still not enough. Because I’m supposed to be over it, but I’m not. I’mneverover it. And the only time I ever got peace was when I was high.”

I fold in on myself again, curling my arms around my stomach, trying to contain the storm in my chest. “I didn’t ask for this,” I choke out. “I didn’t ask to be the broken one.”

“No one asks for this,” Eli says. “But you did the work anyway. You fought tooth and nail to come back. Don’t you dare throw that away because your dad’s too much of a coward to see what you’ve become.”

I let out a sound between a laugh and a sob, hands trembling as they drop into my lap. I’m shaking so hard I can barely sit upright, adrenaline crashing through my veins like static electricity.

“I just want him to be proud of me,” I sob, my shoulders shaking. “Just fucking once, I want him to look at me like I’m worth his name.”