Page 147

“No,” he barked out the word. “I’m not letting you blame yourself for this shit. I get what life is with you, Calliope. I’m a grown man. A smart one. Don’t do me the disservice of thinking I can’t make rational decisions. I love you. I’m not running from you.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “You should.”
He didn’t speak straightaway. He was waiting until I opened my eyes, likely. I took my time. When I met his gaze, it was unyielding. Reverent. Harsh too.
“Maybe,” he smirked. “But I’m not a coward. Calliope Derrick wouldn’t love a coward. You love me?”
I nodded slowly.
He laid his lips on mine. “Then I’m not running.”
And even though I was pretty sure that made me a terrible person, it sent relief coursing through my body.
It took me longer than I had anticipated to recover from my jaunt into New York City, which included the death of two of the most powerful men on the island, if not the country—one of them whom I used to love and had killed with my bare hands.
I didn’t expect the nightmares. How vivid they would be. The warmth of the blood as it spilled onto my hands, the frozen look in Jasper’s eyes, the weight of his lifeless body.
Every night, I woke covered in sweat that I was sure was blood. Every night, Elliot was there, rubbing my back, murmuring in my ear, telling me where I was and that I was safe.
The gentle rumble of his voice, the light pressure on my back, and his lips against my ear brought me back down to earth. Asalways, he was my anchor to safety, sanity and a life I didn’t think I deserved.
I’d given up on trying to push him away. After everything that happened, I didn’t have the energy. And I was selfish. I didn’t trust that I’d be able to recover without him. Even with my girlfriends, my family, I feared I’d sink into some martini and benzo hole, never to be seen again.
Elliot made me strong. Not only was he there in the middle of the night, but he got up with me every night when I needed to shower to wash off the blood that only existed in my memories. Logically, I knew that I wasn’t covered in blood, but there was no way for me to go back to sleep without washing myself clean.
I’d also given up on telling Elliot he didn’t need to get up with me, demanding he sleep somewhere else so I didn’t wake him.
“For the foreseeable future—read, the rest of my life—I’ll be sleeping next to you, Calliope,” he’d told me the last time I’d tried to get him out of the bed and away from my weakness. “I’ll wake up when you have a nightmare, and I’ll stay with you until I know you’re asleep. And if you think I’ll go anywhere else, then you obviously don’t know me very well.”
The determined edge in his tone told me I wasn’t going to win any arguments. Me. And I’d practically argued for a living.
So I was getting used to losing arguments with Elliot.
He was firm when he needed to be, in disagreements over where he slept and when it came to sex—which I had a renewed appetite for. And that was saying something, considering the appetite I had for it beforehand.
I probably needed therapy. No, I definitely needed therapy. I had even before New York. But I didn’t know how much doctor-patient confidentiality extended when admitting to murders of admittedly bad men.
Wasn’t worth risking it.
Rowan and Kip had been keeping their eyes on me, waiting for me to have a breakdown so they could come in to save the day. Not because they were alpha assholes—okay, they were kind of alpha assholes—but because they felt powerless. They were used to being the ones to save the day, fix things, clean up the blood if need be. And I’d done that. Rendered them useless.
I knew it was because they loved me, but their concern, the worried looks when they thought I wasn’t paying attention, was driving me insane.
As was Elliot’s steady presence and the way he acted the same around me. As if nothing had changed. Yet I didn’t miss the concerned looks he gave me when he thought I wasn’t looking either.
He was cleaning up dinner dishes on a rare night when he wasn’t at Shaw Shack or we weren’t eating with one of my friends, my family, or his. It seemed the agenda was to keep me so busy and surrounded by people that I wouldn’t dwell on what I’d done. It wasn’t a bad plan, especially when combined with martinis and copious amounts of sex.
“We can’t keep going on like this, you know,” I told him as he sat down on the sofa.
“Like what?” he turned to face me, his gray eyes guarded.
He was bracing, struggling with his own PTSD from the day I’d tried to break up with him then came back covered in blood after he spent hours thinking I was dead. And although my first instinct was to not feel empathy for a man’s reaction tomytraumatic event, this was Elliot. He was traumatized because he cared about me. He had asked nothing of me for the two weeks since I came back. No further explanation, no additional apologies, nothing. He continued to give. All I did was take.
“You’re a quiet, simple man from a small town,” I whispered. “And make no mistake, I do not mean simple as an insult. I’ve come to learn that a simple man is rare and precious. That he isgood and kind and means what he says and loves in a way that has no conditions, no thorns. He loves in a way that will not make you bleed.”
I squeezed my hands together so my nails punctured the skin.
“Or he shouldn’t.” I spoke quieter that time. “If you are a simple woman, without thorns of her own. But I’m not. Therefore, I do not deserve your love, and you deserve much better than what a life with me would entail. In fact, you would not survive it. Men like you are not made for women like me. Again, that’s not an insult. It’s a compliment.”