Page 67 of A Wreck, You Make Me (Bad Boys of Bardstown #3)

“There’s nothing to explain,” I say, the backs of my thighs hitting the bed, stopping my retreat. “You’re an asshole. There . That’s your explanation.”

I hear him emit a large puff of breath. “Yeah, I’m an asshole. I know. Just… please, all right? Just open the door and let me talk to you.”

I curl my hands into a fist. “I don’t want to talk to you. You’ve made me so mad that I don’t want to do my favorite thing in the whole world: talking . Congratulations, you’re the biggest asshole in the world.”

“Look, I know I fucked up,” he says through the door, and I swear I can somehow hear the grit of his teeth, the clench of his jaw at this, or maybe I’m just so attuned to him that I can hear things he doesn’t say, and I hate that in this moment.

“I know that. Just give me a chance to fucking explain and?—”

“Actually,” I call out, glaring at the door. “Why don’t you call me on my phone?”

“What?”

“Yeah, call me on my phone and leave an explanation in my voicemail.”

I hear him sigh. “That was shitty. I know that, baby, okay? I just?—”

“No, wait, call me on my phone and see if you even get through to my voicemail.”

“What?”

This time his what is said in a soft, thin tone, and it makes my heart flinch for some reason.

Still, I push through. “Yeah, try it. I dare you. I dare you to call me, asshole, because I blocked you. And you know what”—I move away from the bed and stride over to the window on the opposite wall, the one I saw him through the very first time—“I also just locked the window.” I throw the latch as I continue, “You kept saying, didn’t you, that if I wanted to keep you out, I should lock my window.

So again, there. I did that too. You’re blocked and locked out of my door and my window.

And my fucking life. Because I’m done, you hear me?

I’m fucking done with you, so whatever it is you think you have to say to me, I don’t want to hear it.

I don’t want your explanation. And I don’t want your flowers, and I don’t want you to call me baby or Strawberry.

Because I’m not your baby or your Strawberry.

I’m not your anything except your newly discovered stepsister and the half-sister of your half-sister, okay? So just go.”

Okay, so I’m exaggerating a little bit. As in, I’m not done with him.

Sadly, I’ll never be done with him, no matter what happens or what he does to me.

All I need is a little space, but it just came out.

Plus I’m so angry at him right now. I don’t want him to barge in here with flowers, looking like a wreck because he realized he’s fucked up.

I can’t let him make my heart race and my belly quiver when his realization is right. As in, he has fucked up.

Except I haven’t heard from him in the last couple of minutes and I don’t like that either.

Has he really left? I can’t even hear him moving around out there or breathing or growling or any number of caveman things he does when he’s pissed.

And despite myself, I dash back to the door.

I put my hand on the wood and lean in. I press my ear to it, trying to ascertain if my suspicions are correct, when I feel something.

A prickle on the back of my neck, and I spin around.

I see him through the glass, standing far back, at the furthest corner of his backyard, right opposite the window.

I notice his chest moving even faster now, punching his t-shirt, swelling so high up that it might tear the fabric as he stares at me.

With an intensity, dark and thick, that makes me press my spine to the door.

He doesn’t have his flowers anymore, no, but he does have something in his hand.

A soccer ball.

His soccer ball that he kicks around sometimes in the backyard, playing by himself. Snow would sit on the steps and cheer him on while I’d stay away, in the kitchen or upstairs, because I was trying to do the right thing.

He’s spinning it between his hands now, between his long, dusky fingers as he stares at me, and for a few seconds, I don’t really understand why he would have a soccer ball in his hands while staring at me through the locked window.

And then it hits me.

It hits me even before he throws the ball up in the air.

He lets it come back down and ricochet up.

Which is when he moves. I’ve seen him do this move a hundred times before, on the field, before he scores a goal.

He steps back, kicks his leg up in the air and hits the ball sideways.

And he hits it so hard that the ball rends through the air, wrecks the very molecules of it, flying toward the net to score the winning goal.

Only in this case, the net is my locked window, and the goal is the giant explosion of the glass shattering.

It really feels like a bomb went off in here, the sound of it so loud and blaring.

I even act like it because I put my arms over my head and duck down.

Even though I know there wasn’t any need for it.

The spot where I’m standing is away from his path of wreckage.

From the path of the ball that shatters the window and hits the wall, knocking down the picture of a black and white soccer trophy.

Which also shatters as it hits the floor.

I stare at it in disbelief. I stare at the floor in disbelief, pieces of glass scattered around.

Not only on the floor but also in my bed.

On the nightstand, the dresser by the window.

The armchair. Somehow though, they haven’t made their way over to me.

They’re on the floor around me, within arm’s reach but they somehow haven’t touched me.

Like he planned it that way. Like when he decided to bust a soccer ball through my window at the speed of however many miles per hour, he also told the glass how to shatter and decide where the shards may fall.

This is… This doesn’t happen in real life, does it? People don’t have their windows explode by a man who then reaches in and unlocks it, never once breaking eye contact with me.

Never once looking away, he puts his hand on the sill laced with jagged pieces of glass, and I flinch when I see blood ooze out of his palm.

He doesn’t seem to feel it though, the cut, because he doesn’t even blink.

Then, heaving himself up, he lunges inside, his feet thudding on the floor.

And I think he’s so smooth about it, so graceful, that if not for the glass crunching underneath his boots, I wouldn’t be able to hear him come in at all.

Like I wouldn’t back then, when he’d sneak into my room in the middle of the night.

Crazily, I think that’s impressive. But I shut down my wayward thoughts and focus on him.

His eyes are shining with a strange, almost manic light.

His mouth is parted with the force of his breaths, and his arms and fingers are bloody where the glass has managed to cut him.

He looks dangerous. He looks threatening. He looks unhinged.

He looks like a wrecking ball, with barely any grip on sanity, as he walks, prowls toward me.

And I’ve never felt what I’m feeling in this moment. I feel like I want him to. I want him to lose that little grip on his sanity before he gets to me. I want him to teach me a lesson for locking him out, ruin me for saying I was done with him when I’m not. And I never will be.

There’s something wrong with me, isn’t it? There’s something wrong with him too. There’s something wrong with both of us, but I really don’t give a shit.

I’m shaking by the time he reaches me. I’m shaking harder when he leans in and puts his hands on the door by my head, caging me in, his palms splayed wide, his elbows settling beside my body as well, looking like he’s about to do a push up.

“You…” I swallow, looking into his dark, glittering eyes. “You b-broke your window.”

He licks his parted mouth. “Yeah.”

His voice is so rough that I have to squeeze my thighs as it passes through me. Then, glancing over to the fresh blood streaking his corded arms, I add, “You’re b-bleeding.”

“Good.”

My eyes snap back to his. “You s-said… that was the only way to keep you out. Locking it.”

His bloody biceps strain as if literally repelling the words from his body. “There’s nothing that’ll keep me out if I want in.”

I squeeze my thighs again and ask, uselessly, “So you lied?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Didn’t wanna scare you.”

“You’re scaring me now.”

“I know.”

“How?”

He keeps our gazes locked. “Because your thighs are shaking.”

“I—”

“And that vein on your neck”—he licks his lips again, as if thinking about tasting it, or maybe already tasting it on his tongue—“the one that goes crazy when I’m close and the one that has my teeth marks on it, is fluttering really fucking hard.”

I know. I can feel it. I can also feel his teeth marks on my neck.

I’ve felt them on and off ever since he left them on me two nights ago.

I’ve been lamenting the fact he didn’t break skin.

That he didn’t make me bleed from the neck like he did from my pussy.

If he had, his bruise would last longer.

As it is, it’s fading away too quickly for me to hold on to it.

And that’s all I had, see. For the last two days, because for some reason, I didn’t have him.

“Why does it…” My heart thuds and cracks a little bit and I claw my nails into the door. “Why does it feel like that night at the club?”