Page 113 of Cruel When He Smiles

I let the silence answer for me for a second. I don’t have a neat reply. I don’t have the kind of defense that will make this make sense to someone who hasn’t lived in my skin.

“I know what it looks like from the outside,” I say. “But it doesn’t feel like that inside my head. He’s the only person who makes the noise stop without asking me to be anyone else.”

Sage leans back in the chair like I’ve knocked the air out of him. He pushes his glasses to the top of his head and drags both hands over his face, pausing at his mouth before dropping them into his lap. His shoulders are rigid.

“You think that means it’s love?” he asks quietly. “You think that because he gives you the quiet in your head, it excuses all the other shit? You told me he made you feel like you couldn’ttrust yourself. You said he treated your pain like it was his fucking toy.”

“I also told you I’ve never felt safer with anyone else.”

“That’s not safety,” he snaps, eyes sharp again. “That’s dependency. That’s conditioning. That’s abuse disguised as comfort.”

“Maybe,” I admit, my voice tired. “Maybe it is. But it’s mine, and I don’t want to let it go.”

“You’re not hearing yourself, Nate.”

“No,” I say, sitting up more, wincing as pain flares across the left side of my skull. “I’m hearing myself for the first time.”

His mouth opens again, but this time, I cut him off.

“You think I’m a victim,” I say, not cruelly, just honestly. “You think he’s this monster, and I’m some helpless idiot getting dragged along behind him like I don’t have a say.”

Sage doesn’t respond.

“But I do. I know exactly what I’m doing, and I know how dangerous he is. I know he plays with people like chess pieces, and he watches reactions more than he hears words. And I still choose him.”

“Why?” Sage whispers. “Why him? Why not someone who actually gives a shit without making it a power game?”

“Because,” I say, and it takes everything I have not to flinch when I admit it, “he doesn’t look at me like I’m broken.”

“He breaks you.”

I press a hand to my temple. “Yeah, maybe. But he puts me back together, too, and the pieces fit better now. They feel like me.”

Sage stares at me for a long time, sadness and exhaustion settling behind his eyes. “You’re so far gone.”

I don’t deny it. There’s nothing left to deny. The damage is already done.

“I’m still here,” I tell him.

“Yeah,” he mutters, standing up slowly. “But for how long?”

He paces the edge of the hospital bed once, then stops beside it. I can see the internal war raging behind his eyes. The part of him that wants to scream at me again. The part of him that wants to cry. The part of him that still doesn’t understand how we got here. How I, the one who used to call bullshit on every controlling relationship we ever saw, ended up this tangled in someone as lethal as Liam fucking Callahan.

I watch as that fight reluctantly dies in him.

“I just want you to be okay,” he says. “I want you to be safe.”

I nod, meaning it. “I know.”

“I’m not going to pretend to like it,” he warns. “I’m not going to start treating him like he’s some romantic fucking hero in your story. He scares the shit out of me, Nate. He’s not wired like the rest of us.”

“Neither am I,” I murmur. “Or did you forget what my version of love looked like while growing up?”

That silences him all over again.

Sage finally sits back down, resting his elbows on his thighs, staring at the linoleum floor with a haunted look in his eyes.

“I’ll never stop looking out for you,” he says eventually.