Page 76 of Ghosts Don't Cry

“No. I just … I need to not be here.”

She nods, and climbs into the back of the cab. I follow, dropping onto the seat and pressing my fingers hard against my thighs, trying to block out the memory of his hands. My reflection in the car window catches my attention. I look exactly like what Amy said.

But it’s not just his touch that lingers, it’s the look in his eyes when he pulled away from me. That flash of vulnerability before he buried it under cruelty. The way his hands shook before he stopped them … before he spoke those words designed to destroy anything that might have been left between us.

You’re just like them.

Yet even those words didn’t stop me from wanting him to stay. I wanted to pull him back, wrap my arms around him andbreak through those walls he’s built. I wanted to find the boy who used to whisper poetry against my skin, and looked at me like I was the only good thing in his life.

Because, after everything, if he touched me again, I don’t think I’d tell him to stop.

And I don’t know what that says about me. What it means that I’d let him ruin me over and over if it means having him back for a few minutes.

I let my head fall back against the seat, staring at the car’s roof while the driver takes us through the dark streets.

He wasn’t supposed to touch me again. I wasn’t supposed to want it.

But he did.

And Ido.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

RONAN

The walkback to the house takes longer than it should, every step dragging like I’m wading through quicksand. My head is pounding, a brutal, punishing rhythm in my skull.

I can still feel her on my hands, and against my mouth. Her body pressed between me and the wall. Her breathless, shattered gasps weaving through my mind.

My legs are unsteady beneath me, the adrenaline crash hitting hard and fast. The cold air bites at my overheated skin, but it doesn’t help.Nothinghelps. I’m still hard in my jeans, and it feels uncomfortable and wrong, my body refusing to acknowledge what my mind knows.

I just destroyed the only good thing I ever had in my life.

Nausea rises with each step, and I stumble, catching myself against a streetlight and forcing air into my lungs. The street is empty, and there are no witnesses to watch me fall apart.

Small mercies I don’t deserve.

Her perfume clings to my clothes, filling my lungs with every breath I take, making what I did impossible to ignore.

I touched her when I knew better. I let her touch me when I knew what the cost would be. But I did it anyway, and now she’s under my skin again, burned into me as though she never left.

The door slams behind me, and the silence of the house bears down. My hands won’t stop shaking. I scrub them over my face, through my hair, trying to shake her loose. My fingers smell of her, that mix of arousal and perfume that fills me with want and self-loathing in equal measure.

I need to get her off me.

I need to get her out of me.

But she’severywhere.The taste of her lingers on my tongue. My fingers twitch, recalling the way her body melted beneath my hands, the way she tightened around me, and how she gasped my name like she didn’t care that I was poison in her veins.

In prison, I told myself she was an illusion. A figment of my past warped by desperation. She wasn’t as soft as I remembered, or as warm. She wasn’t waiting for me on the other side. She was just a name on my tongue, a ghost in my mind, a lie I had to carve out of myself just to breathe.

But she was real tonight.

And I ruined her all over again.

My stomach lurches, and I shove open the bathroom door, flicking on the light. My reflection in the mirror stares back—wild eyes, too-pale skin, lips still swollen from kissing her. There’s a smudge of red at the corner of my mouth. Her lipstick. Evidence of what I did.

I look like a man who devours things.Destroysthings. One who doesn’t stop when he knows he should.