I Stand Before You (Judge Me Not #2)(59)

I move to his other bicep, kiss the scroll of words I’ve never been close enough to read. I do so now, reading them out loud in a reverent whisper, “As I stand before you, judge me not.”

It strikes me as interesting that I could have these same words written on my body, it would certainly be fitting. “What does it mean?” I ask.

I can see from Chase’s face that talking about this tattoo is going to be hard for him, more so than any of the others. I think about telling him he can share this one with me another time, but I hold off. I sense he needs to get this out. In fact, I’m certain of it. That’s how well we’ve learned one another.

Chase takes a deep breath and I go to move, but he holds me in place. My boy wants me on him, so I stay as I am, sprawled on him as he tells me about the last night with his father. He talks of how they ordered Chinese food and ate on the floor of their empty, about-to-be-repossessed home. He tells me how his little brother slept through dinner, and how afterward his father asked him to stay with Will while he took care of “something.”

Chase’s lips press together when he gets to this part of the story. I place my head on his shoulder and wrap my arms around him as best as I can. While I hold tight to my heartbroken boy, he rubs his hands up and down my back in a motion that’s meant to soothe us both.

“He never came back,” Chase whispers. “He drove off that road on purpose, I know it, Kay. He didn’t care enough to stay.”

Chase has told me enough good things about his father that I feel honest in saying, “He still loved you, Chase. He did.”

“Not enough, apparently” he says sadly as his arms tighten around me.

I hold on to Chase, wishing I could take away his hurt. His pain resonates in my own heart, it wraps around my soul, mingling with my own deeply rooted pain. Chase has become an incredibly important person in my life, his happiness is as important to me as my own, maybe even more important, at times like these.

It’s at that exact second I realize—in a rush, like a wave crashing all around me—I have fallen in love. I am head over heels in love with Chase Gartner.





Chapter Seven


Chase


It amazes me that one day can be so perfect, and then the next can turn to shit in an instant. That’s exactly what happens as Friday dawns. Not at first though.

The day starts out great, I wake up buzzed. Not on drugs, not on alcohol. I am buzzed on life, buzzed on Kay, buzzed on the afternoon we spent together in the school yesterday during lunch. Kissing Kay—finally giving in—felt right. And good. Damn, real good.

No, good doesn’t even begin to f*cking describe what I felt. Finally kissing my girl was something better than good. It was the best. No, more than that too. It was f*cking indescribable, okay? Giving in to all I’ve kept buried inside awakened in me something deeper, some feeling yet not experienced. Well, until now. I didn’t say a thing, but I realized what this feeling was—is—when I was holding my girl next to the lockers, when my mouth was on hers.

I f*cking love Kay Stanton. I do. I love my girl, with all my good and all my trouble.

The resistance I was fighting? Yeah, that shit has not only crumbled, it’s f*cking annihilated. I am done for; sweet girl owns my ass. Maybe the more appropriate thing to say is that she owns my heart. Since, after all, it’s my heart that swells with all the many things I love about my girl…

I love that I can make her laugh. I love that I pink her cheeks. I love that she’s sweet and tastes like honey. But there’s more. I particularly love the sexy little moans she makes when we’re kissing. Those sounds go straight to my cock. Speaking of which, I want to make my girl come—make her f*cking explode—using not only my dick, but my fingers and my tongue. But this is more than just something sexual with Kay. I want to make this woman happy. And not just the fleeting kind of happiness I can give her with a few good orgasms. No, my girl deserves to feel that rare, deep-in-your-heart brand of happiness, like the kind I feel for her.

I guess what it comes down to is this: I just want my sweet girl to let me love her.

That’s why I said so many things I previously kept inside. My girl—and it really feels like she is my girl now—deserves to know what’s in my heart. I’ll be good to her, I will, or I’ll die trying. I won’t allow myself to hurt her, and because I made her promise, I feel confident she won’t ever let me.

Maybe she’s not as fragile as I first suspected, but she’s still never been with someone quite like me. I am nothing like that * she dated years ago, Doug-f*cking-Wilson. He was just some wannabe-bad guy, a manipulative dick who took advantage of Kay being such a good person. I’d never do anything intentionally bad, like that, but I still worry, because let’s be honest, there’s a part of me that will always be bad.

There’s blackness on my soul, ugly smut that’s rubbed in there for good. I can’t erase my past, or change the things I’ve done. And I’ve done some bad, bad things—to myself and to others. I am capable of destruction, in so many f*cking ways. The battle with my dark side ebbs and flows, true, but it’s never completely absent. Lately, it’s been ebbing, which is great. But the black, the darkness, it’s always lurking, just waiting to be unbridled.

These worries, though, can’t minimize the perfection of yesterday. And that’s what kissing my girl was—f*cking perfection. I hated when Kay and I had to part and get back to work. If I’d had my way, I would’ve hung out with her all day in that gym, just kissing, talking, and loving her, slow and easy.