Finding It (Losing It, #3)(56)

I swallowed, my heart speeding up when it should have been slowing down. There were things about myself that even I didn’t want to know, let alone share them with him.

Changing the subject, I asked, “So you don’t regret crossing that line?”

His mouth trailed across my jaw, and he hummed under his breath.

“I can still think of a few other lines I’d like to cross before the night is through.”

He rolled, pulling me on top of him, our bodies still intimately connected. The friction teased my sensitive skin, and I had to steady myself with my hands on his chest.

He traced the curve of my body from my breast to my waist to my hip and said with a wicked grin, “You’re adventurous, right?”

Now, this was the kind of adventure I was always on board for.

Hours stretched into days, and we only left the apartment in Riomaggiore when we had to. We got whatever food and supplies we needed, but we never lasted very long before our tastes turned away from food.

Our seventh day came and went, and neither of us made any move to leave or end our time together. And I began to understand the Via dell’Amore a little more, that chair and all those locks. I realized it wasn’t the lock that mattered so much as the fact that it required a key.

Jackson had found every little sensitive nook that made my toes curl and my eyes roll back in my head. He knew what made me hold my breath and what made me cry out his name. He unlocked my body, and in doing so unlocked doors that held nothing but stale air and bad memories.

If I believed the stories I learned growing up, God made the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested. I wondered if, like me, the eighth day was when he watched it all begin to unravel.





23


I WOKE, MY breaths pushing from my lungs like broken glass. Jackson wasn’t in bed beside me, and I curled into a ball, glad for his absence.

Pieces of my dream were slipping away, and I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to try to hold on to them to examine or to push them away so I wouldn’t have to.

I’d been twelve again, but in that way that dreams don’t make sense, I was also twenty-two. Mom and Dad were arguing in the kitchen, and Mr. Ames, Dad’s business partner, had come upstairs. He said he was looking for a bathroom, but there were two on the bottom floor. He touched my shoulder. He told me I was soft. And like those animated flip books I played with as a kid, the sheets of my dream began to fan, and it wasn’t Mr. Ames’s hand against me, but the boy I’d lost my virginity to just a year and a half later.

He trailed his fingers to my neck, and then down to my chest. The pages flipped. More hands, a different one on every page. Some looked familiar. Some didn’t. But with each page, the hands swept across my body. The pages flipped and the locations began to change along with the hands—the back of a pickup truck, my freshman dorm, my apartment, a few hostels.

The scene shifted, and it was me and Mr. Ames in all those places, and I screamed and cried long after the dream had shifted on to a new person, a new place. And each hand carved away a part of me, sanded and chiseled until I was hollowed out, a wisp of a girl.

I pulled away, crying, and stumbled from a hostel bed to my parents’ living room couch. This time I was just me, present day, but my parents looked down at me like I was still only four feet tall.

Dad was talking, saying I was blowing things out of proportion. He morphed into Mr. Ames for just as second as he said, “Quit playing the victim.”

Mom asked me questions, asked me how Mr. Ames touched me and where. When I showed them, when I put my hand to my chest … I knew what was coming next. I knew the words like they were carved into my skin, like the pulse of my heart beat them out in Morse code.

I waited for them, cringed for them, begged for them because I needed to hear that it didn’t count.

But instead, my world was filled with Hunt, with his all seeing eyes, with his blistering touch, with his consuming kiss and the words, “Tell me this counts.”

His hands, large and callused lay atop my chest where the heart beneath had been sanded down to a tiny thing. In my dream, he held my crumbling body, and he told me that it was okay. His touch was soft and perfect and exactly what I wanted, but I didn’t stop crumbling in his arms, no matter how gentle he was.

That was when the lies I’d built so high that they scraped the sky shattered. Every brick I’d laid between me and that day when I was twelve crumbled as if they were made of something less than sand.

Because it mattered.

Who touches you, whether it’s your skin or your soul, matters.

I sat, huddled alone in bed in that Italian apartment, shaking from a dream that I knew was nothing more than synapses firing in my brain, collecting recent thoughts and putting them together regardless of sense or order. I knew that’s all it was, but things didn’t always have to make sense to be true.

And I could feel every hand that ever touched me, the ones that I’d welcomed along with the one that I didn’t, as if they were bearing down on me, pushing me below the current until I had no choice but to breathe in that shattered glass of truth.

It all counted.

Hunt walked through the door of our poisoned oasis, held up a bag, and said, “I’ve got breakfast.”

It took everything in me not to cry. Because he was perfect. So goddamn perfect. And I was a mess.

“Thanks,” I shrugged, the corners of my lips jumping briefly in a similar motion. “I’m not hungry, though.”