Restore Me (Shatter Me #4)(74)
something
something I don’t hear
because I’m looking at his lips and feeling my skin ignite with memories of him and it was just yesterday, just yesterday that he was mine, that I felt his mouth on my body, that I could feel him inside me—
“What?” I manage to say, blinking upward.
“I said I really like what you’ve done with your hair.”
And I hate him, hate him for doing this to my heart, hate my body for being so weak, for wanting him, missing him, despite everything and I don’t know whether to cry or kiss him or kick him in the teeth, so instead I say, without meeting his eyes,
“When were you going to tell me about Lena?”
He stops then; motionless in a moment. “Oh”—he clears his throat—“I hadn’t realized you’d heard about Lena.”
I narrow my eyes at him, not trusting myself to speak, and I’m still deciding the best course of action when he says
“Kenji was right,” but he whispers the words, and mostly to himself.
“Excuse me?”
He looks up. “Forgive me,” he says softly. “I should’ve said something sooner. I see that now.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“She and I,” he says, “it was—we were nothing. It was a relationship of convenience and basic companionship. It meant nothing to me. Truly,” he says, “you have to know—if I never said anything about her it was only because I never thought about her long enough to even consider mentioning it.”
“But you were together for two years—”
He shakes his head before he says, “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t two years of anything serious. It wasn’t even two years of continuous communication.” He sighs. “She lives in Europe, love. We saw each other briefly and infrequently. It was purely physical. It wasn’t a real relationship—”
“Purely physical,” I say, stunned. I rock backward, nearly tripping over my own feet and I feel his words tear through my flesh with a searing physical pain I wasn’t expecting. “Wow. Wow.”
And now I can think of nothing but his body and hers, the two of them entwined, the two years he spent naked in her arms—
“No—please,” he says, the urgency in his words jolting me back to the present. “That’s not what I meant. I’m just—I’m—I don’t know how to explain this,” he says, frustrated like I’ve never seen him before. He shakes his head, hard. “Everything in my life was different before I met you,” he says. “I was lost and all alone. I never cared for anyone. I never wanted to get close to anyone. I’ve never—you were the first person to ever—”
“Stop,” I say, shaking my head. “Just stop, okay? I’m so tired. My head is killing me and I don’t have the energy to hear any more of this.”
“Juliette—”
“How many more secrets do you have?” I ask. “How much more am I going to learn about you? About me? My family? My history? The Reestablishment and the details of my real life?”
“I swear I never meant to hurt you like this,” he says. “And I don’t want to keep things from you. But this is all so new for me, love. This kind of relationship is so new for me and I don’t—I don’t know how to—”
“You’ve already kept so much from me,” I say to him, feeling my strength falter, feeling the weight of this throbbing headache unclench my armor, feeling too much, too much all at once when I say “There’s so much I don’t know about you. There’s so much I don’t know about your past. Our present. And I have no idea what to believe anymore.”
“Ask me anything,” he says. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know—”
“Except the truth about me? My parents?”
Warner looks suddenly pale.
“You were going to keep that from me forever,” I say to him. “You had no plan to tell me the truth. That I was adopted. Did you?”
His eyes are wild, bright with feeling.
“Answer the question,” I say. “Just tell me this much.” I step forward, so close I can feel his breath on my face; so close I can almost hear his heart racing in his chest. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“Honestly, love,” he says, shaking his head. “In all likelihood, I would have.” And suddenly he sighs. The action seems to exhaust him. “I don’t know how to convince you that I believed I was sparing you the pain of that particular truth. I really thought your biological parents were dead. I see now that keeping this from you wasn’t the right thing to do, but then, I don’t always do the right thing,” he says quietly. “But you have to believe that my intention was never to hurt you. I never intended to lie to you or to purposely withhold information from you. And I do think that I would have, in time, told you what I knew to be the truth. I was just searching for the right moment.”
Suddenly, I’m not sure what to feel.
I stare at him, his downcast eyes, the movement in his throat as he swallows against a swell of emotion. And something breaks apart inside of me. Some measure of resistance begins to crumble.