Make Me Hate You(39)

Tyler shook his head, righting himself and leaning against the old wood of the house with his eyes on the lake. Slowly, steadily, the laughter left us — and my eyes found Tyler while his focused on the rain, feeling like each new bolt of lightning was striking right through my chest.

Water fell from his hair and over his temples, his jaw, streaming in a small river that led down the valley of his throat. I followed the water down, down, over the muscular swells of his pecs, between the lean, cut edges of his abdomen, all the way to the band of his trunks.

When my eyes crawled back up again, his were watching me.

I was already moving toward him before I realized it, stepping into his space, into his warmth — so much so that he put his hands on my arms to stop me from coming any closer.

“If she wouldn’t have come to you,” I screamed over the rain, blinking over and over as water dripped from my lashes onto my cheeks. “If Morgan hadn’t told you to stay away from me… would you have… what would have…”

I couldn’t find the words to ask the question. It was as if all the boldness that had moved me toward him, that had propelled me to this moment was suddenly gone — washed away, wiped out with the rain.

But Tyler’s hands slicked up my arms — slow, purposeful — his fingertips trailing over my skin and leaving goosebumps in their wake. Those warm hands pressed flat against my shoulders, my collarbone, curling around my neck as my eyelids fluttered shut.

He stepped into me, and I swallowed, tilting my chin up as my heart pounded so hard that I knew he could feel it through the veins in my neck. I knew he could feel how I trembled under his touch, how I shivered from the rain and the wind and the tornado that he had always been in my life.

Back away. Pull away. Stop this right now.

But I couldn’t.

I felt the heat of his breath on my lips, and I gasped, parting my own, feeling the most intense mixture of warning and desperation swirling within me that I had ever felt in my life. It was elemental, primal, powerful.

Unstoppable.

His hands slipped into my wet hair, tilting me even more toward him, and his bare, wet abdomen brushed my chest, eliciting a sharp inhale from my lips.

It was his nose that touched me first, warm and wet, sliding down the bridge of my own before his forehead melded with mine. His hands gripped harder where they held my hair, and that’s when I realized.

He was shaking, too.

His arms trembled as I wrapped my hands around them, holding onto him, begging him not to pull away as much as I begged him to put distance between us because I knew we should — and I knew I couldn’t be the one to do it.

Every new beat of my heart was a flash of memory, of a past life, searing through me like hot sparks as I gripped him tighter. I saw what once was, what maybe could have been, and more than anything, what never was.

My breaths were ragged and shallow, eyes still shut, every other sense on high alert. Tyler’s lips were so close that when I licked my own, I tasted his, and I whimpered at the shock of that small, almost imperceptible touch.

And that’s when Tyler let out a long, slow exhale of a sigh, shaking his head so softly I almost wondered if I imagined it.

“I would have run to you,” he said softly over the rain, his lips touching mine as he did. “I would have pulled you into me. And I would have never let you go.”

My eyes fluttered open, the tip of his nose where it met mine blurring in my vision. His words knifed me between the ribs.

“You are my weakness, Jaz,” he husked. “You always have been.”

I swallowed, pulling back just a sliver, just enough to look him in his eyes.

But then, contrary to what he just said, he let me go.

He released me all at once — his hands from my hair, his eyes from my own, his lips, nose, forehead — all gone with one giant step back as he ran a hand over his face, rubbing the stubble on his jaw like it was the root of all his frustration as he turned his back on me.

“Goddamnit,” he murmured, shaking his head. Then, he kicked the porch railing, which was already too old and soggy to hold. It broke instantly, and Tyler kicked it again, and again, until his chest was heaving and the entire railing was falling off into the weeds below.

The rain let up — not completely, but enough. Enough that the lightning and thunder rolled on across the lake. Enough that the storm that had been outside existed inside us now. Enough that Tyler jogged down the steps, and across the yard, and past the car to the trail that led the back way home. We used to ride our bikes down that trail, before we could drive, and it wasn’t short, but it wasn’t so far that you couldn’t walk it if you wanted to.

Except Tyler didn’t walk.

He ran.

I didn’t try to stop him. I didn’t run after him, though every muscle in my body ached in protest and begged me to.

I just lifted two shaking fingertips to my lips, touching the flesh that he’d whispered those words into.

And I watched him go.





“Okay, and you’re sure you packed all the party favors in Tyler’s truck?” Morgan asked two days later, checking off the list on her clipboard with her glasses falling down to the tip of her nose repeatedly. Each time, she’d just push them up with her middle finger, only for them to fall down again. “The little champagne bottles, the custom Yeti cups, and the chocolate balls, right?”