Come to Me Quietly(47)

But I knew he really could have no idea.

How could he?

“I thought about you every day,” I admitted, burrowing my head farther into the bed, farther into his warmth. We skirted along the edges of an embrace, his hands on my face, mine on his, the expanse between us so great I wasn’t sure we’d ever be able to cross it. “What was it like?” I asked, lifting my face to his.

He paused, his breath palpable in the room. “I don’t know, Aly. It sucked, I guess. People were always telling us what we could and couldn’t do, all the while they were calling it a rehabilitation center. There were some really good guys there, ones who just did some stupid stuff. I always hoped that maybe it did them some good. Most of us there were hopeless, though. It wouldn’t matter what punishment we had, there was no chance of coming up with a different result.”



Hopeless. I blinked, trying to understand, to make sense of the tone in his voice. “You felt you were like that?”



Sadness swelled in the room, a thickness that made my skin crawl with goose bumps.

“They let me out when I turned eighteen, Aly. Eighteen.” His voice cracked. “How f*cking ridiculous is that? As if I’d paid my dues? As if spending two years of my pathetic existence behind bars would make up for what I’d done?”



Anger rushed from him, these waves of rage that pounded and fought against my spirit. Jared’s body jerked, and I could feel him trying to hold it back, to hold it in. His face contorted as if he were trying to block it all out. “What kind of bullshit is that? She was worth so much more than that.”



“Jared – ”



In a blink, he shot off my bed and onto his feet.

Shocked, I twisted around and scrambled onto my hands and knees as I faced the man standing in the middle of my room. Agitation spun through him, twitching his muscles. My breaths came heavy and strong, mixed with the hostility seeping from Jared’s pores.

Jerking both hands through his hair, he glared down at me, his eyes frantic. “Just don’t, Aly.” He touched his chest with a fisted hand, then dropped it. “Please don’t say something that means nothing.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Please. Not you, too.”



When he opened his eyes, the walls were down, everything bared to me.

Devastation.

It was the only thing I saw.

My heart twisted, this pain slicing me through to the core, cutting to the place where Jared had been a fantasy in my mind. There I’d imagined he had somehow still been whole and not what I saw now, a mess of the few mangled pieces of himself that now remained in the wake of his ruin.

“Jared,” I whispered, my hand fluttering out in his direction, silently begging him to take it. Seeing him this way killed me. It reminded me too much of those months when I could do nothing but watch him fade away. Some part of me had held on to the hope that time had healed some of those pieces.

Now I was certain it had not.

He stumbled back to the door, recognition flashing in his eyes. “You can’t fix me, Aly.”



I winced and dropped my chin as if I could conceal the place where he attempted to extract my thoughts. “I know that,” I whispered.

“Then don’t try.”



ELEVEN


Jared



Fuck.

I stood with my back to her door and tried to reel the evening in. My hands fisted in my hair, and a scream locked in my throat.

I couldn’t breathe.