Sugar on the Edge (Last Call #3)(53)
“I didn’t,” he says simply. “I tried as hard as I could to kill myself with drugs and alcohol. I don’t even remember the first few months after his death, because all I could do was blame myself for leaving him with Amanda.”
I jolt upward and out of his arms. Turning my body, I straddle his lap and hold his face firmly in my hands. “No,” I practically shout at him. “That was not your fault. That was all on Amanda. She failed Charlie, not you.”
Gavin takes one of my hands in his and kisses my wrist. He leans forward, grazes his lips over mine, and gives me a sad smile. “It was on both of us, Savannah. I’ve accepted my role in his death, and I’ll always bear that cross.”
“What happened to Amanda?”
“She had a breakdown. The police investigated, but no charges were filed against her. She had a legitimately documented medical condition of depression, and besides… I didn’t want her to go to jail for it. She couldn’t help her illness… that was beyond her control.”
“Weren’t you angry with her though? I don’t even know her and I’m angry at her, and I don’t care that she was sick.” My voice is rageful and so unkind. So not me.
“I wanted to kill her,” Gavin admits to me. “I wanted to drag her down to that little creek and hold her facedown in the water, so she could feel the water saturate her lungs and know what it was like to suffer that slow death.”
My body shudders over the violence in his voice, but then he takes another deep breath and lets it out slowly. “But I found another outlet for my anger. Outside of the drinking and drugs, I expressed my frustrations in other ways.”
Gavin doesn’t elaborate, and I have a feeling I wouldn’t like to know those other ways. But I think I really do know, because he has hinted at it before. “With sex?”
“With everything,” he tells me honestly. “I did everything to the extreme, and much of that involved sex. I immersed myself in the dodgy underbelly of London, and I learned all the ways I could hurt a woman so exquisitely she’d orgasm multiple times. I took pleasure whenever it was offered to me, sometimes even paying for the privilege to forget my shitty existence while a woman would suck me down. I did things that would so thoroughly disgust you, Sweet, that I really have no right to even let you sit here on my lap and let you comfort me.”
His head hangs low with shame and dejection, and I didn’t think my heart could break further.
With shaking hands, I grip his face tighter and lift it so his eyes meet mine. “You could never disgust me. Those things you did… they were but a moment in your life. Just a tiny, incomprehensible moment, and you did what you had to do to survive. And you did survive. Just look at you now… you more than survived. You flourished.”
Gavin shakes his head sadly. “No, love. I didn’t survive. And I don’t flourish. I just exist. It’s all I know how to do.”
Leaning in, I kiss him sweetly on his mouth, and he sighs into me. I kiss him a bit harder, and his arms tighten around me. I clutch at his shoulders and kiss him some more, trying to suck out every bit of pain and doubt that I can. I can feel him grow hard beneath me as I straddle his lap, but I pull back from him. “You’re wrong, Gavin. When you just exist, you have no emotion. No passion. But when you live… you seize opportunity, you drink of a joyful life, and you’re motivated. The man I know… the man I’ve let into my heart, he’s a man that lives.”
The sadness in Gavin’s eyes melts away and curiosity fill up his gaze. He’s listening to me, so I continue. “You suffered unimaginable pain and horror in your young life, and you let it bend you. It bent you over backward, nearly snapping you in half. But it didn’t break you. You didn’t let it break you.”
“Savannah—” Gavin says and his words are husky, filled with emotion.
“The man that held my face and told me that I was the strongest heroine he’s ever known, that is a man who is living his life. The man who touches me so sweetly and does the loveliest of dirty things to me… the man that makes me crazy with lust and causes me to scream at the top of my lungs… that’s a man that is filled with passion. The man that writes such amazing words and sucks you into his story… he’s a man filled with genius and creativity. You’re sad, Gavin, and that’s okay. Let me share it with you, but don’t ever think for a minute that you will ever be a man that is content to just exist.”
Gavin stands from the couch in such a swift move that I yelp in surprise. He grabs me by the back of my hair, pulling my face back and kissing me hard. Kisses me with passion and yearning and a zeal to make the most of this very moment we’re sharing.
He carries me to the stairs and up to his second-floor bedroom, his lips never leaving mine. I feel something different. In the way he touches me, in the way that he stares at me. He’s opened himself up to something that he never did before… something he had held himself back from, and I realize what it is in the moment when he lays me on the bed and looks down at me.
He needs me.
Gavin Cooke, a man who swam through darkness and torture, drowned himself in the ecstasy of the next big high and probably f*cked his way through half of London so he could forget his demons, rose from the ashes having survived, but having done so while being utterly alone.