She thought he would have hit her back, accost her, but he only let out a heavy sigh filled with more emotion than she suspected he wanted it too. He looked tired, from what, she didn't know. Instead, he grabbed her arm, dragging her with the dog in the other arm back to the waiting car, tossing her in, and slamming the door behind them both. She forced herself up against the opposite door so hard it hurt, she didn't want to be anywhere near him, and he knew it.
The ride back to New York was silent, each one of them thinking about what the hell had just happened. She was cursing herself for her recklessness, probably her one chance to escape and she had blown it, for all she knew the second basement was waiting for her back in that place. He was tired, the constant feelings building up and imploding inside his head. To fall for any girl, why was it her? She would never have him.
They got back, and as soon as she got out of that elevator on the twelfth floor, she hurried out, sandals slapping on the wooden stairs, up to her bedroom, and slammed the door loud enough for him to inwardly wince. All he did after watching her fall away from his sight, was take a few steps into the living room before collapsing face-first into the nearest white leather couch cushion.
She couldn't believe what she had done, in a single moment of weakness, she had allowed his lips to press against her own. No matter how fleeting it may have been, it didn't matter, the damage had already been done, and it was unrepairable.
He had kept her against her will, had threatened to kill Zuni, had threatened her with a loaded pistol, and had choked her to the point she nearly fainted. That thought had her quickly getting up from the bed, grabbing the desk chair, and placing it under the handle, making sure it was properly sturdy this time. The chair had slipped in the middle of the night when she slept, it made him capable of getting in to sit on that lounge chair across the room, for however long he stayed there she hadn't known, she would never know. But, she certainly wasn't going to have it happen again.
She hurried into the bathroom, ripped her clothes off, and got under the hot water of the shower, scrubbing at herself with the unscented, name-brand body wash. She wished that it had a scent, smellable proof that she had removed all the yuck from herself. But, she scrubbed the hardest at her lips until they swelled in the thick humidity of the stall. Her first kiss, taken by him with such force, her back still ached from being slammed into the wood wall and forced to stand there under the guise of his wondering eyes, the soft brush of his fingers against her skin that made goose bumps form on contact. His words, those three words, they ran through her head over and over again like her brain was a broken radio
"Because, you're you"
The feeling that enveloped her when he said those words, was one she had never experienced before in her entire life. She didn't quite know what it was, but she knew definitely what it wasn't. It wasn't love, at least not what she imagined love would feel like. Being in love was supposed to be like keeping a letter from an old friend, it wasn't necessarily useful, and sometimes it was a burden, but more often than not you kept it because it made you feel warm, it reminded you of times in your life when you were the happiest. At least, that's what her Mother had always told her. Love was a warmth, not a fire, fire would do nothing but turn you to ash. Did he have feelings for her? real ones? not just lust...but something more than that?
It wouldn't be a man wanting a woman, but Maxwell wanting Harmony.
Most of her life she had spent confined by a prison of her own dwindled self-worth, she never thought she was worthy of those kinds of feelings from another. She had been dirtied, they all said so. The worst time had been sex education in high school, when the teachers preached purity values, insisting that no woman who had sex before their marriage had the right to wear white on their wedding. Maintain your purity, they used to say, comparing the declining beauty of a woman to a set of sneakers degraded from use, eventually tossed away. He was supposed to be her sibling, not genetically, but by marriage, and her mother always insisted that she should treat him like a brother that shared blood because there was no meaningful difference.
YOU ARE READING
His Angel
Romance"You have a name, don't you?" his voice was deep and irritable, but rather calm. Her eyes lifted just slightly, now staring at the edges of dark hair that hung an inch or two from his shoulders. Her lack of answer seemed to annoy him further, she co...
