Because I Love You✔️

Chapter 83: Flashback

He leaned down so they were nose to nose, but her breathing hitched at his proximity and petered out altogether when his round pupils turned into sharp, thin slits.

"You're afraid I'll hurt you," he said simply, eyes dragging across her face.

Her throat felt like it cracked when she spoke.

"No. I am afraid that I will mess up again and hurt you to the point where you want nothing to do with me, like the last few times," she rasped, not wanting to face her feelings, but unable to divert them when he was looking at her so harshly. "I don't want that."

Xaphile didn't reply.

She didn't move when he lifted his hand and cupped the side of her face with it, thumb stroking the skin below her eye for just a moment before travelling lower, pressing lightly against the spot on her neck where Vordt had bit her.

The skin there twinged at his touch, shivering with heat.

"I hurt you," he said quietly. "The same way that he did. How could you possibly care about me?"

"It wasn't the same at all," she instantly growled, shooting him a dangerous look. "Never say that again. The difference between you and him is that you weren't aware of what you were doing, and you never took advantage of it afterwards. You had absolute power over me, Xaphile... you could have forced me to do whatever you desired, but you didn't."

He turned, looking as if he were about to walk away from her, but before she could think, she grabbed his shoulder. The force she applied to his arm was as light as the touch of a dragonfly, but he didn't resist when she turned him back towards her.

His eyes fell closed.

"Look at me."

When he opened them again, giving her a rather unhappy expression, she stepped forward and wrapped him in an embrace.

Her ear came to rest against his bare chest, where she heard a steady heartbeat.

The scars on his broad back were bumpy against her finger, and they threw her mind back to all the times she'd ever hurt him.

She would never forget the day the guards had slapped a metal collar around his neck on her orders, or the sight of him quite literally being dragged by the throat through the dirt, barely able to move after all the abuse he'd been put through.

The trail of blood that had followed him to the cage still stained the ground in her memory.

He hurt me? she silently muttered, feeling the roughness of his once-smooth flesh. Compared to all I've done, his actions were pure and honest.

She was so much worse.

When he'd been crying in the rain, she'd chucked one of her daggers at him and told him to kill himself, had said that she wouldn't care or even shed a tear if he did, and she had, in fact, said with no small amount of venom that she hated everything to do with him because of his catlike features.

She had promised herself that she would never forget those moments... that she wouldn't let herself so she would never hurt him again.

Even now, his eyes were full of pain.

Pain that was there because she'd put it there.

The half-formed visions of her memories dissolved.

"You may have hurt me once," she said softly, "but I hurt you many times more, in many different ways, and most of those times were blatantly intentional. You didn't even mean to do what you did, yet you still feel guilty about it. And that is why I care for you. Nobody who meets you can dislike you, because you're an honest and very gentle creature."