Fuck, I just wanted to keep her.
I stood up and started cleaning, washing the dishes, and wiping down the counter before I leaned against it and looked at the closed door separating me from my girl.
There wasn’t a lock on it, but it was still an obstacle—a physical barrier—and I didn’t like it one fucking bit.
Without a thought, I opened the door, careful not to be too rough. I didn’t want to scare her.
She barely acknowledged me when I walked inside, though I knew she was aware of me based on the tensing of her shoulders.
“You think I seduced you as some sort of game?”
She turned to me, and—thankfully—her eyes were dry, even with the hurt clear as day in them.
“Didn’t you? What would you have me think,Xavier?”
“Roman,” I said gruffly.
I realized she hadn’t ever called me by my name, and I wanted to hear it from her lips now.
I stared down at her, and she took a deep breath. “R-Roman.”
Fuck. That was the sweetest fucking sound. How would it be when she called out my name while in the midst of ecstasy?
Heaven.
It would be like heaven.
“I didn’t seduce you as some sort of a game.”
I was fucking thirty-two years old. I didn’t have time to play those kinds of games with her, and what was more, I didn’t want to.
Her eyes told me she didn’t believe me.
“I sought you out because I wanted to kill you.”
She flinched at my bluntness, but I realized some time between when she closed the door on me and as I was cleaning the kitchen, brutal honesty was the only way to go from now on.
“I fucking hated you. And that hate, baby? It only festered each day that I had spent locked up.”
I stepped further into the room, and she scooted further up the bed.
I kept going until I had her trapped against the headboard.
I barred her in with both arms on either side of her. She closed her eyes, turning her face to the side as if she was afraid to look at me.
I cupped her cheek, and she sucked in a sharp breath.
“Until I saw you for the first time,” I said softly. “I was fucking hooked at first sight.”
I had killed twice for her now. The first time was when I caught a stupid fucker following her home from campus, and the second was when the bastard from her building pulled her into the alleyway and tried to hurt her.
I might have gotten my hands bloodied before, but it was never to protect someone.
It was never like this with anyone.
“How could you not see how fucking obsessed I am with you? What do you think I was going to do? Seduce you and discard you?”
The way her breath stuttered told me that was exactly what she thought.
