“I…uh, I mean, it’s just…” She clears her throat. “What made you want to study that?”
A smirk pulls at my lips. “You want the truth?”
She nods, flipping her long hair behind her shoulders. I debate on whether to tell her or not, because as simple as it is, I’ve never told anyone before. But something makes me want to tell her, just to see how she reacts. “It’s a terrible feeling when you’re terrified of your own mind, Ava. I wanted to understand why I was so fucked up.”
“Everybody’s fucked up,” she mumbles. I can almost hear disdain in her tone.
Almost.
“Ah, yes, but the level of fuckedupness—”
“That’s not a word.”
“Not a clinical word, no.” I laugh.
“So, I guess your level offuckedupnesssurpasses most normal people’s?”
There’s a faint smile across her lips when I lock my eyes with hers, and without pause, I confess exactly how fucked up I am. “I killed for the first time when I was sixteen, and I liked it. I loved it. I dreamt about it over and over because I wanted to do it again.”
That smile vanishes and those supple lips of hers part. God, if I can’t help but think about slipping my fucking cock between them, and almost immediately after imagining wrapping her hair around my wrist while she’s on her knees, shame washes over me.
“Shocked?” I ask.
“I shouldn’t be…” Her eyes shift to her lap and she begins to pick at her nails. So cute. She’s so fucking innocent, so much something I want.
“Only the bad people though, remember that. I only want to kill very bad men.”
She nods, but she won’t look at me now.
“We all have our secrets, don’t we?”
“I guess so.”
“So”—I sit up and scoot to the edge of the bed, clasping my hands together and leaning over my knees—“you know my secret, what’s yours, Ava?”
I watch her swallow. She shrugs.
“I want to know something about you.” I stand and cross the room, kneeling beside her. There’s an overwhelming urge to touch her, so I do. I gently brush my fingertips over her warm cheek, trailing them down her jaw. My pulse picks up as my touch sweeps over her throat and collarbone. Grabbing her chin, I tilt her head back and force her to look at me. “Tell me something about you no one else knows.” I hold her gaze. There is something so familiar in that stare, and for a moment, I wonder if I’m losing touch with reality. “You said everyone is fucked up, which means you think you’re fucked up and I want to know why.”
“There’s a darkness inside that won’t let me go,” she whispers. “And it scares me.”
“A darkness?” I move closer to her, my hand still clutching her chin. My lips are mere centimeters from hers, and I have to close my eyes because the temptation istooreal. Her breath hitches and to keep my mouth from slamming over hers I drag my thumb across her plump bottom lip, fighting a groan at how perfect it feels. “Why are you afraid of the dark, my dear… Don’t you know that’s the only place we can dream?”
“And it’s where all the nightmares live,” she says as tears seep from her lash line, her lips beginning to tremble.
I back away from her, uncertain of what to think. I’m intrigued because oh, how looks may be deceiving. She is innocence on the outside, but so it seems, the angel I thought had not one crack may be broken on the inside, already crumbling from past destruction. And the thing that scares me with this revelation is that I realize why I am drawn to her—have been drawn to her. Sheistainted, by what I am not certain, but only people who are fucked up can understand what that darkness is, and I want to know what has cast that shadow over her brilliant soul. Fear creeps through me like a slow fog hanging over a lake. The one thing I do believe is that it takes another dark soul to understand a broken person, and I now know this is dangerous territory I’m wandering through. Two broken people together—that will either end in something so unreal and raw that all those fractured pieces of the two of us will fuse together or we will only break each other further until nothing is left.
And when the broken break, nothing in hell can compare to that catastrophe.
17
Ava
I’m tired of reading. I’m done with pacing. And all there is are these four fucking walls and that goddamn door. That locked barricade. So I sit, twiddling my thumbs. Over and over.
The lock clicks—and like Pavlov’s dog—I almost salivate. I’m conditioned to find excitement in that noise now because I know Max will be strutting through in a mere second. And he does. He’s in a fitted gray T-shirt and jeans, a slight five o’clock shadow. And I swoon—I shouldn’t—but things like that, like this, like him standing at the edge of the mattress, staring down at me with his intensely dark gaze, you can’t help it.
He smiles and I feel my cheeks blush. I’m like a thirteen-year-old with a crush on a teacher and I hate it.
