“I’m not.”
“Good.” He nearly trips as he kicks his boots off. “Shouldn’t be.”
Max grabs the bottom of his white shirt, lifting it over his head. I watch the muscles in his stomach bunch and flex, my eyes skimming over his bare flesh. He catches me staring at him and smiles before tugging his jeans down and crawling onto the bed next to me. “Shitty motel, but that’s what you get in the middle of butt-fuck Egypt.”
I laugh.
“What’s so funny?” he asks, lying on his stomach and grabbing one of the pillows. He scrunches it up under his massive arms before he rests his chin on it. “Huh?” he says. “What’s so funny?”
“I like that term—butt-fuck Egypt, I use it all the time.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah…” He grabs my knee and gives it a playful squeeze, but instead of moving his hand away, he leaves it there, gently rubbing his fingers over my leg.
“Figures.”
“Figures?” I ask.
“Yeah, figures you’d say some shit like that, too.” He grins again. And that smile—it does something to me. There’s a few moments of silence where we look at each other and all I want him to do is kiss me. Hold me. Love me…
“It will all be okay now.” He tucks a stray piece of hair behind my ear. “I promise.”
“I know.” My mind is racing. I worry that he’s going to leave me. He cannot leave me. Ever. My pulse kicks into overdrive again.
“What?” he asks as he trails his fingers down my jawline. “What are you thinking?”
“Don’t leave me,” I blurt, realizing how desperate I sound.
The thing is, it’s not just that I feel lost without him or that I love him, but that there is something about him I know I’ll be hard pressed to find anywhere else because it’s something I have yet to put my finger on. This connection—it’s deeper than any I’ve ever felt.
His brow wrinkles and he sits up. “I’m not. I’m not leaving you…” There’s a pause where his eyes narrow. His gaze grows intense like he’s trying to pull something out of me without words. “I want to know what happened to you. Not in that house, Ava. What happened to you? Long before I ever met you, you were fucked up by something.”
My lungs cease to pull in oxygen for a second, and my mind goes to those places it shouldn’t, those places I’ve blocked out and trained myself to forget:
The dark.
The footsteps outside my bedroom door.
The way the laundry detergent smelled, the whiskey on his breath.
The second I close my eyes, I’m sucked down that twisted tunnel of fear and shame. All these years later and I can still feel his rough hand slam over my mouth to muffle my cries, smell the cigarettes on his fingers. It still—even though I wish to God it didn’t—feels like his hands are all over me. I can actuallystillhear him telling me how terrible I am, how if I tell, no one will believe me, and most importantly, that no one will love me.I’m unworthy of love.That kind of shame and confusion, fear and betrayed trust, drowns you no matter how well you think you’ve recovered. It always devours you. And the thing is, when you’ve never told anyone about this kind of demon, this hell you relive within the realms of dreams and sometimes within your waking thoughts, well, you are alone. Absolutely and utterly alone in the dirtiest place imaginable.
And I’ve yet to tell anyone because the thought of it makes me feel sullied.
I don’t want anyone to see me for what I am.
I drop my head to my chest, and Max immediately takes my chin and gently lifts it, but I close my eyes. I don’t want to look at him because, if I do, he will know. He will know and he could never love me if he knew. People can say what they want, butno onewants something soiled.
And that is why I build my walls up. Why I push people away because then they can’t hurt me…but with Max, my walls are crumbling and it terrifies me.
“Ava, look at me,” he whispers, his thumb gently stroking my jaw. “I want to knowyou. I want to know those parts you think are broken and ugly because anyone can love the light. I want to love the dark inside of you.”
Does he reallyloveme?I sit, my stomach flitting and fluttering.Could he really love the ugly person I hide deep down inside?Max grabs onto me, pulling me to his chest. And I find myself sobbing because that is the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said—he wants to love the parts of me I hate.
Piece by broken piece that barrier I’ve spent my entire life building falls away, and I allow myself to come apart in his arms—within the embrace of a man who anyone else would say wants to destroy me. And I feel safe. I feel unjudged. I feel whole.
I have always been enslaved to the memories of something so wrong, so fucked up…and I’d rather be imprisoned to a man who will love the parts of me that need to be loved—to a man who will live in the shadows and hide in the dark with me.
