Page 57 of Playing with Forever
“I don’t give a crap about a security detail! I don’t want your random buddies, I want you!” Her voice cracked under the weight of anger and something worse. Desperation. “I care about you—”
“Well, you shouldn’t.” The words came out too fast. Too sharp.
She blinked at me, stunned. “Oh, so you’re allowed to care about me but—”
“I don’t,” I snapped coldly. It was a lie. A vicious, necessary one.
Her expression splintered, like I’d just taken a hammer to the fragile trust we’d built. Her mouth parted slightly, but no sound came out. Just disbelief shimmering in her eyes. Grief.
Inside, I was crumbling. My lungs were tight, like I couldn’t get enough air. My heart thudded so violently I could hear it echo in my ears. I wanted to take it all back, to gather her into my arms and hold her until the pain I’d just inflicted went away, for both of us.
But I didn’t move because I knew I couldn’t give her what she needed. I wasn’t the man she deserved. Not with the shit I carried. She wasn’t going to be safe as long as she was with me, not emotionally and perhaps not even physically.
“Don’t say that,” Andrea whispered in an aching tone. “I know it’s not true.”
Itwasn’ttrue. Not even close. I cared so goddamn much that it scared the shit out of me. Loving her…it had started to feel inevitable. And that was exactly why I had to cut this off now. Before I failed her in a way I couldn’t undo. Before she saw the darkest corners of me that I couldn’t even look at in the mirror.
“I’m sorry you’ve fallen for the belief that you’re more to me than you are, but what you are, is my sub,” I said, forcing myself to sever the relationship, for her own good. “Which you shouldn’t be anymore. You know enough by now to go have fun on your own. I was giving you an education, remember? That was it.”
God, it felt like I was driving knives under my fingernails to say such cruel things to her, things that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Andrea stared at me, bottom lip trembling, and the look on her face…it wasn’t just pain. It was betrayal, vulnerable and raw.
I’d never hated myself more.
I wanted to reach for her, fall to my knees, beg her to see the truth, that I was doing this to protect her, not because I didn’t care about her. But I clenched my jaw, locking myself down, because the hardest thing I would ever do was let her go. For her. For both of us. Because if I didn’t, I was afraid she’d be the one I broke next.
Without another word, Andrea went to the bathroom and packed up her remaining toiletries. She shoved them into the luggage and zipped it up. Then, she glanced up at me, her chin high, defiance blazing in her eyes as if she refused to let me see her fall apart.
“Fuck you, Chase,” she snapped. “Seriously, fuck you.”
She stormed out, leaving me alone with the wreckage I’d caused and the silence that felt a hell of a lot like guilt and self-loathing.
CHAPTER22
Andrea
“That’s it. I’m beating the shit out of him for you.”
I groaned where I lay on the couch with a cool washcloth over my eyes, trying to do something to ease the pounding in my head. “Violet, please don’t get arrested for murder.”
“Murder’s too good for him,” she muttered. “Too quick. Too clean. He needs tosuffer.”
I peeled the washcloth off enough to see Violet stomping back and forth across the living room. A living room I’d filled with empty wine bottles and ice cream cartons to drown my sorrows. I’d spent the last week being the most pathetic person in the city. And that was saying something in Las Vegas.
“He’s twice your size and ex-military,” I pointed out. “I don’t think you’ll be kicking his ass anytime soon.”
“I’ll bring my brass knuckles,” Violet said, lips pursed. “And trust me, size isn’t much against pure rage. You ever tried to wrestle an angry cat?”
The mental image of Violet acting like a pissed-off feline and yowling and scratching and climbing all over Chase was pretty hysterical, and I snorted with laughter. “Look, he wasn’t kind about how he ended things, I admit that. But come on. He was right. I saw more into the situation than was there. Chase is… he’s clearly haunted by what happened in the military,” I said, trying to talk myself down from the heartbreak. “He’s hypervigilant, so he took me into his home and I read that as romantic, and that’s on me. He never made me any promises and he was straight-forward about our situation. I’m the one who muddied it.”
Violet stopped pacing and stared at me like I’d grown a second head. “Are you hearing yourself right now? He pulled you into his life, into hisbed, practically branded you with that look he gets when someone so much as breathes in your direction. But oh, sure,you’rethe one who misread things?”
I tried to laugh, but it cracked halfway through and came out sounding brittle. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? He made it pretty clear I was just a lesson for him. A…phase.”
Violet sat down beside me and gently pried the washcloth from my hand. “He’s a liar.”
I blinked up at her. “Excuse me?”
