Pete grabs my arm and pulls me back with wild, pained eyes. “See, dude? She signed a contract, remember? You don’t need to destroy the hotel, man.”
My knees feel weak from the sheer insane relief I feel.
My Brooke my Brooke my Brooke is here.
As I charge for her, Pete sticks me in the neck and I feel a prick and a burn of liquid pushed into my skin. The roiling energy inside me halts and dies, my feet slow, and my vision fogs and tunnels on her. Fuck! Fuck no! No no NO!
My brain sputters one last stream of panic that she, Brooke Dumas, who looks at me like I’m a god, is watching this. My head hangs and it’s all black. Black like me. And now she will know. She will know. And she. Will. Leave.
The despair hits me so hard, I want to die right here, right now. I try to lift myself but can’t, and Pete, with his diminutive power, is struggling to prop me up against the nearest wall. The frustration I feel, and the pain that comes when all my hopes shatter over Brooke and me, is indescribable. If this whole building sat on top of me it wouldn’t even compare.
Pete maneuvers one of my arms around him, and Riley comes to drape my other arm around the back of his neck. My feet drag, and I’m burning with the shame and humiliation of not being able to pull free and stand upright on my own. Me. I’ve fought like a madman to show her I’m strong and there could be no better protector for her than me. Now I’m a pitiful mass of muscles and bones, slumping into the guys, but the last of my adrenaline, coupled with all the panic in me, still forces me to speak.
“Don’t let her see.”
“We won’t, Rem.”
I want to lift my head to try to make sure that what she’s seeing is hopefully not me, but I can’t move. It takes the energy it would take me to move a mountain just to strain out the rest of what I need to. “Just don’t let her see.”
“Yeah, man, got it,” Pete assures.
They drag me into the room and start mumbling about me maybe getting strangled in my clothes and they strip me and plop me on the bed. My mind is already tormenting me. If she saw, she’s going to leave. She will fucking leave. She’s mine, but I can’t have her. She’s fucking mine and I can’t tell her that she is, I can’t take what I want, I can’t do anything but lie here and try to stay awake, so that if she leaves, I can stop her.
“There you go, big man.”
“Don’t let her see,” I groan.
Pete grunts and so does Riley as they try centering me on the bed. “She’s all right, she won’t see anything, Rem. Hang tight, we’ll get someone to come and make you feel good,” Riley tells me.
I bury my face in my arm and know it’s not possible. I’ll never feel good.
Brooke saw me. I saw her face for a moment. I saw her wide, scared eyes, fuck me.
I hear the door close quietly after them as the blackness claims me. It’s a familiar place I’ve been in a thousand times. Sometimes I sink to it willingly, but today I ache in all the places inside me that Brooke Dumas touches with her smiles, and all I can think of is clawing my way out of here to stop her from leaving me.
♥ ♥ ♥
THE SOUND OF clapping wakes me. The sheets rustle at my side, and this is something I don’t understand because I sure as hell am not moving. “Get your lazy asses out of bed, guys, and let’s try hitting the gym,” Riley says from the threshold.
Gym, I tell myself, even when today is one of the days when I don’t give a shit. My body feels about as flexible as a building, but I make the effort to push up on my arms—
And stop short, squinting when I spot Brooke lying next to me.
She jumps to a sit when she sees me, and all the cobwebs in my mind clear in a fucking second as I take her in.
She’s sitting like a fantasy in my bed. No. More than a fantasy. She’s fucking unreal. Gut-wrenching, ball-twisting, chest-punching beautiful. Her dark hair tumbling down her shoulders, her lips pink, her eyelids heavy and sleepy. She’s breathing fast as if she’s got on her fight-or-flight from the mere sight of me, and she wears a Disneyland T-shirt that looks so fucking old it’s screaming at me to tear it off her. The sun touches her skin and reveals a trio of freckles on her temple that I’d never seen before, and if I weren’t so sedated, I’d be tracing them with my fingers while I latched my fucking mouth onto hers.
Struggling within myself, I watch as she takes a deep breath and eases off the bed like she can’t get out of here fast enough. My heart gives a wild, helpless kick as I watch her cross the room and close the door behind her. Fuck.
As I stand to go after her, a wave of dizziness hits me, and I plop back down on the bed with a groan. A wave of grief hits me and I roll flat to my stomach. I slide back into bed and curl my hands into fists like I always do when I can’t assimilate what I’m feeling. My muscles feel leaden and I can barely move from where I dropped. That fucking sedative Pete gives me is meant for a damn rhino and I still can’t unwind my hands. I want them in her hair, at her hips, splayed over her juicy, little bottom.