She took in his hooded blue eyes, the white, barely there, scar lancing his eyebrow, and his subtly crooked Roman nose, and she realized she didn’t know this man. Sure, she touched every inch of him with her mouth and hands, indelibly burning him into her memories and her heart, but she didn’t really know him. He was Alec Reed, the drummer of Chasing Ruin, and that made him someone entirely different from the person she kissed just that morning before reality crashed down on them. “I don’t even know who you are,” she whispered, the words scarring her throat as they exited her mouth. Her irrational and totally untrustworthy heart screamed at her to take her words back, that she did know him, but her mind was done being ruled by her heart. She had to think rationally.
“Baby,” he pleaded. “You know me. I’m still the same person as when we woke up this morning.” He lifted her hand and pressed it against his chest over his rapidly beating heart, but she refused to uncurl her fingers. It hurt too much to touch him. She could feel the severed pieces of heart that had bloomed with hope over the past few weeks wither inside of her chest. “You know what’s in here. Chasing Ruin…that doesn’t matter. It’s not my identity. That’s not me. It’s what I do, but what I shared with you is me…the real me. And the real me loves you.”
She shook her head, her pale blonde hair floating around her shoulders. “If it wasn’t you, or at least a big part of you, you wouldn’t have hid it from me. It wouldn’t have been a big deal.”
“I wanted you to know me, not the person the world or gossip websites think they know, and the only way that could happen was to keep it from you just for a little while, not forever. Is that so bad?”
“Yes.” Even as she said the words, a little part of her wanted to fall back into his arms, but she wouldn’t. If she let him back in now, he’d only hurt her later because she could never compete for his attention once he walked back into a reality that was so far from her realm of comprehension, it might as well have been another galaxy. “I can’t do this. Who you are, what you did, changes everything.” She pushed the tangled strands of hair from her face. “You need to get out of my room, my house. I can’t look at you.”
He flinched as though her words mortally wounded him, and it took every ounce of willpower she could gather from every centimeter of her soul not to apologize and wrap her arms around him. She hated hurting him. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his black jeans that perfectly molded the contours of his toned long legs. “No, I’m not leaving until you understand. I won’t let you push me away without trying to work this out.”
Another wave of anger mixed with agony rushed through her and she couldn’t take it. She needed to get away from him. Being around him confused her and twisted her around until she didn’t know who she was anymore. “I don’t want to work this out because when I look at you now, all I see is a liar. I could never trust you. I could never love you.”
Alec reeled back as though she’d shoved him and for a long, fragmented moment she wanted to take back the words, but she couldn’t because he was liar, no matter his intentions. She watched as his beautiful blue eyes clouded with hurt and a frigidity that she hadn’t seen in weeks.
“If you’re not going, I am,” she finally said when he didn’t make any move to leave.
She brushed by him before he could respond to what she said, but he didn’t try to stop her.
“Vi,” Ryder yelled from the living room as she half-stumbled, half-ran by him, tripping over the corner of the rug and catching herself on the back of the sofa.
“I need to go.” She looked over her shoulder, catching Alec out of her peripheral vision, leaning against the wall, his hands folded against his chest, his eyes arctic and stormy and so guarded she wanted to weep.
“Wait, what’s going on?” Ryder said, looking at Alec instead of her and she took advantage of the moment, swiping her keys and phone off the entry table.
“I’m going out.”
“Why?” Ryder said, his eyebrows lifted. “I just got home.”
“I can’t be here, right now…not with him.” She pointed at Alec. “When he’s gone, call me and I’ll come home.”
“Goodbye, Violet,” Alec choked out as she stepped out the front door.
The finality threaded through his simple words caused a cataclysm of tears to fall down her face, blurring her vision, but she refused to look back. She needed time, time away from him.
Chapter Twenty-Three