Never Sweeter (Dark Obsession #1)

by Charlotte Stein

  “No, no, no, goddamn it’s not a good thing. He’s all mixed up with these…these…mobsters and he’s already fucked them once and if he does it again…if he does I don’t…I can’t breathe. I need to put my head between my knees.”

  She did, though it didn’t help.

  Mostly because Lydia said after a long silence, “Holy shit. We are living in a Nicholas Sparks novel.”

  “Exactly,” she said from between her knees. “And I’m so not okay with that.”

  “I know, I know. Just…you know what? Gimme a second to call the Hendersons about the babysitting I was going to do.”

  “Why, why what do—why do you—”

  “We’re going to take Brad’s car. We are just going to drive right up there and tell his coach or stop him or maybe, I dunno, murder a mobster behind some Dumpsters.” Lydia paused in the middle of texting, face so suddenly determined it flooded Letty’s chest with something like hope.

  And especially when she added one last thing with a grin.

  “Important question: do you have something we can murder the mobster with?”

  “My insides feel pretty toxic right now. I could probably bleed in his mouth.”

  “Perfect. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 25

  It seemed to take forever to get there. Every light was red, and they went the wrong way at least twice. By the time they pulled up outside the gymnasium her teeth were chattering. Lydia had to smooth Letty’s hair down once they were out of the car because of all the pulling and finger combing she had been doing. She had to talk to her in a soothing voice about life and how it doesn’t work this way.

  “It’s only in movies that people get there, like, a minute too late,” she said.

  And Lydia was right. Of course she was right. They snuck in behind a cheering, sign-waving crowd, and Tate was just wrestling some guy in the same way he always did. In fact, if anything he seemed even more focused than usual. She caught a glimpse of his expression, as tense and fearsome as she’d ever seen it. Saw him dodging and going for the weak spots like it hardly took any effort at all.

  He was going to win, no problem.

  Then she remembered in a rush: winning was bad. Winning in this case was really, really bad. She could even see two suspicious-looking dudes three rows down—one in the most beautiful suit she’d ever seen in her life, the other so big he dwarfed everyone surrounding him. Both of them watching intently, like they were just waiting for him to make the wrong move. “It might not be what you think,” Lydia said, but that only suggested she had seen the same thing.

  Now Tate was hurling his opponent around as if he were made of skin and air, and god god god, she just had to get down there right now. Even if it wasn’t true. Even if this was all just somehow part of one last grand trick—she didn’t care. She saw herself as he must have seen her, when he had asked her out all those years ago and she had laughed. Saw how mean it must have looked, even though she’d never intended it that way. She had always thought of it as the start of his cruelty, the start of his jokes and his tricks, instead of what it really was.

  The thing that had divided them.

  She couldn’t let that divide happen again.

  Not purposefully. Not like this. Not ever.

  And so she took the steps two at a time, almost shoving anyone who got in her way. Popcorn spilled down the stairs to her right, though she had no idea why or how or from where. She didn’t know anything but her goal—getting to him and telling him something, anything, to make him go down. Maybe even grab him, if she could get close enough. Run right out onto the gym floor like a maniac.

  So it was lucky, really, that Coach Parker caught her. He put an arm out and stopped her before she could make it; barked at her that she was crazy. And the truth was, she couldn’t argue with him.

  She sounded it when she shouted his name.

  “Tate, stop!” she yelled out, hardly expecting him to hear over the crowd.

  But he did. For one brief second his gaze locked with hers, so full of relief and happiness and surprise she could have cried. In that instant, everything was real again. It was real and it was okay.

  It was going to be okay, she thought.

  Then he closed his eyes and dropped his arms, just in time for his opponent to smash him into a bloody pulp against the gymnasium floor.

  —

  It was strange, sitting next to his hospital bed. Like that gravity switch again, only ten times as fast and ten times as hard. Whenever she looked directly at him she got kind of dizzy, and breathing became a problem. But she looked anyway. She looked at all of him, the way he must have looked at her. Not like an enemy or a friend or even someone he ruined and wanted to put back together.

  More like a woman he’d loved for years and years.

  Far longer than she had loved him.

  Longer even than she’d ever loved anyone.

  They had both been sixteen when he first asked her, and she had laughed in response. They would be twenty-one soon, with almost five years of this bloody battle behind them. Five years of fucking up and fixing things and fucking up again. It seemed impossible and tiring and amazing and beautiful. It made her exhausted thinking about it and it made her happy, but most of all it made her desperately needing him to wake up.

  What if he never woke up? It did seem like the right ending for reality, after all. In real life, you didn’t get a neat resolution. Explanations never happened, and if they did they were usually half formed. The brittle ice of his apologies to her, while underneath an ocean of what he really wanted to say surged and flowed. Never breathing a word about it, because what would a word have done?

  It would have made her sorry.

  And he wanted it to be him, only him.

  Or at least, she thought so. But what if she never got to ask? What if she—

  “Are you upset because you think I’m taking the combination to the safe to my grave?”

  She had her head in her hands when he suddenly spoke, which of course only made it ten times more shocking. The sound almost made her jump out of her chair, and she came extremely close to giving him a good whack. In fact, she probably would have if his face wasn’t a bleak mosaic of blacks and purples.

  Instead she had to settle for shouting.

  “Oh my god, you asshole. You total, total asshole. I swear to god if you ever let anyone smash your face into the ground like that again you better stay dead. Otherwise I’ll just fucking murder you.”

  “It’s super nice to see you, too, Letty. I’m glad you…want to…murder me?”

  “I do want to murder you. I want to murder you to fucking death.”

  “Well, that’s typically the state murder leaves you in.”

  “Do you not think I know that do you think—”

  The tears just came, right in the middle of her rant.

  One second she was furious, the next she was blubbering like a fool into her hands.

  Though she suspected the word death had something to do with it.

  “Hey, come on. You can’t cry. You’re supposed to hate me, remember?”

  “I don’t hate you. How can I hate you when you wrote those emails?”

  There was a long pause then. Long enough that she knew he knew what she meant.

  It was even more obvious when he answered, in a tone that was trying hard to be casual.

  “What emails?”

  “The ones you sent me.”

  “You mean…the one where I was a huge dick after your accident?”

  “No, I mean the ones where you seemed to realize you had been a huge dick and then agonized over it and beat yourself up until I lost my fucking mind.”

  Again, there followed a huge silence. And when he eventually spoke, his voice was even more unconvincing than it had been when he first asked which emails she meant.

  “I don’t know what you might be referring to.”

  “That’s okay. Because every word is burned into my brain, so it should be p
retty easy to jog your memory. Let’s start with you being the person who called 911.”

  “That…anyone would have done that. I would have had to be a sociopath not to.”

  “Probably true, probably true. But less of one to get my blood all over you trying to save my life.”

  “You think that makes me less of a sociopath? Come on, Letty. I had to do something. You were bleeding everywhere and it looked like there was a rock in your head and I just—”

  “You just didn’t tell me anything about any of this.”

  She looked up at him then, but it didn’t make anything any easier.

  Now she could see those pained eyes among the forest of bruises.

  “If I had told you, how would it have looked?”

  “Like you wanted to get top marks from your target.”

  “Exactly. I wanted you to trust me because I earned it. Not because I did the only fucking decent thing I could possibly do. Seriously, I was your worst enemy, but you would have still done the same.”

  “If I had rammed you off a cliff? Yeah, probably I would have. But I don’t think I would have kept the shirt you bled all over and then written poetry about it.”

  “I didn’t write poetry, I—”

  “Wrote something that sounded like poetry.”

  He looked up at the ceiling, as though she’d busted him for doing something terrible.

  Instead of busting him for writing about the bloody painting and the telltale heart.

  “Yeah. Okay. I’ll give you that.”

  “Will you give me the other stuff, too? The stuff about you loving me about a hundred years before you actually said a single thing? Loving me even when you claimed to hate me?”

  “You must have known. You must have known I loved you. I practically told you so, so many times and in so many different ways. Why did you think I was at Breckenridge? Didn’t you wonder what I’d been doing in those two years you took off to recover? Didn’t you think it was weird that I was here?”

  “I thought it was you being an asshole. Like you couldn’t breathe without me being there to belittle.”

  He winced at the word belittle—but she couldn’t hold it back.

  He had to know the truth, no matter how much it stung.

  “And after you realized that was totally not the case?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought. I do know that you could have told me.”

  “You wouldn’t have believed me. You don’t even believe it now after hacking into my emails and reading all my private thoughts and feelings that I never in a million years thought you’d see.”

  Now it was her turn to sting, so sharply it made her eyes water.

  Though it might have been more like crying, if she was being honest.

  “God, don’t put it like that. I feel bad enough as it is.”

  “You don’t have anything to feel bad about, honey.”

  “But I do. I really, really do. I didn’t trust you, even after you did everything possible to help me. I blamed you for things that you weren’t to blame for. I jumped to terrible, shitty conclusions. And to top it off, everything was all my fault to begin with. You asked me out when we were sixteen and I rejected you in the grossest possible way.”

  “And there’s the other reason I didn’t say anything. I knew that you would think that, I fucking knew.” He shook his head, despite the fact that it seemed painful to do it. Made a fist and punched the mattress beneath him. “But you’re not fucking responsible for shit that I chose to do. You didn’t owe me your love. You didn’t owe me a polite yes. It was not on you to let me down gently and somehow ward off punishment I was fucking stupid enough to think you deserved.”

  “You weren’t stupid, you were hurt.”

  “Yeah, and over what? You didn’t even fucking mean it. Right?”

  She had to swallow a few extra breaths before speaking. Really calm herself down, after all this confessing of her own crimes. Though somehow, even after she’d gotten to the explanation part, everything still felt fraught and awkward. Her voice was so small when it finally emerged.

  “I thought you were joking. I thought it was a joke. You were just so…you were so handsome, I just thought…I thought that was the start of you tormenting me. I didn’t understand that you were serious or I would never, ever have laughed and called you a…a jughead.”

  It helped, that he laughed at the word jughead.

  And when he reached over the space between them and put his big hand over hers.

  “I know you wouldn’t, honey. I realized within seconds of talking to you like a human being that you would sooner poke out your own eyes than upset someone you barely know.” He paused to give her enough time to digest this. Then just whacked her with another sackful of emotional bricks. “And then when it dawned on me, I went back to my dorm and heaved my guts up for about six hours. It worked out nicely though—I made weight the next day super easily.”

  “Christ. I don’t know which is worse: me or wrestling.”

  “The answer is C: I am. I am the worst.”

  She shook her head. Squeezed one of his fingers between her finger and thumb.

  “You don’t get to say that anymore. Not when the stupid conclusions I jumped to almost made you commit suicide by psycho mobster.”

  “Hey—that is not what happened. I got a little reckless and depressed, yeah, but that is all on me, not you. I’m the one who spent years fucking up my own life. I’m the one who chose to be an ass to you. I don’t get to blame you now for trust issues I caused. You understand me? You have to understand—we covered this same thing like five minutes ago.”

  “I do understand you. I promise I do. I just—” she started.

  But thankfully he finished it for her.

  “Stop. Start again, by putting some of this on my shoulders.”

  “You’re in a hospital bed, Tate. I think your shoulders have taken enough.”

  “My shoulders are fine. Come on. Just gimme one thing you wish I’d done differently.”

  It was hard to consider, with him looking at her like that. He had turned onto his side, even though she was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to do that. And she could see where the skin had split around his jaw—those paper butterflies were lined up in a curling row over the red.

  Plus he was stroking her knuckles now.

  How was she was supposed to keep putting it on him, in light of that?

  She had to glance away, just to get anywhere close.

  “Why didn’t you explain when I found all that stuff?”

  “That’s good. That’s better. I don’t have an answer for you, but it’s better.”

  “There must have been some reason you just stood there and took me yelling at you. I mean, later I could understand, because I basically deleted you from my life. But you had me right there and…nothing.”

  “Honestly? I didn’t feel like there was anything I could say. That first email is fucked up. It’s like everything that was wrong with me before I started to get my shit together. And then there was that fucking video…why the fuck did I keep that fucking video? I knew as soon as I saw I’d somehow recorded us that I should have just fucking deleted it. It was so weird that I kept it. It felt weird, like being one of those guys who secretly puts their girlfriends on porn sites. But I just…I don’t know you were so pretty and you looked like you loved me so much I…I’m making excuses again.”

  She squeezed his hand tightly for that.

  To reassure him, the way he always reassured her.

  “As excuses go, ‘I wanted to keep evidence that you loved me’ is pretty good.”

  “But the rest is kind of creepy though, right?”

  “I don’t think creepy would be the word I would use.”

  “Stupid, then.”

  “No.”

  “Crazy?”

  “Not even close. I was thinking more…heartbreaking. All of this is really, really heartbreaking. And it just gets more heartbreakin
g the deeper in I go. Like, I thought you smelled of my perfume for no reason at all, but now I’m thinking otherwise.”

  She didn’t know how to feel when his expression turned sheepish.

  Thrilled, that she was right.

  Sad, that it had taken him so long to say.

  “That was kind of an accident. Some girl sprayed it on me in a mall and I just thought it was nice and it gave me a good feeling so I bought some. Then I got close to you in the library and realized that I’m a fucking dumbass who basically has no clue why he does anything ever.”

  “Would it help if I said that I like you being a fucking dumbass?”

  “It definitely wouldn’t hurt.”

  “I like you being a fucking dumbass. I like that you don’t know why you do things.”

  “Even though it’s responsible for ninety percent of the fucked-up shit we’ve been through.”

  “And the other ten percent?”

  “Is me knowingly making terrible decisions, like asking Harrison to put us together. I mean, I knew why I did that. I get that it was terrible. It’s just that I went ahead and fucking did it anyway.”

  “I think we’ve established that it wasn’t so terrible,” she said.

  But he wouldn’t accept it. He sighed and looked down at their joined hands.

  “Yeah, it was. I didn’t stick to the plan, which was to basically make sure you were happy. It wasn’t force Letty into a partnership that makes her even more frightened than she already is. I should have just backed off and waited for my moment to help you. Beat up guys who were dogging you or—”

  “Beating up guys who are dogging me sounds terrible, Tate. It was bad enough that you punched your buddy—who by the way is responsible for you not being killed by mobsters.”

  “They weren’t going to kill me, Letty. People notice when mobsters murder wrestling stars who they just recently tried to draft into an illegal gambling ring.”

  “Well even so, my point stands. Working with me on a project was a great idea. It did make me happy, Tate. It made me happier than I’ve ever been.”

  “Doesn’t change how selfish it was. I just…wanted to hang out with you.”