“The first time it happened?” I croak. “What is it?”
“The first time that man held a knife to your throat and demanded that my sister marry him. And when she refused, he…” she trails off, her voice breaking like she’s crying. “That man, he…”
“What did he do?” I gasp, muting the volume of the TV. Oh God, what did my father do and why can’t I remember?
“He hurt you, real bad.”
Oh God.
“What happened to me?” I whisper. Jesus, what the hell happened to me and why can’t I remember?
“These are the kinds of memories that you suppressed, allowed yourself to forget because of the cruelty of them,” she whispers, making shudders go through me. A knife? To my throat? My own father?
“But Mia, when you remember, it’ll hurt you,” she whispers in a rush. “Go to Paris. Go be with your friend.”
No…
“You still haven’t told me…”
“No! Your own subconscious decided to protect you, I will as well,” she says, her voice hard and unyielding now. “Go. There’s really nothing for you here but trouble.”
And with that, she ends the call.
* * *
I have no idea what time it is when I finally start doing as I’m told, packing my bag so I can go. I already booked my flight using my fake ID. I’ll be on the next flight out of here to France.
Just then, the phone that I got four days ago rings. If it’s Nicky, I really have nothing to say to her after what she just revealed. But she keeps calling until I have no other choice but to answer.
“If you’re calling to tell me more of the childhood memories that I forgot, then you can shove it. I don’t want to hear anymore,” I croak, hating the way my voice breaks at the end when I answer.
But the offending silence at the end of the line has the hairs at the back of my neck stand up on end. The blood in my veins starts rushing as my heart starts pounding so hard, I gasp.
“Hello?” I whisper.
“Little Minx.”
And there it is. His deep, rough voice that makes shivers race up and down my spine. The same one I hear in every nightmare, telling me of my crimes and how much he hates me.
“I know you’re still there,” he says, and I can tell he’s trying his hardest not to be angry. Even though I’ve known the guy for a few months, I can still discern his moods.
“How did you get this number?” I whisper, now on high alert.
“You think I wouldn’t find you?” he questions, the dark notes in his deep voice washing over me like a soothing shower.
“So, you’re stalking me now?”
He’s quiet for a while and I swear, I’m not breathing, waiting for him to speak or for him to say something that will make me feel a plethora of wild emotions that I can’t control as only he can. I haven’t felt this awake or aware of everything around me since the night when…
“You don’t sound like you’re surprised by that,” he says. “In fact, if I didn’t know the cold, black heart in your chest, I’d say you sound like you’re a bit relieved that I’m stalking you.”
I press the phone harder to my ear, listening to the way he breathes and the intimate, low voice he uses when he talks to me. It’s all still there.
“I guess I always knew you were a bit unhinged and stalkerish,” I murmur then sniffle, as more silent tears run down my cheeks. I haven’t stopped crying since Nicky’s call.
“When it comes to you, Little Minx, I’ll be any-fucking-thing just to get to you,” Julian whispers hotly, angry, and impatient. “Why the fuck did you run?”
Not where are you, no.
“Julian…”
“Don’t you dare start lying to me now,” he seethes, making that cold, black thing he says is in my chest pound even harder.
The anger I’ve been suppressing for days now comes hurtling to the surface and in that moment, I grab on to it with everything I am as if my sanity, my mind, my integrity and soul depends on this moment.
“You don’t have a right to know what I do or don’t do,” I grit out, surprised at the viciousness of my voice. “You and your fucking family are nothing more than vultures preying on the weak.”
“What the fuck does that mean, Mia?” he demands.
“Oh, you don’t know?” I mock. “You know I have to hand it to you, the way you played me for weeks. Messed with my mind while you took over my body only to help your father destroy my family.”
“Is that what you fucking believe?”
“That’s what I know, damn you!”
“Mia, I’m not my fucking father!” he growls. “I told you this before and I’ll repeat myself again because you like jumping to conclusions. I had no idea what he was doing and I sure as hell didn’t know why he was doing that shit to your family, but you have to understand, he wasn’t targeting you.”
“Yeah right.” I shake my head. “You didn’t know what he was doing but you’re defending him anyway? Wow.”
“Fuck this, Mia, everything is so damn complicated.”
“Sure, betrayal and heartbreak is always complicated, isn’t it?” I mock, then glance down at my tender, slightly swollen wrists and just like that, all the anger I just built-up in the short space of this call melts away, as a chilling sense of helplessness coupled with my own self-loathing grips me by the throat.
“Everything about your family and mine is complicated, Mia, but I swear, no one was gunning to destroy you.”
“Yeah, sure,” I murmur. “I guess that’s what you tell each other in your house so you can sleep at night.”
“Fuck, Mia,” he breathes, his agitation and anger so clear with each word he utters. “I’m not having this conversation with you over the fucking phone. I’m coming to get you.”
“Don’t you dare,” I whisper, standing up. I start looking around the hotel room as if he’s lying in wait somewhere in the shadows already. The threat in his voice is so velar like he’s right here.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he starts. “I wasn’t aware that that came out like a fucking request. I’m not asking for your fucking permission, Mia. I said I’m coming to get you.”
He lowers his voice now to a delicious growl that awakens something I haven’t felt in a while. And as I hitch my breath, I’m sure he knows what he’s doing to me.
“I know where you are, Little Minx,” he whispers. With the phone pressed tightly to my ear, his voice feels so damn intimate, I can’t help but close my eyes. Seeing his intense green eyes filled with so much lust and need for me, I shiver. “I also know that you want me there.”
“I don’t,” I whisper making him chuckle, but it’s bitter and angry, like he’s pissed off. “I don’t want you here.”
“I don’t have time for games. You and I are well past that shit,” he says.
“Oh my God, there is no you and me.”
“You’re fucking wrong! There is a fucking you and me, it’s always been there,” he says, his voice a dark, low rasp that hinted at his barely reigned in anger. “If you wanted an out, you should’ve minded your damn business at that hospital, but you didn’t, because you’re mine! You’re drawn to me. You were made for me, Mia.”
How do I respond to that? How do I tell him that I need him right now to hold me, to comfort me, to be near him so I can feel somewhat better?
“No, that’s not true and you know it.” I mean if Courtney was telling the truth, then he isn’t even truly mine and he’ll never belong to me. Why should I keep falling for him when I’m inevitably going to get hurt, as if I’m not heartbroken already? “Whatever we had, Julian, it’s done. It’s over.”
“To hell with that. This, you and me, will never end,” he growls, his voice making me ache all over. “Remember what you agreed to before I was inside you, before I fucked you in a bed under my roof? Before you came on my dick, my tongue, my fingers, screaming my name, do you remember what you fucking agreed to?”
Oh, dear sweet Jesus.
> “Julian,” I gasp out his name, but it sounds more like a plea of some sort as I think back to that night, the sordid visuals assaulting my senses until the blood in my veins starts flowing with a rush.
I hear the swishing sound that moves in sync with my beating heart and the thrumming at the base of my neck, but Julian isn’t done torturing me.
“I told you, Little Minx,” he growls, his voice in my ear sending chills down my spine. “I told you that if you wanted me inside you, you were going to fucking take everything I am. I fucking told you that if I get inside that tight pussy, you were going to be mine and as I recall, that greedy pussy gripped me so fucking tight when I drove home and made you come. Repeatedly.”
“Go to hell,” I grit out, my voice groggy and hoarse and yet, I feel strangely hot and so damn bothered.
“If by hell you mean you leaving in the middle of the fucking night without a word to anyone, knowing damn well that those assholes, the Matthews brothers, are literally out to get at whoever is close to me, and what’s mine, then it’s from hell I’m coming from. And Mia, I’m coming to get you.”
My breath catches as I hear the worry mixed with livid anger in his voice. Is that genuine or is that part of his mind games? And honestly, what kind of game is this now?
“Tell me, Julian,” I start, my heart beating so fucking hard it feels like it’s going to escape, and honestly, I want it to go. Maybe then the pain I’ve been in for weeks will finally be over. “What do you want with me?”
“What?”
“You heard what I said,” I whisper. “I’m nothing to you, surely your fake enemies, the Matthews brothers know that, since you were working together to destroy me.”
“The fuck?”
“I’m not yours and from what I hear, you’re not mine to have either.”
“Mia…” he starts, but I cut him off again as my voice drops to a painful whisper.
“No one wants me anyway, because I’m a disaster. I ruin everything I touch.”
And just like that, the dam I’ve been trying to hold back rushes back to me in a torrent that takes me over and I start crying, but I bite my lip to keep the evidence from showing.
“Little Minx,” Julian whispers my name, the pain in his voice so damn obvious, it makes me cry harder. “I can’t believe you just said that.”
I believe it. It’s the truth.
“Don’t you know how incredible and rare you are?” he questions, the raw emotion in his voice breaking me apart. “Don’t you fucking know I can’t breathe without you?”
“Please don’t…”
“Fuck, you believe you’re ruinous, Little Minx?” he demands. “If you are, then I’m a fucking nightmare.”
“You wouldn’t want me in your…”
“Stop insulting both of us by saying that shit,” he growls, cutting me off. “If wanting you, needing you, being this pathetically desperate for you makes me a fucking psychotic maniac, who doesn’t know any better or can’t take the hint that you’ll still break me over and over again, then so be it.”
Oh God.
How can those words shatter me from the inside, breaking my barely steady resolve?
I know I should crumble for more, but right now, the loneliness that swallows me day after day, the nightmares that come after me, the self-loathing that makes my chest tighten until I’m in desperate need for release, has me breaking down.
I can’t speak as more tears run down my cheeks, tightening my throat until I can’t breathe properly. Sobs rack my body and for a moment, I try to keep them quiet as Nancy’s face flashes before my eyes, but I lose the battle.
“Mia, I didn’t know what John was doing, neither did Liam. I swear,” he says in a broken whisper. “Tell me you believe me, baby.”
Maybe it’s because I need something—him to be specific. Or maybe it’s because I can’t go another day feeling like this, or maybe it’s because I’ve been going out of my mind trying to make the fucked-up puzzle pieces to fit but they’re so mismatched and broken that for right now, I want to hold on to his words, to him, so I do.
I believe him, so I nod but then I realize he can’t see me.
“I believe you,” I croak and then hear his breath catch. I freeze.
“Are you crying?” he questions, his voice a low, angry growl.
Pain, sharp and hard, slams into my chest with that one question. How does he know that I’m so damn out of my mind right now, that I’m not the same anymore, that everything in my world right now is so dark and ugly?
And so red…
“Are you fucking crying, Mia?” he repeats, his voice now harder and louder.
“No,” I whisper but a sob escapes my lips before I clamp them shut. I hear his sharp intake of breath and next thing I know I hear someone else speaking and then…
“It’s okay to cry, baby,” he whispers.
“I can’t…” I croak, wanting to scream, but I can’t.
I can’t cry.
I can’t feel.
I can’t go on living like this.
“You can, baby.”
“No, Julian, you don’t get it. I’m stuck. I can’t…”
“Listen to my fucking voice, I can’t function either. I’m in a funk, Mia. I’m in a really bad place but I won’t let you fall, okay?”
“Julian.”
“Just hold on, baby. I’m coming for you and you can let go, okay?”
I’m silent, not wanting to hold on to something that doesn’t have a future. This doesn’t have a future. Whatever this is between Julian and I, not if what his mother said is the truth.
“Julian,” I croak. “Don’t come.”
“What?” It sounds more like an expletive than a question. I try to swallow past the ball in my throat, but it just sticks there, uncompromising and rigid.
“Let’s face it, Julian, you and I…” I trail off as everything Courtney said comes rushing back, flooding my mind.
“You and me what, Mia?” He grits out the words so low like he can barely say them, and I wince at the sound, barely able to breathe as I clutch the phone in my hand tighter.
“We don’t have a future. Nothing good will come of this.”
“Like hell we don’t,” he seethes. “I can feel your pain and I’m not going to let you suffer alone. Over my fucking rotting corpse.”
“But you’re…”
“I don’t want to hear it, Mia. I’m a whole second away from setting this damn world on fire. I’m so damn angry, I can hardly think straight,” Julian grits out, but I have a feeling he’s barely holding on, trying his hardest not to blow up in anger right now.
And I’m right there with him, if not far gone with my own misery. Silence stretches between us. I can hear him breath and I’m sure he can hear me cry or struggle through feeling like this.
“Listen baby, it’s all going to be all right,” he whispers after a while, the softness of his voice making me feel everything in that moment.
“No, it’s not!” I cry. “It’s never going to be all right because she’s gone, Julian.”
The admission falls from my lips with an agony that would break a nation’s back. The truth is, I’ve been free falling to hell and now I’m self-harming and the truth is, something tells me that I’m probably going to do it again, just to get some relief.
“Wait for me, Little Minx.”’
I want to tell him that I will, that I’m going to wait, but when I open my mouth to say the words nothing comes out.
“Wait for me.”
In that moment, I feel so small, so fragile and so broken, my insides feel so damn raw, all I can do is try to exist from one moment to the next, acute guilt existing along with me.
“She’s gone,” I whisper brokenly, my body trembling now.
“I know, baby,” he whispers right back. But I’m unable to tell him what happened. To confess what I did that night.
God, I just stood there. She needed me and I… I just stood there.
�
��Little Minx, I’m coming for you,” Julian whispers hotly, his voice now so damn low, I hang on to it, wishing so damn hard that he was here with me, holding me, but I know better than to trust him. I know better than to give him another chance to shatter me so when he says, “I’m coming, baby.” I don’t believe him.
14
“Where to all by yourself, little miss?” the cabbie questions when I get in, with my backpack and a heavy heart full of nothing but regrets.
“The airport, please,” I say, clearing my throat.
“Isn’t it a bit hot for that attire?” the old man questions. Unlike his whole Amazon essential polo shirt and the old navy carpenter pants I can see from here, and I’ll go so far to guess that he’s got the good ole sketchers nonslips on his feet—he’s even got one of those cabbie driver caps on his head—unlike his entire look, I’m dressed from head to toe in black.
I have on a new black hoodie I bought two days ago just downstairs of the hotel, along with black sweatpants and a black pair of Ultra Boost trainers. I probably look like I’m going to rob someone, or a ninja, but it’s been really dark out lately and I just wanted to blend along with it.
“I’m feeling cold,” I say as a way of explanation that I really don’t owe him. I look out at the darkening sky, my mind racing a hundred miles per second. I knew Julian was tracking me somehow so I left the phone I bought just in case it was the one that led him to find me—though I have no idea how he tracked that.
“Well, okay,” the cabbie says, and we drive away.
There’s a part of me that knows that I’m running away from Julian, running away from everything really, but there’s a bigger part of me that knows if I stay, there’s a good chance that everything will blow up in my face. Especially with Nancy’s funeral tomorrow, I just… I can’t stay.
So why the hell did you tell Julian that you believed him and now you’re running, bitch?
Urgh, I know what I said but seeing him is a whole other thing. I don’t think I have the emotional bandwidth for that right now so I’m taking the next flight out of here. There was something in Julian’s voice when I talked to him earlier that spooked me, made something in me break.
Cruel Kisses: It’s Just High School #2 Page 15