I twisted to look at him then, struggling to stay on his lap when he firmly settled me at his side.
“What does?” I demanded even though I knew.
“You workin’ for Irina,” he began, stopping to take a few deep breaths. “You puttin’ yourself at risk for this club. You nearly getting’ fuckin’ abducted ’cause of me.”
“It wasn’t because of you,” I retorted sharply, wanting to slap him. “It was because there are some crazy ass people in the world, and some of them happen to want to take down this club.”
“This club you think you have to protect ’cause of me,” he bit off each word and spat it out with contempt, his face a gorgeous mask of indifference.
The mask he always tried to hide behind.
“You think you’d be willin’ to do what you’re doin’ if I wasn’t around?” he argued before I could reply. “You wouldn’t even know these people if it wasn’t for me. I’m the one brought you around here thinkin’ it’d be good you had family, not carin’ what kinda family I bought you.”
“You bought me the best family there is,” I cried out, shedding the blanket because suddenly I was hot with anger, the fabric like needles against my flesh.
“They got Mute killed, King killed, Z in jail so he missed the first months of his babies bein’ alive,” he said flatly.
“The club did shit all to buy that! The Fallen gave Mute and Ares a home like they gave me. They made King into the kinda guy who’d take a bullet to save his family, and they gave Zeus Lou. You think they would’ve crossed paths if it wasn’t for the First Light Church shooting?” I waited for my words to sink in then fell across the couch to take his apathetic face in my hands. “Ignacio was always spouting these stupid sayings, but this one, “no hay mal que por bien no venga,” means there is no bad from which good doesn’t come. Nova, you cannot blame this on the club or on you. If you do, then you have to balance it with the fact that you’ve both brought me untold beauty over the years. So much more than the ugly. Why can’t you see that?”
“You’re askin’ me to do that while you got dirt and blood on your skin after bein’ run down like a fuckin’ animal ’cause of your connection to the club?”
“It could have been because of Ignacio,” I shouted, stranded on the hot sand of my anger looking at the tsunami wave of pain gathering to bear down on me and tear every shred of my recent happiness to smithereens. “Nova, listen to me, do not do this to us.”
He didn’t look at me, eyes fixed to a spot on the counter, jaw wired shut.
I climbed back onto his lap and cupped his handsome face in my hands so he would have to look at me. If he was going to end this, us, I wasn’t going to make it easy on him.
“I am not Meredith. I don’t think the only thing you have to offer the world are your good looks. You are the kindest, loveliest, most misunderstood soul I know, and it breaks my fucking heart because the person who misunderstands you the most is you.”
I pressed my forehead to his, hoping for some mysticism, some connection at the third eye that would open his mind to what I was saying, what gift I was so desperate to give him.
“Whenever I think of home, it’s you,” I told him, plucking at the flowers in my heart, pulling up the grass and roots so he might see the beauty and depth of my love for him. “You’re my closest link to Dane, you’re a Booth and a Fallen man. But…it’s more than that. It’s like clean laundry and sleeping in our own bed after vacation. It’s like loving someone because you were born loving them, like your parents or siblings, but more. You’re more than my family, you’re more than my best friend. You’re the choice I want to make every single day, to live to the fullest and love the hardest.”
My impassioned words drew lines of pain on every inch of his face, more vivid than his tattoos, so stark I wanted to comfort him even as he broke my heart.
He opened his mouth, and knowing the words that would tumble out, I kissed them off his tongue, swallowing the bitter poison so I wouldn’t have to hear them spoken.
I didn’t stop, even when he tried to pull back, even when he would have protested.
I kissed him with everything I had, and when his heart kicked at mine through our pressed chests and I felt the growing ridge of him in his jeans, I asked for one last thing before he broke my heart.