Page 148 of Quiet Obsession
When I left Noah’s room on Saturday evening shortly after Hyde, my first instinct was getting shitfaced and starting a brawl at Jed’s bar, but the promise of blowing off steam did nothing to fill the black hole growing in my chest and skull.
It felt pointless. Meaningless.
What good would breaking someone’s nose do? It wouldn’t fix whatever’s wrong with me. It wouldn’t exorcise the trauma, the rage, the emptiness. Nothing would change. I’d wake up in pain, my head pounding, and feel like shit all over again.
Still, I took the wheel, not entirely sure of my destination. Noah stepped out of the building just as I was about to peel out of the parking space. He yanked my door open,resting against it so I couldn’t drive off.
“Don’t do this again,”he said.“Stop repeating the fucking pattern, Creed. Why do you always end up here.”
“Move, Noah,”I snapped, my chest damn near caving in.
“No. You’re not driving off to get drunk and—”
“I’m not,”I cut in, settling on a destination.“I’m going home. I need time and space.”
Seattle sounded better than Jed’s bar, even if I knew I’d end up drunk either way. At least there was no one else back home and I wouldn’t end up at a hospital with another concussion.
My face had time to heal while I drank myself stupid for three days straight, sitting in my father’s leather chair. The same one he sat in every night, whiskey in one hand, cigar in the other, eyes on the flat-screen, never me.
It didn’t surprise me how well my shoulders settled into the backrest, or how my elbows matched the dents in the armrests.
It fits because I’m just like him.
That narrative kept me draining bottle after bottle. That, and the fact that the more I drank, the blurrier Millie became inside my head. I thought the same thoughts I’ve thought for years. The same shit that kept me pulling back from her... but the harder I tried to convince myself Seattle was exactly where I should be, the less I believed it.
And it collapsed into pieces when I woke from a dream about Millie this afternoon.
She sat cross-legged on the hood of my car, sun in herblonde hair, a summery dress riding up her thighs while she gestured wildly about something I can’t remember. She was smiling, her eyes bright and crinkling in the corners.
I stared at the ceiling of my childhood bedroom for twenty minutes, my head pounding, mouth drier than the Sahara, mind whirring through our moments together over these past weeks, and I couldn’t stop comparing them to that dream. She looked at ease in it. Happy and whole.
She looked like she felt safe... and I’ve seen that look before. So many fucking times since we first played chess in my father’s kitchen before everyone had woken up.
She was like that the morning outside the cafeteria after Jasper and Mateo and when she touched my face instead of sayinghiat the gym. Whenever I pulled her closer. After every stolen kiss somewhere inappropriate on campus. Every time she’s seen me lately.
Safe, happy, calm.
I did that.
What kind of man makes a girl feel safe?
Not a monster. Monsters don’t wake up feeling gutted because they’ve hurt someone. My father didn’t know guilt.
I do. It’s been eating me alive for a year, growing more potent whenever I get scared and push Millie away. Whenever I make her work for something she should never work for...me.
There are so many moments when I get it right and make her smile. So many when she opens up to me a little more. Once is an accident, twice might be luck, butso manyis neither.
It’s a pattern. A fucking habit.
She curls into my side now, naked and warm, body mellow from her orgasm and I can’t believe she’s actually mine.
The bed’s too small for two people. I’m pressed into the cold wall, and Millie’s lying half on me, half off, her small comforter draped over us. It’s fucking uncomfortable, but I don’t want to move yet. Preferably ever.
At some point tonight, I’ll have to face her brother and whatever the hell comes with that, but he can wait a little longer.
Millie keeps dragging her fingertips across my side, reminding me of something she promised me weeks ago.
“Have you started my tattoo yet?” I ask.
