Page 26 of Honey Cut
Ihatethat because my conscience feels absolutely broken right now. What is right and what is wrong, what will hurt the people I love the least—answers that should be simple and distinct are instead jagged and sharp and jumbled together like broken glass.
If I tell Mark about Isolde and me on the yacht, I’ll be betraying Isolde’s trust. If I tell Isolde about what Mark and I did tonight, I could be hurting her. They keep telling me that it doesn’t matter since they’re not married yet, but then why does it feel like it matters so much?
Mark’s fingers find the collar of my shirt, slip around to stroke the nape of my neck.
“I miss having you in my bed,” he says after a minute.
I can’t speak. His touch on my neck is a curse.
“Are you still having nightmares?”
“Yes,” I admit.
“About the man you killed? Your friend?”
“About everyone I killed and everyone I couldn’t save, like my friend McKenzie, but yes. It’s mostly Sims.”
He’s still touching my neck, and my cheek is against his jaw now, my head on his shoulder. He makes it so easy to be weak, and it should be a red flag, but it feels so wonderful. Like I could rest my head on his shoulder for the rest of time, my pants sticky and my heart pounding, and he would hold my weight and stroke my nape for eternity.
“The woman who came in while you were on the yacht. His sister.”
“Cara,” I say. My voice is muffled against his suit jacket. “Cara Sims. She wants to meet.”
“Do you want to meet with her?”
“I killed her brother.” My voice is tired, thin. “Do I have a choice?”
Mark’s lips find my hair. “There’s always a choice, Tristan. There’s no such thing as fate. You know that, right?”
“That makes it worse,” I mumble. “If choice is all there is, then I chose to kill her brother that day. And I’ll have to explain as much when I see her.”
He kisses my hair again. “I could come with you.”
I lift my head and look at him. He’s entirely serious. “I wouldn’t make you do that.”
“Why not? You sit through meetings of mine all the time.”
“You pay me to do that. And this is different anyway because I don’t want you to see—to think about?—”
I can’t finish, but he seems to know what I mean. He pulls me close again.
“Tristan, are you still so ashamed of what you’ve done? Even when you could have done nothing else? Can you not at least be comforted by knowing that I’ve killed far more people for far shallower reasons?”
I give a weak laugh. “Should that be comforting, sir?”
There’s a smile in his voice when he answers. “Probably not.”
“I miss—I do miss sleeping with you,” I confess. “At least then I didn’t have the bad dreams.”
“The door is open,” he murmurs, and then his lips find mine, warm and drugging, softer than I can ever remember feeling them. He licks into my mouth like he wants to memorize the taste and then pulls back to look at me.
“God, you’re pretty,” he rasps, and then he pulls himself away.
I watch him walk up the stairs to the loft, where his room is, my heart pounding as the rain drips onto the windows outside.
* * *
Three hours later,and I still can’t sleep. I toss and I turn and I pace and I try all the fancy breathing techniques the combat stress counselor taught me, and still nothing. My body is alert and my ears are attuned to every gust of wind, every single raindrop.
