Page 37 of Delirium
“I’m not,” I murmured. “But you’re carrying precious cargo, and I don’t want you out there without me. I know you don’t really care about what I want or how I feel right now, but I would feel much better knowing you’re okay.”
She stopped to think about it, looking at me, at the ceiling, the floor, anywhere, before she looked up at me again, resignation clear in her eyes.
“Fine.” She huffed. “But my father’s men are going to follow us and once we’re in Santa Monica, I’m taking my things and getting the fuck out of there.”
I winced at her words, but I still had two days to maybe change her mind. I had two days to try and fix this mess.
The only question was—would she let me?
* * *
Spending almosttwenty hours in a car with a person who didn’t want to talk to you was a new level of hell I didn’t expect. Spending it with the woman you loved and wanted in your life was even worse, but I had no idea what to say to fix this shitshow I had caused.
It would have been much faster if we had taken one of the bikes, but I didn’t want to risk her or the babies, and the weather right now wasn’t exactly made for pregnant ladies. She could fight me as much as she wanted to, but there was nothing I wouldn’t do to protect her and our kids, even if it meant driving in this metal cage for hours on end, with the silence as my only companion.
We made our first stop in Reno because I didn’t want to drive all day and night. I could see that she was getting more and more uncomfortable, even if she didn’t want to voice it. But ever since we left this morning, she’d been quiet.
She wouldn’t even look at me, choosing to stare out the window instead. Ophelia was slowly erasing me from her mind. Even though the physical distance between us was almost non-existent, her mind wasn’t here.
She wasn’t with me anymore, as if she expunged me from her mind and I was nothing more than a designated driver taking her to her next destination.
True to her word, her father’s guards were close to us, following, always on our tail, and it was obvious that she didn’t want to talk. Hell, I didn’t want to talk about this, but we had to. We had to clear the air. If she didn’t want to stay after that, then I would try to respect her wishes.
We had destroyed each other in more ways than imaginable, hitting where it hurt the most, letting the anger and pain dictate how we were going to live our lives. I took the broken girl, thinking I could fix her, thinking I could change who she was and how she reacted, but I hadn’t realized that there was nothing to be fixed.
Ophelia Aster didn’t need fixing—she was perfect as she was, and I was too blind to see it before.
I took the perfect woman for me, but I failed to realize that I was the one unable to let her in. It wasn’t her fault that my heart was locked in a vault, and no matter how many times I told myself that I loved her, that I wanted her with me, the harsh reality was that I didn’t know how to give her all the parts of myself without thinking of it as a weakness.
She’d been trying to fix this mess. Maybe it was in her own, weird way, but she tried. Now with a clearer mind and without the anger clouding my judgment, I could see who the real fuckup was, and it wasn’t her.
We missed the most important step in the relationship, well, I missed it. Communication was the key to everything. Instead of talking about my fears and the things that bugged me, I took it out on her, pushing, taking, never listening.
I replaced words with kisses because I didn’t know how to tell her about the things that laid heavy on my chest. I replaced explanations with sex, masking my deeply rooted fears with passion, hoping she would never see how weak I was.
And I was a weak man. Fear was one of the greatest weaknesses and I was afraid that once she saw it, she would leave. She wouldn’t want me anymore.
But as Lazar already said, no one could make Ophelia do anything, and trying to predict how and what she would do was the greatest mistake any of us could make. Instead of giving her the benefit of the doubt, treating her as my equal, I put her in a golden cage, cutting her off from reality because I was too afraid to show her all the fucked-up parts of me.
I wasn’t afraid of her seeing the viciousness coursing through my veins because I knew she was capable of the same things. I wasn’t afraid of her seeing my anger, because hers mirrored mine.
But I was afraid of her seeing the broken, little boy who often wondered why his parents didn’t love him. I was afraid she would see the fear of being abandoned, of being forgotten, of being loved only for that love to be ripped from my hands.
I was terrified of having her and then losing her once my heart and my soul became too attached. But I was already too attached. There was no going back for me. There would never be another woman who could make my blood hum like Ophelia could. There was no other woman who could make me both angry and happy as she could.
She was it for me, and I failed to show that to her. I did everything in my power to push her away, instead of fighting to keep her with me. And now… now she was going to leave me.
“The first time I saw you, I thought you were an angel of death, coming to take my soul,” I said as we passed the sign for Bakersfield, only two hours away from Santa Monica.
“Your power almost knocked me off of my bike that time, and I knew you were a force to be reckoned with.” I turned my head to the right, looking at her profile. Her slightly arched eyebrows cast a shadow over her eyes, her pouty lips set into a thin line, but she didn’t look at me.
I knew she was listening, but she didn’t want to show it.
“You were such a tiny thing back then, with fury living beneath your skin, humming to the song playing in my heart. I knew I had to have you, no matter the cost, but it wasn’t until we sat down on top of that hill that I saw how much pain you carried in your brilliant eyes. Anger was what fueled you, but this deep-rooted sadness was what ate at you, keeping you in the cage.”
Taking a deep breath, my mind swam through the memories safely tucked in the back of my psyche. Back then, I had no idea how much she would mean to me. But the moment we touched, the moment she showed me the woman underneath the armor of a warrior, I knew she had to come with me.
“It broke my heart when you didn’t show up, and deep inside, I knew you were in trouble. But I couldn’t find you. I didn’t know enough, and I didn’t think that you were the daughter of a man that brought me so much pain.”
