Page 31 of Delirium
“I don’t care,” she answered.
“Sunshine, come on. That isn’t what I meant. I love you. You know I love you.”
She turned toward me one more time, her eyes blazing with an anger I had never seen before. Not when she fought against Nikolai, and not when she bickered with Indigo.
“You can take your declarations of love and give it to someone who wants them, Storm,” she bit back, breaking my heart. “Because I don’t. I don’t want to hear it. Hell, I don’t want you to talk to me anymore. You said it yourself—you’re giving me an out, as if I ever needed your permission. As if you were ever strong enough to hold me back. I know who I am, what I am, and what I’m worth, but it’s you that doesn’t. It’s you who could never love me in the way that I want to be loved, and I was too stupid to realize it before now. So, thank you.” She smiled bitterly. “Thank you for opening my eyes.”
“Ophelia—”
“Shut your fucking mouth, Storm,” she grunted. “Once this is done, we’re going back to Santa Monica and I’m getting the fuck out of your life. I hope you’re going to be man enough to let me go.”
I didn’t want to let her go. I wanted to keep her forever. To have her next to me, but if that’s what she wanted, then I would need to follow.
“But you’re going to be in Santa Monica, right?” I asked, but the answer never came. “Right?” I looked at her.
“None of your fucking business,” she answered, turning up the volume of the radio.
“Hurt You” by Living in Fiction blasted through the car, cutting through my bleeding heart.
“You’re not going back to Kieran,” I blasted, unable to keep my thoughts to myself. “Over my dead body, Ophelia.”
“That can be arranged,” she answered, looking at me. “One thing I’m really good at is apparently killing people. You no longer have a say in what I can and can’t do. Hell, I never should have allowed you to have any say at all, but I tried to play along. I tried to respect your wishes and your need to cage me. I wanted to give you my heart. I wanted to give you everything I had. I wanted to show you that I could change, that you could trust me, that I could earn my place in your Club.”
She huffed, turning her head toward the window. “Now I can see that it was a mistake trying to do all those things, because you never wanted me for me. I have no idea what you expected to get when you first met me, but it’s obvious that you weren’t prepared for me. And that’s okay. But now you don’t get to play the hurt party when you’re the one asking me to leave. Again!”
“I’m not asking you to leave, dammit!” I thundered, slamming my hand against the steering wheel. “I’m giving you an out. I’m telling you that you can leave if you want to.”
“And I am telling you that it was never your decision to make. I could have left ten times by now. Do you really think your guards are a match for me? Don’t you think that if I wanted to get the fuck out of that house, I wouldn’t have done so by now? I might be pregnant, Storm, but I’m not crippled. My fighting skills aren’t dead just because I’m carrying two children. If anything, they’re better because I’m not protecting only myself, but them too. They’re the ones who matter, and it’s obvious that you would never be able to be the father they would need.”
“You’re way overline, Ophelia,” I grunted.
“Am I?” she asked. “If the Club was burning and if they needed help, who would you go to?”
And that was the problem. I was quiet for far too long, too late to tell her that I would always run to them. That I would choose them.
“That’s what I thought,” she mumbled. “But you should know, Storm… If someone asked me what I would do in a situation like that, I would always choose them. I would always run to them because they have my loyalty. Only them.”
I fucked this all up. I wanted her to know that she had a choice, that she could choose to go somewhere else if she wanted to, but I didn’t word it properly. I didn’t explain it properly, and I fucked everything up.
The momentary peace we were in was short lived, and I knew she was serious.
Ophelia was going to leave me.
7
OPHELIA
I was numb.
Deprived of any feeling, I walked toward the cabin we drove to, following Storm, trying to ignore the hollow hole in the center of my chest where my heart used to be.
Storm wrapped his fingers around the pumping organ and tore it right out of my body, throwing it somewhere on the side of the highway we sped over as he said that he was giving me an out. Stupid fucking man.
If I wanted an out, I would have taken it. If I wanted to leave, I would’ve been long gone by now, and he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. But I stayed. I fucking stayed like an obedient little girl, believing the devil on my shoulder that this was where I was supposed to be.
Storm kept glancing back at me as if I would run away right this moment, but those last-minute dot-com decisions weren’t who I was anymore, and this version of me thought things through before acting on them.
Irrational decisions fucked me up more than anything else, and while trying to prove to all of them that I wasn’t the monster, I realized that I needed to start thinking about my actions and my reactions.
