Page 56 of Butterfly
Dangerous for me—dangerous for him. Dangerous because the last person who really knew me ended up dead.
“You know me enough.” I try to lean in for another kiss, but his hand skates from my thigh to my waist… and I freeze.
I can feel what his fingers are doing. They trace the pattern of the scar beneath my tattoo like they do some nights when he thinks I’m asleep. Now, though, he’s looking at me.
I want to know you.
He doesn’t need to knowthatpart of me. I don’t even want to know that part of me. I spend nights lost in blood and paint to try to forget.
“What happened?”
I jerk back, shoving at his chest hard enough that a startled little exhalation punches through the air. It gives me a chance to scramble out of his lap, standing up while he stares at me with a mixture of hurt and confusion on his face.
“Nothing that matters.”
His expression shutters when I answer. It’s still not a lie, but it’s the closest I’ve come to one.
“Shiloh, it matters.” I open my mouth to protest, and I’m shocked when he cuts me off in a sharper tone than anything I’m used to hearing from him. “If it’s you, if it hurts you, it matters.”
Fuck.
Fuck, I don’t know if I can do this.
“I don’t,” I answer, and the way his mouth pinches tells me my mistake. I try to cover it with a sarcastic laugh. “I mean, it doesn’t.”
Donovan sees right through me, though. He stands faster than he has any right to, and his long legs carry him the few steps I’ve put between us. His hand cups my face, warm and calloused and everything I’m starting to get addicted to…
“It matters, Shiloh. You matter.” His thumb streaks a warm line across my lower lip. “To me.”
I can’t.
Ican’t. Because if I do, I’ll have to tell him about that night. About my mom dying, and how it feels to have a knife in your stomach. I’ll have to tell him that Shiloh the little boy died that night, and a monster crawled into the places he was cut open and found a home wrapped around his spine and flooding into a hollow chest.
I can’t.
“No,” I breathe, and I watch the lines of warmth on his face start to break.
“Shiloh—”
“No, Donovan.” I have to force myself to step back. “No. Not this. Okay? Ask me my favorite color, or where I want to work when I graduate, but don’t ask me about this. You don’t want toknowthis.”
It’s there again, that warmth, that heat. Those emotions I saw trapped behind glass the day he found me at Helping Hearts… and I’m drowning in it. Donovan isn’t the sky, or the stars, he’s an endless fucking sea, his freckles nothing but light refractingat the top of the water. It’s his emotions that drag me down. His emotions that threaten to drown me, to scrape my skin off against the sharp stones at the bottom of his depths and leave me flayed raw for the salt to purify my sins.
I can’t. I can’t be that vulnerable. I can’t be the person Donovan thinks he sees when he looks at me like…
Like he…
“Shiloh, whatever hurt you, I can help. I’m here, I?—”
“I’m not broken, Donovan. I figured out how to put myself back together a long time ago.” What I can’t say is that I did it in ways that would make his blood curdle, in ways that would make him hate me.
More than the questions, more than him trying to pry apart my ribs to see the monster I truly am inside… I don’t want him to hate me.
I don’t think that’s a wound I could recover from.
“Shiloh… Loh, please?” The way his voice breaks as he says that soft syllable nearly makes me turn, but I shake my head.
I need to get out of his apartment, or I’m going to do something ridiculous… something like ask him to touch my damn scars again, because when he does, I don’t feel haunted by memories. I don’t know him well enough for that… and he’s right. He doesn’t know me at all.
