Page 72 of Break Away
“No.” Something inside me finally stopped bending. “It makes it even.”
Bliss flinched like I had slapped her, but I wasn’t done.
I looked at both of them then, at my girls, the two people who loved me enough to stand in front of the fire but apparently not enough to admit I was already burning.
“I love you,” I said, and my voice cracked just enough to piss me off. “I mean that. I love you both so much it makes me stupid, but enough.”
Bliss’s expression softened. “Aura—”
“No. Enough.” I shook my head as heat crawled up my neck, sharp, humiliating, and alive. “You want me to be a mop for this shit. You want me to stand here and keep cleaning up the same mess because Easton is hurt and angry, and apparently that gives him unlimited permission to be cruel as long as I’m the one he’s aiming at.”
Charm’s mouth parted, but no words came out.
“You want me to keep calm and not react. You want me to be the bigger person while he rubs women in my face at every party, makes shitty comments, looks through me like I’m trash, and then somehow I’m the problem when I finally decide I’m done taking it.”
Bliss swallowed. “That’s not what we’re saying.”
“It is, though.” My laugh came out awful. “Maybe you don’t mean it that way, but that’s what it is. You want me to tell him everything. You want me to split myself open and hand him every ugly thing that happened to me in high school like it’s a permission slip. Like maybe if he knows enough, he’ll forgive me for not being easy to love.”
My chest rose too fast, but I didn’t look away.
“Maybe Cade has made you understand Easton’s pain better than mine,” I said to Bliss. Then I looked at Charm. “Andmaybe Ryan has spent enough time defending him that you think balance means asking me to bleed quietly.”
Both of them looked wounded.
Good.
I was wounded too.
“And I need you both to hear me when I say this.” My voice dropped, quieter but somehow meaner. “I do not want a man who needs my trauma explained to him before he decides I deserve basic decency.”
They both went still.
“I don’t want someone who can treat me like shit for seven months and then get a redemption arc because he finally finds out I had a reason for being difficult.” I pointed toward Easton without looking at him because if I did, I might break in a way I didn’t have time for. “He doesn’t get to make me bleed in public and then be excused because my private wounds were inconveniently hidden from him.”
“Aura,” Charm whispered.
“No.” I stepped back, my pulse hammering in my throat. “You don’t get to love me and still ask me to swallow this so he doesn’t choke on his own consequences.”
The crowd moved around us in heat, neon, bodies, and the slick smell of beer beneath my boots. Easton remained across the room with Brinley pressed too close, watching because of course he was.
He always watched when I was close to snapping. He simply never believed I would actually do it.
I looked at Bliss one last time, then Charm.
“I love you,” I said again, softer now. “But move.”
Neither of them did at first. Then Bliss’s shoulders sank, and Charm’s hand fell from my wrist.
For once, they let me walk straight into the consequence because maybe they finally understood I had been living inside one for seven months.
Gage’s grin widened when I reached the island. “Aura.”
I smiled back, all teeth and no mercy. “Gage.”
He looked over my shoulder once, then returned his eyes to mine with impressive speed. “Dangerous night to come into the kitchen.”
“I heard danger was where the drinks are.”
