Page 28 of Ignition

“Look,” I called out desperately after her. “I was jealous and took it out on you.”

The words tumbled out of my mouth, dripping honesty.

Shit.

I hadn’t meant to—

SHIT.

She stopped in her tracks.

Turn around and face me, goddamn it!

“Why the fuck were you jealous?”

Her voice dripped disbelief and venom, but the lack of bite barely registered, because something else screamed louder—the raw scrape of her voice.

Something unfamiliar cracked my ribs in two.

Wrecked as she was, her guard drew back up. I hated it. Almost as much as I hated the desperate urge to reach out, clasp her shoulder and… what? Turn her around? Plead? Shake her?

I dragged in a pained breath that felt like someone had taken a serrated knife to my lungs.

“Everyone was staring,” I spat. “I hated it.”

The words stripped me down to a raw, vulnerable core.

Pure, unadulterated terror shot through me, and my hands clenched into fists, as if I could crush the admission into a pulp. I wanted to yank it back and shove it down, but it was too late.

Agonising silence stretched between us. I wondered if she’d ever speak at all.

I was praying for an insult at this point. Anything to tell me I still had a way to her.

What she did next was infinitely worse.

She walked away.

No snort of disbelief, no scathing remark, not even a glare speared at me over her shoulder.

I deserved nothing in her eyes. Not anymore.

A scent taunted me in the periphery of my senses, a mix of something fresh, with a hint of sun-warmed skin as I just watched her go, feeling like she’d clawed my insides out and left me bleeding on the grass.

My hands scrubbed over my face, and a groan rasped out of me, dragged out of my very soul.

My black, broken, useless soul.

Chapter nine

Josh

Days passed, and she kept pointedly ignoring I existed.

I gave her a wide berth, hoping she only needed time to lick her wounds, but nothing changed.

Irritation and something else flared to life, hot and restless, burying whatever had possessed me to try to fix it in the first place.

She doesn’t want my apology?