Page 286 of Face Off

“She fucked you!”

“And you had left my life almost a year earlier!”

“I never left you. You left me.”

I pin her with my eyes. “And why did I leave you? Huh?”

Her sob catches in her throat.

I close the distance before she can answer, but I don’t touch her. I stand close enough that she has to lift her face and see every piece of anger I have spent the weekend controlling.

“You have the fucking audacity to question me over a drunken one-night stand with Temple and treat me like I betrayed you. I owed you nothing then. I owe you nothing now. Fucking nothing!”

The final word tears out of me in a roar.

Charm recoils, but I don’t retreat.

“I could go downstairs right now and have a woman on my arm heading toward my room within minutes,” I shout. “Minutes, Charm. I didn’t need to come here and tear open every part of myself for sex. I didn’t need to stand in front of your father while he humiliated me, listen to the truth about your illness, or put you in front of a mirror and hold you through every second you fought your own reflection. If fucking was all I wanted from you, I would’ve stopped coming back a long time ago. No sex could ever be worth what loving you has cost me, so understand this when I say it: you cost too fucking much for me to keep paying the price unless you can finally give me what I need too.”

The words hit her harder than anything I’ve shouted. Every trace of color drains from Charm’s face, and the hand clutching her stomach falls away as though she has lost the strength to hold herself together. She stumbles backward until the edge of the dresser catches her hip, then grips it with both hands while her knees threaten to fold beneath her.

For several seconds, she cannot cry. Her mouth opens around a breath that refuses to come, and she stares at me with the stunned horror of someone finally understanding that love can survive while the person carrying it reaches the point where survival costs too much. When air finally tears into her lungs, the sob that follows bends her over the hands braced against the dresser.

“I never wanted loving me to cost you everything,” she manages, each word breaking beneath the next.

“It left me with nothing. All that is left is my pride, how do you not get that?”

“I know.”

“No.” I shake my head. “You don’t. You treat me like I’m desperate. Like I’m everything your father says I am because the one thing you didn’t learn in therapy or treatment was how to handle disappointment.”

Her face crumples. “I don’t think you’re desperate.”

“You think my love for you makes me easy to manipulate.”

“No.”

“You think if you push hard enough, cry long enough, or punish me for not giving you the answer you want, I’ll choose comforting you over protecting myself.”

“I was scared you were leaving.”

“I was always leaving! You chose to ignore me, again.”

“I love you!”

The words rip out of her, furious and desperate.

I laugh, but nothing about it contains humor. “Take your pain, your problems, your family, and all the trauma out of the picture for one second. You don’t fucking like me.”

Charm stares at me as if I struck her. “That isn’t true.”

“I never saw it until now.”

“I love everything about you.”

“No. You love me when its perfect. You love me when I make you feel beautiful, when I protect you, when I read to you, and when I’m strong enough to carry whatever you’re too afraid to hold. You love my body, my attention, my loyalty, my dick and the way I choose you.”

“I love you.”