Page 235 of Darling Venom
But that’s okay.
If you run, I will, too. To you.
I pressed my palm over his heart. “You don’t have to say it back. I’m patient.”
“You can’t chase me forever.”
I smiled. “I can.”
“You’ll get sick of it.”
“Tell you what,” I said, already knowing I’d break this promise if he decided to be stubborn. “One year. I’ll chase you for one year, and in that year, you’ll say it back.”
“No.”
“I love you, Tate. And I’ll say it over and over again until you no longer feel guilty when you hear it.”
It was a promise I shouldn’t have made.
One that defied the hardest lesson I’d ever learned.
Love is expensive.
Its currency is grief.
And sometimes, it costs more than you can afford.
I made the mistake of mentioning the plagiarism to Terry.
We sat at Tate’s kitchen island, hovered around my laptop screen. Staring at Darling Venom’s cover. Of chains embracing a journal, joined at the lock.
I tilted my head. “It suits him, doesn’t it?”
“He would’ve said a cover doesn’t make a book,” Terry pointed out, and he was right.
Kellan possessed what he self-dubbed literary ethics, which technically referred to moral principles intrinsic to literature.
But I preferred his version.
Where the appreciation for words reigned supreme over the other bullshit—covers, social media frenzy, and press junkets.
Terry zoomed until his son’s name filled the entire seventeen-inch screen. “But, secretly, he would’ve kept a copy just to stare at it. And yes, the cover does suit him.”
“I meant being an author.”
He opened the manuscript doc. “We should get back to Darling Venom.”
It was due tomorrow.
The final version.
“Have you figured out what the line in chapter eighteen is about?”
The human capacity to forgive in the name of love breeds doormats. Unless, of course, the person doing the forgiving is someone you love and the person being forgiven is you. Then, it’s called personal growth.
And that stench of hypocrisy? Plug your nose, darling. It ain’t going anywhere.
It stuck out like a sore thumb. A passage directed, for the first time, to the reader, as if Kellan needed to cement the message. Only, in the context of the chapter, it made no sense.
