I reach up and curl my hand around the back of his head and pull him down. His lips meet mine, careful and slow, and I sink against him.
CHAPTER 41
REX
The hoodie is doing fuck-all.
I've pulled the hood so far forward I can barely see the TV, not that I give a shit about whatever weird trash TV Phoenix and Raf are engrossed in. It's some kind of island where they make fake scent matches and fuck with everyone's heads, and I hate myself for paying enough attention that I figured out the premise.
At least it's a distraction from the fact I'm in the penthouse without a mask for the first time in front of all three of them. The hood is the only thing keeping me from crawling out of my own skin.
It's been two days since the opera house. Since the entire fucking world got a high-definition look at what's left of my face.
Carmine negotiated a seventy-two-hour media blackout with the major outlets. I don't know how. I don't know what he promised or threatened or sold. But the Internet doesn't give a shit about Carmine's agreements. The Internet never sleeps, and it hasopinions.
So many fucking opinions.
The mask is in my room where I can get it if I snap. I could get up right now, walk thirty feet, and put it on, and the pressure in my chest would ease and I could stop wondering when my pack is going to start freaking the fuck out.
But I don't get up.
Only because Bells is pressed against my side with her legs stretched across Phoenix's lap and her phone in one hand and a steaming mug of tea in the other, balanced precariously on her unbound breast where it's threatening to give her some burn scars of her own if Phoenix laughs again and jostles her too much.
She's on my bad side.
The scarred side.
And she's not treating me differently.
That's the thing that's dismantling me brick by fucking brick. Since the hospital, since I carried her out of a burning building and bled all over her and told her I loved her in a cage, she hasn't adjusted her behavior by a single degree.
She even told me to go fuck myself this morning.
Playfully, but… still.
She's actingnormal.
I don't know what to do with that. There's nothing normal about me. Somehow, she looks at me and sees whatever the fuck she sees and it doesn't make her avoid me.
So maybe I'm testing it.
Maybe sitting here without the mask, in a hoodie that does nothing, with the scarred side of my face six inches from her line of sight, is a test. A trap I've set for her. For all of them.
Sit with this.
Sit with the full reality of what I look like.
Watch how long it takes before the atmosphere changes, before someone suggests I might be more "comfortable" with the mask on and the careful avoidance of eye contact starts.
I'm sabotaging myself.
IknowI'm sabotaging myself, and I don't even need Phoenix to bitch at me and tell me.
Rafael is sitting on the floor between the couch and the coffee table, his back against Bells's hip, his phone in one hand and his laptop balanced on his crossed legs. He's reading Carmine's emails aloud.
"Furthermore, all interview requests must be routed through my office, and under no circumstances should any band member engage with press, social media platforms, or quote-unquote fan accounts that are actually gossip rags wearing a moustache. End quote." Raf scrolls. "He capitalized 'NO CIRCUMSTANCES' and bolded it in red. He's such a fucking dork."
"He's losing it," Phoenix says from the other end of the couch, absently rubbing his thumb along Bells's ankle where it rests on his thigh.