“I don’t belong to you anymore, dickhead. There’s your answer.”
The laugh that leaves my lips is broken and dry. “That may be true, but don’t you see it doesn’t matter? I belong to you, sweet genius. You’ve made me your own, and your body feels it even now. Or are those nipples still hard for someone else?”
Spots of color rouge up her cheeks as she starts setting herself to rights. It’s hard to say if she’s angry with my observation or flushing in response to my heavy cock, which is semi-erect even as I zip my trousers closed. Her eyes follow the movement with unmistakable hunger, but her voice shakes with emotion when she says, “This can’t happen again. Thiswon’thappen again.”
I take a long moment to answer, smoothing my clothes and then tucking her curls back behind her ears. She wants to bat me away, I can see, but the minute my fingertips touch her face, her eyes close and her lips part. Drugged like an initiate into esoteric mysteries. Power flowing from me into her, and then back into me again.
“I am your temple no matter what. Your god, your own. When you need me, I’ll be there.”
A slow shiver moves through her, a dimpling in her chin like she might cry—something I feel like seven thousand arrows—and then she tugs herself away.
“Goodbye, Church.”
“Wait.”
I have no right to this, I know, and I know more than anything she wants me gone. And I’ll go and stay gone, even though I know exactly what ash-dusted tomb I’m consigning myself to—but before I do, I have to know.
“How did this happen, Charlotte?” I ask. “Did you need help finding a job after you graduated?” The thought is actually painful, that she needed help I could have so easily given, and she didn’t ask it of me. “Do you still need help? I know you don’t want to see me, but I can still—”
She jerks her head to the side, silencing me. “I don’t need help,” she says tightly. “I’mfine.”
“You’re not.” It’s shitty and over-familiar of me, maybe. But it’s one thing to have work you choose and another thing entirely to have your choices taken away. And everything about her vibrates with the pain of having her choices stripped from her.
She glares again, but she doesn’t contradict me.
“I won’t apologize for having the audacity to be right, little one.”
Her gaze flares to a molten silver and I think for a moment that she’s going to shove right past me without answering, that she’s going to leave without dignifying my intrusion with a response—but all at once, the anger goes out of her and her shoulders slump. Her eyes drop to the floor and she takes in a long breath that seems to do nothing to make her feel better.
If I thought she looked tired before—hurt, fatigued, alone—then I see it clearly now. The toll her life has taken on her. It’s like dying all over again to see it, but of course that’s nothing compared to hearing what she says next.
“I didn’t need help finding a job after I graduated because Ididn’tgraduate. I couldn’t—I couldn’t even finish the semester. I came back from what was supposed to be our wedding to discover that my father—” she grits out the word with a lifetime of bitterness behind it “—had stolen everything we had and left. Just...left. Me and my brother and our flat and everything.”
Rage—clean and pure—whitens my vision until I force myself to take a breath. “He abandoned you?”
Simply left his children? One, a college student who was still finding her equilibrium after he’d uprooted the family from America to come back to his own country, and the other, a literal child who had years left of school?
Charlotte cuts a look at me. “Sound familiar? Seems to be a theme with the men in my life.”
I wish I could say that shame erases the rage, that I’m humble enough to accept that I can’t stand in judgement of others given my own past—but alas. I still want to fling her father into the river.
“I haven’t talked to him since then, and I have no idea where he is. I managed to get legal custody of Jax and tried to keep things normal for him, but...” She looks down again. “I couldn’t afford to stay in school and pay for the rent and food and everything else. I have to work two jobs as it is, just to scrape by, and to have to manage tuition on top of that? And even without tuition, whatever’s left of my time belongs to Jax. Helping him with school, making sure he’s ready for his exams, taking him to art studio and his flute lessons and keeping an eye on his group of friends...”
She puffs out a breath. “Maybe my father thought because I was marrying someone, we didn’t need him around anymore. Or maybe I’m giving him too much credit by imagining he thought about us at all. But the upshot is that I was completely and utterly alone. I had nothing, and I had no one, and yeah, it fucking sucks that I couldn’t finish school and follow the path I wanted. But you know what? I’m fuckinghere. My brother is here. We’re sheltered and fed and safe, and that’s because of me. That’s because of what I gave up and what I worked for, and I refuse to let you make me feel like shit about it, okay? I’m better than that. My efforts are better than that.”
She is. They are.
And I am nothing. Nothing in the shape of a man.
“Goodbye, Church,” she says again, and this time I don’t stop her.
This time I let her go.
5
Charley
Undefended and alone, now the girl must make a nest of pillows and blankets to protect herself. Tomorrow, the harsh London wilderness will be waiting. But tonight the girl must retreat and recoup.And cry.