Demons, p.24
Demons,
p.24
The tortured look in his eyes was about to rip my heart out. He was struggling, and I couldn’t help him. This had to all be said. He had to accept what he’d done and how messed up it was.
“You’re my sanctuary. When I get locked in a place inside, you are what brings me out. If I’ve felt joy, then it was only with you. I can’t see someone hurt you. I need you happy. I’m not a happy person, but having you happy fills a void that’s always been there.”
Nothing in life had prepared me for this man. I was struggling with trying to remember what he’d done to a woman who had been a little nasty with me and wanting to curl up in his lap and promise to never leave.
“I’m in love with you,” I admitted. He needed to hear it. I needed to say it. “And I want to be with you. You make me happy. Being near you, seeing you, even smelling you—it makes my heart full. But this life of yours, where you can just kill a man and get away with it or beat a woman and have no consequences, I don’t know how to accept that. I can’t be the reason you do that. It will eventually eat me alive inside.”
His eyes flared, and he stood. I waited for him to say more as he began to pace in front of the windows. He ran his hand through his hair, and his face was pinched, looking like he was fighting something inside that I couldn’t see.
“This isn’t something I have control over,” he ground out, stopping to look at me. “I’ve been doing things to protect you, things you wouldn’t want, for years. I can’t help it. I need to do it. There is a demand that takes over, and I can’t stop it. I just react. You being with me now, you just see it. You’re there to witness it. I’m not standing in the shadows on the edge of your life, watching. My actions aren’t new, and even if you walked out that door right now, I’d continue to do it. Protect you.”
How had he been doing it for years? I stared at him, knowing I wasn’t ready yet. Whatever he’d done in my past to protect me, I didn’t think I could handle it. Not today anyway. Maybe not tomorrow.
“If you could help me understand, I might be able to fix it. Help you,” I told him.
He stood there, staring at me. There was a pleading in his expression that warred with the side of him that was always unattached. Unavailable.
“I’ve never loved. I’m not sure what that feels like. I know loyalty. I’ve lived that. I understand it. But love …” He shook his head. “I have no label or example for that emotion. What I can tell you is that if I ever lost you, I would rip my own heart from my chest.”
My eyes stung, and I pressed my lips together as one emotion after another crashed into me. Pain, heartache for the boy who should have been taught love from experiencing it, fear for myself because I loved this man, and relief because he felt the same way.
I stood up, and his gaze followed my every move. He’d laid himself bare. Not held anything back. Been as honest as he could be.
“That,” I told him as tears filled my eyes, “is a description, albeit a disturbing one, of love.” I took a step in his direction. “You won’t lose me. I’m not sure you could even force me to leave. But you can’t kill everyone who hurts me. That’s something I need you to promise me.”
If I could have that reassurance, then we could work through the rest of it. Face it as it came. The dark parts of him he couldn’t seem to control. I would help him.
“You’re the only one who can ease my demons,” he said hoarsely. “If I have you to settle them, then that’s the only way I can do it.”
I gave him a watery smile. “There aren’t demons in you.”
He watched me as I walked to him. His eyes like a caress over my body.
“Yeah, little doll, there are, and they are as obsessed with you as I am,” he said when I reached him.
His hand came out and pulled me closer.
“If demons are obsessed with me, then what does that make me?” I teased him.
He leaned down and brushed his lips over mine reverently.
“An angel,” he whispered.
I laughed. “I think I like little doll better.”
He ran his hands through my hair and cupped the back of my head. “You can be both,” he told me, then picked me up so he could cover my mouth with his.
I wrapped my legs around him, hungry to taste him. Too much had happened today, and I needed the connection. He was completely unhinged and possibly as psycho as his friends believed him to be. But he was mine, and for me, he wasn’t either of those things. I had the man he would have been if he’d been shown love. They could all believe he was wired wrong, but he was wired perfectly. For me.
• About Abbi •
Abbi Glines is a #1 New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and International bestselling author of the Rosemary Beach, Sea Breeze, Smoke Series,Vincent Boys, Boys South of the Mason Dixon, and The Field Party Series. She is also author to the Sweet Trilogy and the Black Souls Trilogy. She believes in ghosts and has a habit of asking people if their house is haunted before she goes in it. Her house was built in 1820 and she finally has her own haunted house but they’re friendly spirits. She drinks afternoon tea because she wants to be British but alas she was born in Alabama although she now lives in New England (which makes her feel a little closer to the British). When asked how many books she has written she has to stop and count on her fingers and even then she still forgets a few. When she’s not locked away writing, she is entertaining her first grade daughter, she is reading (if everyone in her house including the ghosts will leave her alone long enough), shopping online (major Amazon Prime addiction), and planning her next Disney World vacation (and now that her oldest daughter Annabelle works at Disney she has an excuse to frequent it often).
You can connect with Abbi online in several different ways. She uses social media to procrastinate.
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Abbi Glines, Demons
