Come to Me Recklessly (25 page)

And I tried to convince myself that I didn’t give a fuck anymore.

What good was it anyway? Caring? Wanting more?

What bullshit.

It took me all of half an hour to get shit faced. Good for me. I’d become a fucking pro.

It took Jasmine even less time to start in.

She crawled onto my lap, her disgusting hands all over my chest. Nausea rolled in my stomach, bile burning in my gut and rising in my throat.

And everything hurt.

My head.

My heart.

I tossed Jasmine off, stumbling as I staggered to my feet and outside, gasping for air.

Marcus came up beside me, clapped me on the back, and like the fucking awesome friend he was, he gave me something foreign that I swallowed down, two little pills I so clearly
needed
. For two minutes I stood there trembling with remorse, knowing I was giving myself over to the same bullshit Jared had, but then this sensation came rushing in, coursing through my veins, clouding everything out.

Everything except for Samantha.

Samantha.
 

I rubbed my hands over my face, trying to focus, realizing suddenly I was standing at the end of her street, my brain spinning when I ended up at her window.

I shouldn’t have been all that shocked. My soul knew that was the only place I wanted to be.

My vision blurred, and I struggled to stay upright, my knuckles begging at her window, rapping at the pane.

A surge of grief tore through me, pressing through the numbness, tugging me in places I didn’t understand. It nearly brought me to my knees. I doubled over, feeling sick, all those threads of sanity being snipped away one by one.

God, I almost wept when I saw Samantha’s face appear on the other side of her window, and I let that sanity go, no longer clinging to anything else, because she was the only thing I needed.

Slowly, she cracked the window open an inch, and I shoved it wide, crawling over the windowsill and into Samantha’s arms.

“Christopher.” My ears pulsed with her voice, but it sounded distant and fading.

I needed her closer, wouldn’t let her go.

“Samantha… oh my God, I need you. Fuck. Need you.”

And her skin felt so good under my hands, like warmth and comfort.

I’d gone without it for too long, and there was nothing I wanted more. Nothing could touch this despair except for her.

Her mouth was even hotter, my tongue pressing in, searching for that balm, for a way back to what we’d been, before she’d been stolen from me.

She was on the floor, and I was over her, on her, seeking. My hands were frantic, tearing through our barriers.

I thought maybe I was dying, this suffocating suffering. Only Samantha could give me breath.

“Samantha.” I felt her name whimpered from somewhere within, like a plea, a cry, and I struggled to get her closer.

I could hear her calling me, too, this reflection of pain that echoed through her room. And that pain was palpable, tangible as it cut and clawed into my skin. Fear pounded through my chest, and somehow I knew it was hers. Her voice sliced through the haze, breaking through the tortured numbness.

Something sharp.

A vicious sting.

My own fear clogged my throat, and I scrambled back, squinting to see her in the darkness of her room.

She was curled into a ball, rocking. Rocking. Praying to her God to make me stop.

Her top was torn wide open.

And I wanted to cry when this awareness fell over me, this sickness when I realized what I’d nearly done. The top two buttons of my jeans were undone, and my fingers shook uncontrollably when I reached up to my face. Blood coated my fingertips from the deep scratches her nails had slashed across my cheek.

What had I done?

On my knees, I slid my hand along the carpeted floor in an appeal. “Samantha… please…”

I wouldn’t have. I would have stopped.

Wouldn’t I have?

She flinched, curling up tighter. Her mouth shook, and she silently cried, her face turned toward the ceiling, like she couldn’t bear to look at me. I could barely hear her when she spoke. “Please, go.”

I fumbled forward, keeping myself low, as if that could wipe out the disaster of my actions. “I just need you… please… listen… I wouldn’t have…”

She choked, her voice an anguished whisper. “I don’t even recognize you anymore. Please… just go.”

“You promised me… you promised me we’d make it.”

She lolled her head in my direction. Her expression alone destroyed the last good thing in me. Because I knew it was done.

“I trusted you,” she said, the words breaking as they scraped from her throat. “My parents were right to protect me from you.”

I swallowed over the heartbreak. My chest burned with it, this fiery anger as I stared down at the one person who I always believed would have faith in me.

Instead she looked away.

I tried to climb to my feet but fell back to my knees. Like the cursed, I slid along the floor on my belly, grunted as I hoisted myself up and over the windowsill. I landed on the dirt ground with a hard thud.

Two days had passed. Two days since Jared took those extra steps to ruin his life. Two days since I’d turned right around and ruined mine.

Riddled with shame and bitterness, I sat back on Marcus’ couch and lifted the bottle to my mouth.

No, I wasn’t getting so fucked-up that I could hurt anyone else. Not ever again. When I’d woken up the previous morning with my head splitting in two, I’d sworn never again. I’d never allow myself to lose that kind of control, my mind nonexistent in the abyss of all that blackness.

But my heart was already broken, and the bottle I clutched in my hand worked just fine with that kind of pain. So I chased that numbness, the dulled sense of accepting that nothing mattered.

Nothing mattered because there was nothing left to fight for, and I was giving in.

Yesterday I’d tried. I’d sucked it up and made one last valiant attempt. With my heart lodged in my throat, I’d dialed Samantha’s home number.

On the first ring, it’d chanted that three-beat chime, the one that warned I’d reached a number that had been disconnected.

And now that’s all I wanted to be.

Disconnected.

To pull the plug on every one of these emotions wringing me tight.

It hurt too bad, and I didn’t want to feel anything anymore.

That afternoon, I’d sat in the quiet of my room and poured my heart onto paper, sifting through myself for the remnants of her light, dug deep for the few things left within me that I still cared about. I’d ended up with three letters.

One was for Jared.

One for Stewart.

The other for
her
.

I’d sealed them up in envelopes, same way I sealed off my hemorrhaging heart. I took two out to the mailbox and hid the other away.

Now I sat on the couch, draining an entire bottle of Jack. I slumped back, and the empty bottle slipped from my fingers and hit the floor. Muddled faces floated through my vision, the party loud and obnoxious, but somehow I felt as if I was watching it from above.

Detached.

Hands slipped over my chest, a warm body pressing firm at my lap, a hot mouth on my neck.

I groaned, and my cock reacted. My fingers dug into skin as a distorted pleasure reverberated through my body.

She laughed, and the tip of her nail trailed down my chin to the neck of my shirt. She clutched it and tugged. “I told you one day you’d come to your senses.”

I laughed in her face, an incredulous, crazed sound, because she couldn’t be further from the truth.

I’d lost every last one of them, all except for the physical need to let it go, to give in and take the one thing within my reach that would let me feel good.

Jasmine pulled me to my unstable feet.

My parents were right to protect me from you.
 

I let her lead me upstairs and into the dimly lit room.

How she knew I’d follow, I didn’t know. Maybe I was bleeding defeat.

And I hated her as much as I always had. But I hated myself more.

She kissed me and I kissed her back, but it didn’t feel anything like the kisses I gave Samantha. It felt empty, and the hollowness inside screamed out.

It clashed with the nerves shooting across my skin where her hands touched me, rushing up and down, spurring the coil of lust that fisted in my stomach.

Samantha left me.
 

Numbly, I helped her undress me, watched idly when she stepped back and undressed herself. She pushed me back onto the floor, the same floor where Samantha had promised herself to me, where I’d told her I loved her and I’d given in to the delusion that somehow all of our firsts would belong to the other.

But that was nothing but a stupid fantasy. I was never good enough for her. Somewhere inside, I’d always known it. Known I was only going to hurt her, and hurt her was exactly what I’d done.

I didn’t stop Jasmine when she straddled my legs. She moaned my name when she lowered herself onto me.

And it felt so wrong, but everything had gone wrong a long time ago.

She rode me and I just lay there, wanting to erase every memory. Hate filled me up so full I wanted to vomit. Hate for Jasmine. Hate for myself. Hate for Jared for being so selfish.

Most of all, I hated that Samantha had given up on us so easily.

She’d said she loved me.

She’d said we were forever.

I’d fucked up… but I’d thought… I’d thought that’s what love was supposed to be about, finding a way through those faults, making them right and ensuring we never committed the same sins.

Turned out what I’d done was unforgiveable.

Or maybe she’d just never really cared all that much.

I turned my gaze from Jasmine, couldn’t watch the victorious expression on her face.

Instead I looked off into the distance and let the physical pleasure consume me.

A destructive reprieve.

Even still, I couldn’t rid my mind of Samantha’s perfect face. She was all I could see, that beautiful, sweet girl, all that blond hair and those blue eyes. A sad smile tugged at me when I thought of that mouth.

And God, I wanted to picture her happy, like she used to be, but she was standing there drowning in all the sadness I’d caused her. The tears and the hurt. The girl falling to pieces over her own broken heart.

Softly I smiled, somehow hating her and still wishing there was a way I could take away all her pain.

But there was not one fucking thing I could do. So I shut it off and turned back to Jasmine. I grabbed her hips hard and fucked her like she’d been begging me to for months.

And for a few mindless minutes, skin was the only thing I felt.

Rattled, I stood staring at the closed door.

I was tempted to run back through it.

On the other side, I could hear the low rumble of his truck when he shifted into gear.

I wanted him to stay.

I needed him to go.

To say my emotions were a mess was a gross understatement. I was a wreck.

I’d woken up next to Christopher Moore. And God help me, the first few disoriented seconds were complete and utter bliss. The smooth, inked skin of his bare chest under my cheek, the steady thrum of his heartbeat beneath my ear, and what felt like an endless expanse of rock-hard abs twitching under my roaming hand.

Intoxicated, I’d buried my nose under his jaw, gorging myself on his smell, a lust-inducing euphoria clouding my head, coaxing me to drift into the warmth of his body.

But all of that had only drawn attention to the excruciating need in mine, this undeniable burn seated deep between my thighs promising me everything would be just fine if I got a little closer.

Awareness had come crashing in.

Me curled up in his arms. In his
bed
. With a gaping blank spot in my memory.

And he’d been aroused.

Very
glaringly so.

At the memory, my stomach dipped and clenched.

Right. And there was that.

It had been enough to send me straight into panic mode.

Ha. Panic mode. More like deranged-and-irrational-drunk-girl mode. So maybe Christopher had been joking when he was giving Aly crap that women shouldn’t drink, but I was beginning to think there was some validity to his statement.

Bottom line, I shouldn’t.

Not like that.

Not when I was with him and vulnerable, liable to fall into all sorts of foolishness. Not when the sweet boy I’d thought I once knew had come out to play.

Especially when I was no longer sure it was just an act.

Because I’d felt it tonight. Heartbreak. Christopher’s when he first saw Stewart, this true and genuine concern that had come rushing from him uninhibited. And for those few moments, I’d felt as if I could rely on him the way I used to. I used to believe he was the only person who really understood how I felt. The only one who’d allow me to fall apart and then patiently put me back together.

Tonight it’d felt the same.

Every rational side of me knew I should be terrified of Christopher. His big hands could shred me.

The truth of the matter was, I had been. That night when he’d come into my room, I hadn’t recognized him. Seeing his face at my window? I’d been inundated with relief. Finally he was coming to save me. Finally he’d come to prove to me that everything he’d promised about making it through was the truth. He wasn’t giving up, no matter what obstacles we had to face.

Because I’d been losing hope.

After what happened with Jared, something had changed in Christopher. He was no longer carefree. No longer full of life. He was distant, going out and partying all the time, and insecurities had begun to wind themselves through my heart, choking out the confidence that he truly loved me.

But I’d hung on.

Instead of bringing relief when he’d pushed through my window, his presence had stolen all the air and filled it with fear. Terror had trembled all the way to my bones when I realized he was really going to force me.

My first time and he was going to force me. And it wasn’t even the physical that broke my heart. It was the fact that he could treat me that way.

The sad thing was I would have given myself to him.

Right there, on my bedroom floor, if he’d have stopped long enough to look at me. To show me that he saw me and he wasn’t seeing right through me.

But I’d been so caught off guard, the desperation in Christopher’s touch and in his words hadn’t processed. The next day we were moving, and I’d already been withdrawn from school, so it wasn’t until two days later that I’d heard the gossip about Jared, the boy who’d spiraled so far he’d finally hit bottom.

As soon as I had, I’d been struck with overwhelming grief. Christopher had
needed
me. Just like he’d said. He wasn’t looking through me. He wasn’t able to
see
at all.

So I’d gone to find him.

To hell with my parents and all their rules.

I didn’t care.

We would run away.

But when it came to Christopher, I’d always been just a foolish girl.

Turned out I had no idea about broken hearts until that night when I found him.

It had destroyed me.

It’d all been a joke.

A cruel, sick joke.

And with
her
.

It had to be her.

Thank God Ben had been there. I was scared of where I would have ended up had he not.

And here I was all these years later, standing in the middle of my living room, listening to the roar of Christopher’s engine as he accelerated and drove away. All those things I knew I should never want suddenly felt like they were missing. All those resolutions I’d made didn’t seem so solid. And the commitment I had to Ben didn’t feel so real.

Yes. I was terrified of Christopher Moore.

Physically? No. It was a sad, sick twist of fate that in his arms was where I felt safest.

I was terrified of what he could do with this burgeoning heart.

When I walked into my classroom on the Tuesday morning after I’d woken up in Christopher’s bed, there was an envelope on my desk. My name was pressed into it with the familiar heavy-handed script, and it was wrapped in the same red ribbon that had adorned the bouquet the month before.

I cast a suspicious glance around the room.

How had he snuck it in here?

Drawing in a calming breath, I inched across the room and sank into my chair. Finally I gathered the courage to pick up the letter. My fingers shook as I pulled the ribbon free. It dropped to my lap and I slid the card from the envelope.

Again the front was blank, but this time I had no delusions that the inside would be. My eyes blurred as I read the words.

Blinking away tears, I clutched the letter to my chest as if it could blunt the ache inside.

Would I?

Could I be brave enough to accept what I really wanted? Could I forsake Ben and shun everything my parents ever wanted for me?

Above it all, could I ever forgive Christopher for what he’d done?