Dance for Me (Fenbrook Academy #1) - New Adult Romance (22 page)

He took a step back, stunned at my rage. “But you’re hurting yourself.”
As if I didn’t know that.
“I love you. I can’t let you hurt yourself.”

You love what you think I am.
“It’s not your right!” I was hysterical now, tears streaming down my face, crying so hard I thought I was going to throw up. “You don’t get to decide what I do with—It’s
my
body!
Mine!”

He shook his head. I almost understood. He wanted to protect me from myself; he didn’t realize he was getting between me and the one thing that let me cope. And I could see him starting to lose it. “I just don’t—
why?
Why would you willingly hurt yourself? It makes no sense!”

I put my hands to my head. “It’s not—It’s not like I
want
to do it.“

“Then stop!”

“It’s not that easy! You don’t understand....”

He took a deep breath. “Natasha, I love you. I love you for who you are....”

You don’t know who I am. You don’t know the real me.

He continued, “...you don’t need to do something like this to get me to...focus on you.”

I think my jaw actually dropped open at that. “You think I’m doing this for
attention?”

He flushed, and I knew that was exactly what he’d been thinking.

“Do you think that’s what I’m like—like a kid holding his breath until his parents give in?” It was difficult to speak, my face crumpled and red now from crying.

He was getting angry now—just as Clarissa had done when she’d found out. “Then tell me! Stop telling me what it isn’t and tell me why you do it!”

“I can’t!”

“Why not?”

Because you’ll hate me.
The way he kept pushing and pushing for an answer finally tipped me over the edge. “
I had it under control!”
I screamed at him. “I had it under control—I haven’t even cut since Tuesday! It was all fine, it was better since I met you and now....” I trailed off.
Now it’s all ruined.

The clouds finally let go, three or four warning drops and then the deluge began. It was the sort of rain that hissed and chilled, like solid lances of water stabbing straight down into us. We were soaked in seconds, but we just stood there glaring at each other.

I could see it dawn on him. He’d thought he was saving me. He was just realizing that he’d stepped between an addict and their needle, a child and their security blanket. He grabbed my shoulders, his eyes panicked. “Natasha,
please
. Come back inside the house. We can talk about it.”

I shook myself free and stepped back. My dress was stuck to me like a second skin, my bare calves running with water. Everything we’d built together was ruined, and that made me so horribly, sickly angry that I shook. It wasn’t the pure, cleansing rage I’d felt before. It was old anger that was bitter and bloated and rotten from having been bottled up for so long, since the revelation that night when I was fifteen:
I’m never going to be a normal person now.
I’d escaped, with Darrell—for a wonderful handful of days, I’d stepped outside my fate and lived another life. And now I was being plunged back into it and that made my very soul howl in pain. I took another step back.

“Let me help,” he said desperately. “Let me help you.” He reached for me, just our fingertips touching.

I turned and walked, heels sinking into the soaked gravel of the drive.

He ran alongside me, spluttering with the water coursing down his face, trying to blink it away. “Natasha, you’ll get pneumonia. It’s a mile back to the road. Come inside, we can talk!”

I could feel myself closing down, everything drawing into a tight knot at the center of my body, the rest of me cold and dead. I shook my head, a tight little movement, and kept walking.

I heard him stop and drop away behind me. Then he said, desperately, “Don’t give up on us!”

I stopped. Is that what he thought—that
I
was giving up on us? I wanted him, more than I’d ever wanted anything in the world. But I knew where this was headed. He’d want to—
need
to—fix me, and he’d keep pushing for an answer. When I refused, he’d get angry again. Or he’d eventually wear me down and I’d tell him, and then he’d swing from love to hate.

But what if I was wrong? What if I was throwing this away based on everyone else I’d met, not based on him? What if he was different?

Every inch of my body was urging me on, pulling me towards the road. He’d stopped following me, leaving it as my decision. I could walk off, get a cab, and never see him again. My secret would be safe and I could go back to my old life.

Only...I didn’t want my old life anymore.

I turned to him. The rain made it impossible to see tears, but I could see how red his eyes were. I could feel my soaked dress draining every last ounce of heat from my body, and I hugged myself with my arms. Behind him, the mansion—warmth and shelter. But I couldn’t imagine being shut inside it with him, in the quiet of the workshop or the stately elegance of the dining room. I needed neutral ground, so I could run if I had to. “Out here,” I told him. “We talk out here.” It was important to me, somehow, that he accepted that condition. Maybe I had to feel like I had some control over things, or maybe I just wanted to know he cared about my feelings, after he’d so viciously invaded my privacy.

His face lit up at the faint possibility of hope. He looked around. “But it’s—” He saw the look in my eyes, the way I was just barely holding it together. “Okay! Okay, out here.” He reached for my hand. “Come on.”

I looked at his hand warily, as if it might bite. “I’m not going inside.”

“We’re not going inside. Come on.”

I took a deep breath and took his hand. I’d give it one last try.

***

As we got closer and closer to the mansion, I started to hang back, stretching our joined hands to breaking point. But we didn’t go to the door. We went around to the side, and then into the garden, where I’d waited for him happily on the grass. The bottle and glasses I’d brought out were still there, half full of cold rainwater. By now, I was shaking with cold, my arms and legs numb with it.

He led me around a corner, to an area the party hadn’t reached. There was dark timber decking, with beams holding up a pointed roof—a mini-bandstand, almost. And in the center of the decking, a squat timber box as high as my hip, covered with a padded blue lid.

Darrell pushed off the lid and steam rose up in a cloud.

“A hot tub?” I said disbelievingly. “You want to get in a hot tub...
now?”

He indicated the crashing rain outside. “It’s out of the rain—but still outside.” He shivered, and he wasn’t acting. “And doesn’t a hot tub sound like a really good idea right now?”

It was utterly insane. We were in the middle of a blazing row, on the verge of breaking up. But I was
freezing.

“We can just talk,” he told me. “Until the rain stops.”

I looked at the tub, at the snakes of steam drifting upwards from it. I was trying to stop my teeth from chattering—the water looked incredibly inviting.

“I’m not taking my clothes off,” I told him. I couldn’t bear the idea of him staring at my scars.

He blinked at me, and then pulled off his shoes and jacket and climbed into the tub in his shirt and pants. The groan of ecstasy as his body hit the steaming water didn’t sound fake. He sat down, the water rising to his shoulders, and looked up at me.

Decision time. Did I dare risk another talk with him? I was in enough pain already—why would I open myself up to more?

I looked into his eyes as he sat there, that pure crystal blue that let me see right into his very soul.

I kicked off my heels and stepped into the tub, gasping as the steaming water unfroze my bare legs. My dress stopped clinging to my skin and unfurled in the water, billowing around me. I sunk down until only my shoulders were out, and then sat on the seat opposite him. We both sat in silence for a moment, letting the heat soak into our chilled bodies.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” I said at last.

“I’m sorry I pushed.” Under the deep, bass rumble of his voice, I could hear the fear. He knew he’d come within a hair’s breadth of losing me. We were still balanced on the edge of the precipice, stable only because we’d stopped moving. Somehow, we had to claw our way back to safety, and I knew it was going to have to be me who did most of the talking. When he’d tried to guess at the reasons, that had just annoyed me more. I had to explain it to him.

I took a deep breath and looked straight into his eyes, and that seemed to calm me.

“It’s not for attention. It’s not to hurt myself. I mean, it
is
hurting myself, but that’s not why I do it.” I stopped and thought, and marveled at his self-control. I knew he had a million questions, but he was letting me do it at my own pace. “It’s not about pain—it doesn’t even hurt much. It’s not about damaging myself.” I took another deep, shuddering breath. “It’s...about control, I guess. Having something real that I can hang onto. Something stable and solid that will always be there.”

I stopped for a second because I could see the question in his eyes. “Yes. You’re like that: you’re solid and real. That’s why I’d stopped doing it, but—” My throat tightened up. “I don’t want you to think that—that you have to”—I sniffed—“I don’t want to put that on you and make you feel like—”

He reached out and brushed some of the sodden tangles of hair off my face, making the little
shh
ing noises. “I will
always be there,” he told me.

I sniffed and nodded, tears running down my cheeks. I couldn’t speak.

“The reason you need something stable and solid...is that”—he saw the look of panic in my eyes—“no, no, it’s okay. I’m not going to ask. Just—is that because of something in your past? Something you don’t want to talk about?”

I nodded. I could feel myself tensing up, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been when we’d been out on the driveway. I was emotionally exhausted, incapable of getting angry with him, and he was looking at me with such sadness it broke my heart.

“It holds the memories back,” I said at last. “Stops me sliding down into them. So does dancing. So does the bike.”

He frowned. “The bike? Your exercise bike?”

I let out a snort of teary laughter, and nodded. “But none of it works as well as...you.”

He moved off his seat, closing the gap between us. He looked me right in the eye and waited until I was completely, utterly focused on him, as if he wanted to be sure that his words would really soak in. “I’m not going anywhere,” he told me.

I sniffed, blinking tears from my eyes, and slid off my seat. We met in the middle of the tub, and he wrapped his arms around me, pulling me to him, our clothes flapping and tangling in the water. He pushed my sopping hair back out of my face and laid kisses on my forehead, then down my cheek, and then we were clinging together, close enough to share heartbeats, warm and safe in the water as the rain hammered down outside.

“I don’t know if I can stop,” I told him haltingly.

“Okay,” he said, and I knew he meant it. I knew he’d wait for me, for as long as it took—forever, if he had to. As he held me, the feel of his arms and the touch of his cheek nursed something back to life, deep inside me, a tiny glimmer I’d thought was gone forever: hope. If he could resist pushing, accept that there was a part of me he’d never know...maybe we still had a shot.

***

We stayed there for a full half hour, the water gradually warming us through. After a while, I slipped my dress off under the water and sat there in my bra and panties—I wasn’t ready for naked, yet. He stripped down to his jockey shorts and we sat with my back against his chest, looking out at the rain as it pounded the ground, six feet away but unable to touch us.

When it became obvious that the rain wasn’t going to stop, we agreed to make a dash for the house. We left our wet bundles of clothes by the side of the tub, scrambled out and ran in our underwear down the garden, the freezing rain sluicing down our steaming bodies. By the time we’d run around the side of the mansion and in through the front door, our feet were sticky with mud from the waterlogged lawn and we were gasping and shaking with cold. Without words, we headed straight upstairs to his bedroom and then through to the shower. We stood there under the spray, trying to stand so it could rain down on both of us, and watched the water blast away the mud until we were clean and perfect.

I looked up into his eyes and felt the mood change. The anger and hurt wasn’t forgotten, but we had a fresh start.

And that left us standing near-naked in the shower.

He moved just fractionally closer to me, leaning in over me and blocking the spray with his body. I could feel everything speed up as the realization of what was going to happen hit us both at the same time.

He leaned down and kissed me, lips just brushing at first as I raised my head to him. Then tasting, his hands on my shoulders and the wet straps of my bra. It felt like we were kissing for the first time—a whole new part of me had opened up to him, and as ugly and broken as it was, he loved all of me. He moved back a little, checking it was okay. Waiting for a sign.